Finding Ferguson

Finding Ferguson

Once booming sawmill town now South Carolina’s Atlantis 12

By: R. Darren Price dprice@theitem.com /07&.#&3 t %&$&.#&3 | LAKESIDE

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t’s no secret that there is history under Lake Marion.

If you go to the Clarendon or Orangeburg County Archives, you can find articles about Revolutionary War battlefields, antebellum plantations and family burial plots now obscured by the lake’s waters. Find a local amateur archaeologist, and he can probably show you ancient American Indian tools that waters have churned up and washed ashore.

But there’s one piece of South Carolina history under the lake that, unless you know who to ask, has been completely lost. That piece of history is a turn-of-thecentury logging town called Ferguson. Abandoned in 1915, submerged in 1940 and until about two years ago, completely forgotten, the former logging boomtown is a Lake Marion historical enigma.

In 2008, drought brought down lake waters far enough to expose the town. The foundations of a building that once housed a huge sawmill and the structure of what used to be a wood kiln were all that was left of the town founded in 1895 by the Santee Cypress Lumber Company.

Lakegoers could follow a line of cypress trees normally partially submerged from the landing to find the town and walk among the ruins. And though state law prohibits residents from plucking artifacts from the town site without an amateur archeologist’s license, that didn’t stop some.

“I’ve found all sorts of stuff,” says Buddy Walker, 64.

“But it’s been taken away.”

Others, like Dwight Stewart of Manning, just walked along the ruins, trying to learn what they could. Stewart, a forestry consultant, wrote an article on the town for a newsletter. He didn’t take anything but a few pictures.

“I appreciate the history of the area,” he said.

The low water table proved to be a high-water mark for the town’s history. Stewart’s article along with a couple others from local newspapers, and that was it: the waters went back up and Ferguson’s profile sank. But why did Ferguson disappear in the first place?

Bad Bookkeeping In 1910, railroad historian Tom Fetters said Ferguson was ahead of the curve. It had a hotel complete with 63 rooms, houses for blacks and whites and running water and electricity for all. But by 1916, The Times and Democrat in Orangeburg wrote that the town was a shell of its former self.

“Homes have been deserted, club rooms lay idle and the modern lighting and sewage systems are used no more,” the report said. “Lots of valuable stuff is going to junk.”

If it sounds like the town was just shut down overnight, it’s because it was. Francis Biedler Sr., the Chicago businessman who owned Santee Cypress decided to shut the operation in Ferguson after losing his sight to macular degeneration in 1912.

“He couldn’t go down to look at the books,” Fetters said. “So, he decides to shut it down when he hears things aren’t up to snuff.”

And when he shut it down, he decided to sell everything in the town with it -- the sawmill, the huge Santee Cypress railroad engine, even the rail ties used to get into the city. And since Santee Cypress owned everything from the hospital where workers were frequently treated for malaria down to the water lines, the workers had little reason to stay. According to The Times and Democrat, the only town’s inhabitants were “rats and insects” by 1916.

But Fetters said that isn’t the only reason Ferguson is a forgotten town. If you look through the Orangeburg SANTEELAKESIDE.COM 13

County Archives, the earliest mention of the town is in 1910, despite the town being in existence for 15 years.

That’s because the town and surrounding area spent much of its existence in territorial limbo, as it was tossed from one county to another. Before the town was part of Orangeburg County, it was in Berkeley County.

Records from the town between 1895 and 1909 could be found in the county’s archives in Moncks Corner, but Fetters said most records from that time are probably long gone, if they ever existed. A long mud road between Ferguson and Moncks Corner was seldom traveled. “They were the forgotten end of Berkeley county,�

Fetters said.

Any surviving information before that regarding the Santee Cypress, its founder, B.F. Ferguson, or Biedler, Fetters said, would likely be somewhere in Charleston County - Mount Pleasant, now in Charleston County, was the Berkeley County seat until 1895.

Only the foundation slabs are still visible where Ferguson once boomed in Orangeburg County. The town was abandoned and then ooded to make Lake Marion in the 1940s.

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What was life like? +VTU BTL ,FOOFZ 'VOFSCVSLF PG 4VNUFS 8IJMF IF never worked for Santee Cypress, he is a living history of logging in America. After graduating from the University of Georgia for forestry in 1950, he worked in the industry in the southeast and and set up logging operations in Brazil. Funderburke had three words to describe the life of a turn-of-the-century logger. “It was tough,� he said.

The people who lived in Santee Swamp, as Santee River basin was then called, faced constant risk of mosquito-borne diseases like malaria. Funderburke said they often faced the risk of being crushed by falling trees. “The pay was low, danger was high, and the mortality rate was considerable,� he said.

For much of the late 19th century, boat travel was impossible on the river; Fetters said Santee Cypress and other logging companies without alternative ways to transport lumber simply let rafts float through the state’s waterways to Charleston.

But Fetters said things started to turn around for the town after Ferguson sold his stake in the company to Biedler in 1905 to settle things with his estate before he died in 1906. Biedler went about making the Ferguson settlement a boom town. He built 53 homes for white workers and another 97 for black workers, along with a hospital, company store, school, bank and a 60-room hotel. Running water from two 600-foot wells and and electricity from a 10-boiler power plant supplied the town with utilities. Rail lines were built so wood products could be shipped on Santee Cooper’s massive steam engines, rather than floated downstream. The lines also made life easier for workers from Eutawville, who previously had to make a four-mile trip each day. “A lot of people from Eutawville would just stay the night,� Fetters said.

No records ever suggest the town had a church, though. According to a Times and Democrat report from 1912, a pastor had to come to the town once per month to minister to the 800 or so men and women

who lived in the logging boom town.

The Work By all accounts Santee Cypress’ operation in South Carolina was a huge one, and at the center of it all was Ferguson. Biedler and Ferguson started the company to take advantage of the quality cypress forests in the region and bought about 120,000 acres on which to log -- about 10,000 acres more than Lake Marion. Biedler’s grandson, Francis Biedler III, said the area’s cypress forests were lucrative because the wood was so rot resistant. “You could use it for railroads and water towers,�

Biedler III said. “They used it for anything you didn’t want to rot.�

Fetters said workers would girdle trees for months with chains before cutting them down. This was done to drain sap from the tree. After chopping them down, they floated them them to the town, where the trees sat in a collection pond before being dried in the town’s electric kiln. Fetters said the kiln was powered by electricity rather than by wood or coal, which was advanced for the time.

Then they would be processed in the town’s massive sawmill. Able to process 80,000 feet of wood boards each day, the mill was large, even by today’s standards, Stewart and Fetters both said. “It was really big,� Stewart said. “You would expect to see one-half that size today.�

After that, workers would make boxes from the finished boards. Fetters said cypress boxes were popular in the day because corrugated cardboard boxes, though invented in the late 19th century, weren’t widely available. Fetters said for its day, Santee Cypress’ logging operation was pretty advanced.

It was also profitable. According to 1953 letters from Fred Seeley, who managed the lumber mill at Ferguson from 1896 to 1906 and again from 1909 to 1911, the

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logging operation was the one only profitable in the southeast. “Anybody could make money with logs, a good mill crew and booming prices,� he said.

The Atlantis of South Carolina By 1916, there were less than 30 families living in the town that used to be Ferguson. The population, mostly transient, went where work was, so by the time Lake Marion’s waters rushed through the town, it was already a ghost town.

Still, some of Ferguson survives. In 1978, a former logger’s son, Walter Hulbert, then 70, visited the area. “I can close my eyes and see the whole town,� he told The Times and Democrat. “I can sit here and picture the town just as it was laid out.�

But Hulbert wasn’t the only part of Ferguson’s legacy. When Biedler shut down the operation in 1915, he kept some of the land. His family sold of about half of its holdings when the Santee Cooper Project was building the dam that would create the lake for $12 an acre -- a good price for the time.

The family set aside part of the lands for what is now the Congaree National Park and Francis Biedler Forest in 1967. They still own about half of the acreage, and sell “stumps� -- basically rights for loggers to cut trees down. Francis Biedler III still lives in Chicago, and though he never knew his grandfather -- Biedler, Sr. died in 1924 -- he is still intrigued by Ferguson. “I absolutely regret not visiting it while the water was down,� he said. “If I had the chance, and that sort of drought occurred again, I’d be there.�

Until then, Biedler and everyone else who wants to visit will have to wait for Lake Marion’s forgotten city to resurface. “It’s like the Atlantis of South Carolina,� he said.

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