" Goliath's Daughter: The 6'8 Giant Slave Woman Who Crushed Her Master's Skull with Her Bare Hands......"On August 14th, 1827, in the rice plantation surrounding Charleston, South Carolina, a plantation owner named Josiah Crane was found dead in his library. His skull crushed so completely that physicians examining the body reported bone fragments embedded in the mahogany desk 6 ft away. The coroner's report, still preserved in Charleston County archives, described injuries consistent with compression by hands of extraordinary size and strength, exceeding normal human capacity. The only suspect was a woman who stood 6'8 in tall, weighed over 240 lb of solid muscle, and had vanished into the August night without a trace. For nearly two centuries, local historians have debated whether Sarah Drummond really existed or if she was merely a legend born from guilt and fear. But the medical records, sale documents, and eyewitness testimonies suggest something far more disturbing. That she was absolutely real and that what happened in that library was the inevitable conclusion of a horror that had been building for years. The story of Sarah Drummond does not start with violence. It starts with money. In the spring of 1823, the port of Charleston was experiencing one of its busiest trading seasons in decades. Ships arrived weekly from the Caribbean, from West Africa, from the tobacco regions of Virginia, all carrying human cargo to be sold at the markets on Charmer Street and Gadsden's Wararf. Charleston was not just a port city. It was the beating heart of the domestic slave trade in the American South, a place where fortunes were made through the buying and selling of human beings with the same casual efficiency as cotton bales or rice barrels. The rice plantations that surrounded Charleston were particularly brutal operations. Unlike the cotton fields further inland, rice cultivation required workers to stand in water for hours at a time in swamps teeming with malaria carrying mosquitoes, venomous snakes, and alligators. The death rate among enslaved workers on rice plantations was staggering. Some historical estimates suggest that nearly 30% of enslaved people working in the rice fields died within their first year.The work was so dangerous, so exhausting, so deadly that plantation owners constantly needed to purchase new workers to replace those who had perished. This created a perverse economy. Slave traders scoured the southern states looking for strong, healthy workers who could withstand the brutality of the rice swamps. And occasionally they found something unusual, something that would fetch an extraordinary price. In March of 1823, a slave trader named Caleb Rutherford arrived in Charleston with a coff of 37 people he had purchased in Virginia and North Carolina. Among them was a young woman, perhaps 19 or 20 years old, who immediately drew attention for one unmistakable reason. She was enormous.Contemporary accounts from the auction house records describe her as standing near 7 ft in height with a frame of unusual breadth and musculature. Witnesses at the auction reported that she had to duck to enter doorways and that her hands were so large they could wrap entirely around a man's head. Her name, according to the auction documents, was Sarah. No last name was recorded in the initial sale papers, as was common practice. She had been born on a small farm in Piedmont, North Carolina, the daughter of an enslaved woman whose name has been lost to history. From the scattered records that survive, it appears Sarah suffered from a condition that modern medicine would recognize as pituitary gigantism, a rare disorder caused by excess growth hormone. typically due to a benign tumor on the pituitary gland. In the 1820s, however, no such medical understanding existed. To the people who saw her, Sarah was simply a freak of nature, a curiosity, and potentially a very valuable one. The auction took place on a humid Tuesday morning in late March. The auction house on Chalma Street was packed with planters, merchants, and curious onlookers who had heard rumors about the giant woman.