Ferguson and the Santee basin, under Lake Marion
Cleared from 1939; the basin flooded by 1942Ferguson, now under Lake Marion, Orangeburg County, SC
The Santee Cooper project cleared more than 160,000 acres of the Santee swamp and drowned the mill town of Ferguson. The people it moved were the Black farming communities around it - in one parish, 2,500 to 3,000 people, about four in five of them African American.
Ferguson was built in 1890 by Chicago lumbermen - Benjamin Franklin Ferguson and Francis Beidler - as the headquarters of the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company, which had bought some 200,000 acres of cypress swamp along the Santee at the cheap prices that followed Reconstruction. The company put up worker and management housing, a hotel, a school and a hospital against the malaria of the swamp, ran its own railroad, and paid in company scrip that could be spent only at the company store. At its peak around 1900 about 2,500 people lived there, in the South's largest cypress lumber operation. By 1920 the company was out of business and the town was abandoned.
In 1934 the state created the South Carolina Public Service Authority with power to dam the Santee, divert it into the Cooper and flood two reservoirs; Franklin Roosevelt approved Public Works Administration money, making Santee Cooper the largest New Deal project in the state. After a four-year court fight construction began in 1939. At its peak the project employed nearly 15,000 workers, most of them off Depression relief rolls, who cleared more than 160,000 acres with handsaws and mule-drawn wagons and relocated the cemeteries in the basin. The powerhouse at Pinopolis began generating in 1942.
Lake Marion covered the Ferguson site and nearly 61,000 acres of the lumber company's land. It also covered the communities that were still living there. In the St John's Parish section of the basin the flooded area held 2,500 to 3,000 people, about 80 per cent of them African American, along with nine plantations and the houses, schools and churches that went with them. Most of the Black families were tenant farmers, so the payments for land went to the people holding the titles, and there was nothing to buy out the work of the people who farmed it.
The lake that replaced them became a fishing and holiday economy worth more than $200 million a year by the end of the century, and electricity from the project reached most of the state's farms within two decades. Of Ferguson itself there is no marker; a University of South Carolina community study and an oral history of people who grew up beside the drowned town are the main attempt to hold the record. The tally of who was moved out of the basin, by name, was never made.
The flooded St John's Parish section held 2,500 to 3,000 people, about 80 per cent of them African American. Ferguson itself had been abandoned for twenty years when the water arrived.
Sources
- Memories of a drowned townUniversity of South Carolinasc.eduOn Ferguson's founding, its company scrip, its peak population and its flooding, drawing on Jessica Elfenbein's community study and an honours oral history project.
- Wood Basket of the World: Lumbering, Commerce, and Conservation in South Carolina's ForestsJessica I. Elfenbein, University of South Carolinamanifold.sc.eduThe acreage razed, the 61,000 acres of company land drowned, and the 2,500 to 3,000 people in St John's Parish, about 80 per cent of them African American.
- Santee CooperSouth Carolina Encyclopedia, University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studiesscencyclopedia.orgThe authority's creation in 1934, the court fight, the 1939 start, the 15,000 workers who cleared the basin and relocated its cemeteries, and the landowners who fought the dislocation.