Abstract

"Reclaiming Ferguson, South Carolina 1890-1940: A Community Study"

Jessica Elfenbein, University of South Carolina (jessicae@mailbox.sc.edu)

After Reconstruction, Midwestern lumbermen came to South Carolina, acquired significant landholdings (200,000+ acres), and created the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company. The forest products SRCLC generated - part of an international flow of commodities - made its owners rich, influenced national taste in home furnishings, and created the town of Ferguson. This is the story of an industry that took on the swamp, employing corporate heft and technological innovation in an effort to master what generations before had not been able to tame.

Built out of the swamp as SRCLC corporate headquarters, Ferguson thrived as one of the South’s largest lumber enterprises for thirty years. At its peak, 2,500 people, African American and white, lived and worked there, including local farmers who recast themselves as industrial workers, lumber experts who relocated from the North and Midwest, and European immigrants recruited at Ellis Island. By 1920, SRCLC closed and Ferguson was mostly abandoned. Two decades later, a gigantic hydroelectric plant - created as part of New Deal rural electrification - swallowed the town, submerging it under Lake Marion.

Some in Ferguson’s African American majority relocated to larger cities while others remained in the rural South. Whites, a minority in Ferguson, comprised SRCLC’s entire management team. Recruited from out of state or overseas, their movements reveal a national market for skilled (white) lumber workers, linking rural South Carolina to major lumber centers like Chicago, Tonawanda, NY, and Bay City/Saginaw, Michigan, as well as to New York City, from which immigrant laborers came and to which much of SRCLC’s forest products went.

Studying SRCLC without corporate records is complicated. A wide range of tools, including those of genealogical research, allows us to recreate the drowned town of Ferguson replete with company workers and the ministers, laundresses, storekeepers and physicians who completed the community.