South Carolina Canal and Railroad: Charleston to Hamburg

The South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company was chartered by the state on December 19, 1827, and on October 3, 1833, it completed a 136-mile line from Charleston to Hamburg on the Savannah River, the longest railroad in the world under a single management at the time. Its locomotive, the Best Friend of Charleston, had already begun hauling paying passengers on Christmas Day 1830, the first scheduled steam passenger service in the United States. Somewhere past the midpoint of that line, the trains stopped at a planter’s store. The stop was called George’s Station. It is St. George now.

Why did Charleston build a railroad to Hamburg?

Charleston wanted the trade of the interior, which was drifting toward other ports. A railroad was first proposed in 1821. The charter came in 1827 and was amended in January 1828. The destination was Hamburg, a town on the South Carolina bank of the Savannah River across from Augusta, which would let Charleston draw upcountry cotton to its own wharves instead of Georgia’s.

William Aiken was the company’s founder and first president. Elias Horry took over as president in 1831 and saw the line through. Horatio Allen, the chief engineer, argued for steam power from the start, at a time when most people assumed railroads would be worked by horses. He had driven the English-built Stourbridge Lion on its only American run and knew what an engine could do.

How was the line built?

Construction began in Charleston in January 1830. The first six miles were done that year. To save the cost of grading and embankments, the engineers ran the track on timber pilings driven into the ground, with flat strap-iron rails laid on wooden sills. It was fast and cheap and it did not last. By 1834 the pilings were rotting at ground level and the company began replacing them with earthen embankments; the strap rail gave way to T-rail starting in 1836. Labor was short. The principal contractors, Gray & Company, brought white laborers from the North and from Europe, and the company also used enslaved labor, including as firemen on the engines.

The line had sixteen evenly spaced turnouts, each with a water pump and a timber shed, so an engine could take on wood and water every eight miles or so. At the western end, near Aiken, the track dropped 180 feet in 3,800 feet into the Horse Creek valley by an inclined plane, worked first by a steam winch and later by a locomotive acting as counterweight. The delay there made Aiken a stopover town.

When did the first train run?

The Best Friend of Charleston, built at the West Point Foundry in New York, arrived in Charleston in October 1830 and made its formal debut on Christmas Day, December 25, 1830, pulling passenger cars out the first six miles of track. Regular service began on that demonstration route. The engine’s boiler exploded in June 1831 and killed the fireman, but the company stayed with steam. By 1834 it had fifteen locomotives.

The full 136 miles opened on October 3, 1833, with named stops at Summerville, Branchville, Blackville, and Aiken, among others. Hamburg was reached, and Charleston had its railroad. A branch from Branchville to Columbia was built in 1840 and opened in 1842. The Camden branch followed in 1848.

George’s Station

Between Summerville and Branchville the track crossed the land of James George (1789–1867), a planter who is believed to have kept a store there since around 1810. George gave land for a station when the road was built in the 1830s, and the stop was named for him. A town grew on both sides of the rails, was incorporated as George’s Station in 1875, and became St. George’s in 1889 and the seat of Dorchester County in 1897.

The country the railroad ran through was already crossed by older roads. The route called the Wire Road, which later carried the telegraph line between Charleston and Augusta, follows an old trading path for more than twenty miles across Dorchester County, past the Four Holes Swamp, Indian Field, Grover, and the Koger-Murray-Carroll House on the outskirts of St. George. The railroad did not replace the road. It ran beside it and then outlived it as a route, until the interstates outlived both.

From South Carolina Railroad to Southern Railway

In 1839 the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad took stock control of the company, and under an act of December 19, 1843, the two were merged in 1844 as the South Carolina Railroad. The line was permitted to cross into Augusta in 1853 and to join the Georgia Railroad in 1858, completing the link west. The Civil War wrecked the track, buildings, and rolling stock. Columbia and Charleston were reconnected in January 1866, but the company never fully recovered. It was sold to New York bondholders in 1881, went into receivership in 1889, and was sold again in 1894 and renamed the South Carolina and Georgia Railroad. The Southern Railway leased it in 1899 and absorbed it into its Carolina division in 1902. The track through St. George belongs to Norfolk Southern today.

What happened to the St. George depot?

The depot that stood beside the tracks in St. George in the early 1900s no longer exists. A photograph of it survives; the building does not. There is nothing on the site to visit. The line still runs through town, and the 2019 historical marker at Memorial Boulevard and North Parler Avenue tells the story of the station that gave the town its name.

The trains still come through at night. Nobody meets them, and they do not stop.

The railroad shows up at the edges of several dispatches, and St. George’s whole history as told in the county history hangs on it. The engine that ran the first train has its own page, as does the town. The line is drawn on the county map.

The South Carolina Canal and Railroad, and the Station Called George’s