My father told me once about someone who was able to look out their dining room window and see boats go by, with enslaved people taking commodities to a port to be shipped. I suppose it was his grandmother, the Fanny Myers Little of these poems. I thought my father said they were shipping grains, but I cannot find out what grains would have been raised as far west as Littles' Mills. I know rice was raised just a little further east. Cotton and corn probably would have been the chief crops of Littles' Mills.
The branch of the Pee Dee that runs behind Little's Mills is actually known as The Little River. The port would have been Georgetown, South Carolina.