The kiln at Ferguson was used to dry the lumber before it was shipped.
Editor’s Note: At the request of his readers and in memory of Warner M. Montgomery, Ph. D, we will continue to publish his Adventure Travel stories for the time being.
In 1881, two lumber magnates from Chicago, Francis Beidler and B.F. 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.
Beidler and Ferguson, realizing the forests of the Northeast and Midwest had been exhausted, meant to capitalize on the bald cypress trees they discovered in the virgin Santee floodplain. They built a lumber mill on the Santee River and constructed a “town” in which the workers could live. The new town was called Ferguson.
Ferguson became a mini-boomtown. It was one of the first towns in South Carolina to have indoor plumbing and gas lighting in the streets. A water tower provided fresh water to each home and flushed their sewage into the river.
Everyone in Ferguson got along, blacks and whites, bosses and workers. There were very few firings, and it was easy for a man to work his way up in the company.
Remains of the sawmill at Ferguson are over 30 feet high and 100 feet long.
Wildlife was prolific. Alligators, bears, turkeys, squirrels, deer, ducks, possums, raccoons, wild pigs, fish, and snakes supplemented the population’s diet. Grapes, walnuts, hickory nuts, blackberries, blueberries, and mulberries were available in season.
River traffic picked up. Steamboats, the City of Columbia and the City of Georgetown, plying the Santee between the fall line and the ocean, delivered passengers and supplies at the Ferguson dock. Tug boats pulled logs and barges to the mill. The train from Cross pulled into the town everyday.
The massive sawmill sat adjacent to a four-acre deck supported by concrete piers. For over 28 years, day and night, logs that were floated down river and barged up river were hoisted onto the deck and sorted. The average log was 16 feet long cut from a 136-foot tree that may have been 700 years old. Logs that were too watersoaked to cut were stacked and allowed to dry in the sun.
Dry logs were debarked and taken into the sawmill where they were cut, edged, and trimmed. The lumber was stacked in the giant kiln heated by hot wire coils to be dried. Once dry, the planks were planed and cut in uniform widths and lengths.
It was usual for the mill to get 565 board feet to the cypress log. Finished lumber was shipped by rail to Charleston or by barge to Columbia. Partially finished lumber could have also been shipped down river to the Atlantic Coast Lumber Company in Georgetown, which, along with Ferguson, was among the largest sawmills in the U.S.
It would be easy to say the logs rolled in and the money rolled out, but that was not quite the case. Competition lowered prices, the mill burned and had to be rebuilt, Ferguson died in 1905, and Beidler, who bought his partner’s interest in the company, began to go blind. Beidler turned over operations to M.B. Cross and lent the company $621,000 of his own money to keep the saws turning, but in 1914, he closed it down.
Beidler sold the machinery for scrap and the remaining lumber to Brooklyn (NY) Cooperage Company for $5 million. When he died in 1924 he owned 8,000 shares of stock in the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company worth $1,632,000, and the company owed him an additional $621,000. His wife and two children owned 7,000 shares worth $1,428,000.
The town of Ferguson disappeared into the Santee swamp. In 1940, the remains of the mill and the other buildings were flooded by the waters of Lake Marion. When the level of the lake fell in the fall of 2007, Ferguson reappeared… and was rediscovered.
There has been another discovery, too. The wealth taken out of South Carolina by B.F. Ferguson and Francis Beidler was invested in trust funds and non-profit foundations and benefits the people of South Carolina and Illinois today.
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