Pineville, a historic refuge

This Engine #102 was built in 1862 in Pennsylvania and purchased by the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company in 1910. Two Yankee carpetbaggers came South in 1880, bought up land along the Santee River, built a lumber mill, made a fortune, and returned home to Chicago. In 1920, the mill closed and the forest reclaimed the buildings.

Finally, in 1940, it disappeared beneath the waters of Lake Marion. Since then, the mill has been nothing more than a landmark for fishermen. The mill and the mill town were soon forgotten.

During the past year, the drought lowered the lake level and fishermen wondered at the stark concrete and tile buildings, some three stories high, that emerged from the water. Explorers, historians, and archeologists marvelled at the rediscovery of the Lost Town of Ferguson.

I visited Ferguson twice walking among the larger- than- life structures trying to get a fix on how the mill and the town functioned. On my third visit, the lake had swallowed up the town once again.

In the process of researching Ferguson I uncovered another mystery, the legacy of the fortune created by cypress lumber taken from the Santee swamp. The capital generated by B.F. Ferguson and Francis Beidler is alive and well in South Carolina and Illinois.

The town of Ferguson was organized around the lumber mill. But, first, the origins of the Lost Town of Ferguson.

Francis Beidler (1854- 1924) and Benjamin Franklin Ferguson (1839- 1905) formed the South Branch Lumber Company in Chicago in 1874. Beidler's father had been in the lumber business since 1844 in Michigan and opened a lumber yard in Chicago when Francis was a schoolboy.

Ferguson worked in his father's lumber yard as a young man in Pennsylvania then went to New York to become an auctioneer. In 1861, he joined the Union Army and was stationed in Alexandria, Vi rginia. After the war, he moved to Chicago and joined Beidler in the South Branch Lumber Company which became very successful and much later was sold to Weyerhauser Pacific Coast.

During an exploratory visit to the economically depressed Lowcountry of South Carolina in the 1870s, the two lumbermen saw great potential in the virgin forests of the Santee Swamp. In 1881, Beidler and Ferguson formed the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company and purchased over 165,000 acres of land along the Congaree, Wateree, and Santee Rivers in South Carolina.

Ferguson was located on the 1875 SC map between Pineville and Eutawville. They built a lumber mill on the Santee River next to Nelson's Ferr y and the Sinkler's Belvidere Plantation and near the ill- fated Santee Canal which had stopped operating in 1850. Since the mill was in an isolated location, they constructed a "town" in which the workers could live. The new town became known as Ferguson.

The SRCL Railroad Company ran a spur line f rom Ferguson to the town of Cross where connections for supplies and lumber were made to Charleston. Barges carried lumber from Ferguson upriver to Columbia and downriver to Georgetown.

In the center of town was the saw mill. A kiln, warehouse, and dock lay between the mill and the r iver. Homes for the workers were laid out away from the river on neat fenced lots on boardwalk streets raised above the water leve l . The company built a hotel, hospital, school, post office, and company store. Ferguson had its own money, wooden and metal coins, with which it paid its employees and cashed in at the hospital and store.

The Santee River Cypress Lumber Company issued its own money including these coins. Both had the company name on one side. The octagonal one reads "Good for 50¢ in Merchandise." The population of Ferguson fluctuated between 300 and 1,000. There were usually 200- 250 negroes and 100- 150 whites in residence. Each family had a house, a cow, two to three pigs, and 50- 100 chickens. The men made furniture from lumber scraps. The women made clothes out of cloth bought at the company store. Children of working age (over 10) assisted in the mill. Younger children were given a minimal 3Rs education at the company school.

Even though Ferguson was only six miles from Eutawville, there was ver y little intercourse between the two. In the fashion of the day, the mill workers were captives of the company. Black preachers, Baptist and Methodist, visited every month or so to conduct funerals, baptisms, and weddings. White foremen were allowed to go into town on the weekend and regularly had to be bailed out of jail on Monday by the company.

Tropical diseases were rampant in Ferguson. After all, it was located on a spit of cleared land in the middle of South Carolina's largest swamp and smaller logging camps were scattered throughout the swamp. Almost no white person escaped the hemorrhagic fever, bloody discharges, and comas of malaria. It was treated with daily doses of calomel, castor oil, and quinine. The fever claimed 50% of its victims, all white. The blacks, fairly immune to malaria, suffered from other illnesses.

The company began making big money during the McKinley Boom of 1896 when prices rose. With local cheap labor more timber was able to be cut and more lumber shipped. Unskilled labor was paid 40- 75¢ per day, skilled labor $1.00 a day, and professionals (surveyors, fitters, foremen) $2.50- 3.00 a day. The mill produced as much as 45 billion board feet a year.

(Next week: Ferguson, the final years)