a wordDutch Fork

The land between the Saluda and the Broad rivers above their meeting at Columbia, in Lexington, Newberry and Richland counties, settled by German-speaking Protestants in the middle of the eighteenth century and named for them, Dutch for deutsch. It is the upstream end of the mustard belt: the yellow mustard barbecue sauce of the Midlands is linked to the German families who settled between Orangeburg County and Newberry County, and the Fork is the Newberry end of that line. Lutheran churches, place names and family names are what remains of the German; the dialect is gone.

The British colony offered incentives to foreign Protestants to settle its backcountry, and between 1730 and 1766 German-speaking families took up the fork of the Saluda and the Broad; the South Carolina Encyclopedia dates the first European settlement to the 1740s and says German language and culture lasted in the Fork's isolation into the early twentieth century. The name is English for what the settlers called themselves. Their mark on the plate is mustard. Wikipedia says South Carolina's mustard sauce may have originated with the French and German immigrants of the eighteenth century and is linked to a 'Mustard Belt' from Orangeburg County to Newberry County where Germans settled; the Dukes family of Orangeburg County, of German origin, is the example historians give; and mustard goes into the hash of the German Midlands. Newberry is still the only South Carolina county more than a tenth Lutheran. Inference — the Fork is not the whole belt but its upstream end; Orangeburg, the other end, lies south of the Congaree and outside it. Tradition holds — the Dutch Fork is claimed as the birthplace of mustard sauce; no document in the sources consulted places the first pot.