There is a town at the bottom of Lake Marion. Not a legend of one; an actual town, with paved streets, indoor plumbing, gas streetlights, a hotel, a school, a hospital and a sawmill that cut the oldest cypress on the Santee for thirty years. Its name was Ferguson. In dry years, when the lake drops, its brick kiln stands up out of the water on a low island in Orangeburg County, and people take boats out to look at it. This is what it was, what happened to it, and why the man who built it is the reason the biggest cypress forest in Dorchester County is still standing.
What was Ferguson, South Carolina?
A company town, built from nothing in 1881 by two Chicago lumbermen, Francis Beidler and Benjamin F. Ferguson, who had looked at the swamps of the Santee, Congaree and Wateree rivers after the Civil War and seen money. The state was broke and the land was cheap, as little as two dollars an acre, and on it stood bald cypress that had been growing since before Columbus: trees a hundred feet tall and ten feet through, in water, where nobody had been able to cut them. Beidler and Ferguson bought 165,000 acres of it and formed the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company.
They put their mill on the Santee at the edge of the swamp, in what is now Orangeburg County, and built a town around it that was ahead of most of South Carolina. Paved streets. Coal-gas streetlights. Indoor plumbing. A hotel, a school, a hospital, a company store, fenced yards, and a kiln the size of a church that cured cypress and creosoted railroad ties. About 350 men worked there, with their families, in a town that did not exist on any map before the mill and would not exist on any map after it.
Why was Ferguson a company town?
Because the company owned everything, including the money. Workers were paid in scrip, company coins stamped “Santee Mercantile Co.,” which could be spent only at the company store. The coins turn up with collectors today, which is most of what remains of the town’s economy. The arrangement was ordinary for a Southern mill town and it meant that when the mill went, nothing else could stay. There was no reason for Ferguson except the cypress, and cypress, cut at that rate, runs out.
Why was Ferguson abandoned?
The company shut down the Ferguson operation in 1915. The trees that could be reached had been reached, the mill was aging, and the lumber market was changing. The workers were laid off, the post office closed in 1917, and within a few years the town was empty. For twenty-five years the pines and the swamp took it back, which is what the Lowcountry does with a town once the people leave, and if that were the end of the story Ferguson would be a few bricks in the woods, like a hundred other mill sites.
Then, in 1939, the state began the Santee Cooper hydroelectric project: dams on the Santee and Cooper rivers, and two lakes, Marion and Moultrie, to be flooded across the valley. The lakes filled in the early 1940s. Plantations went under, churches went under, cemeteries were moved or weren’t, and Ferguson, which nobody had to evacuate because nobody was there, went under whole. Streets, foundations, the hotel’s footings, the kiln. The same water covers the battlefield of Eutaw Springs a few miles south.
Can you see Ferguson today?
Sometimes. The site is a low island in the upper lake, and at normal water most of it is a few feet down, with the stumps of the town’s pilings standing in the shallows like a broken fence. In drought years the lake falls and Ferguson comes up. The big one was 2007 to 2008, when the water dropped far enough that people drove four-wheelers out across the lakebed to the island and walked the streets. The kiln, a tall brick chamber at the north end, stood dry. Foundations, a well, stonework, bricks, bottles and pottery lay in the mud. Some people photographed it. Some people took things, and dug, and that is why there are signs now.
The site belongs to Santee Cooper, the state power authority, and its artifacts are protected. Looting of submerged sites and graves during the drought was reported and investigated. You can go, by boat, and look; you cannot dig, and you should not take anything, and if the lake is high you will see pilings and a brick wall where the water meets the trees and not much else. The kiln is visible from the water in most years. Launch from the public ramps near Eutawville or along SC 6 and ask locally; everyone on the upper lake knows where Ferguson is.
Francis Beidler and the forest he didn’t cut
Now the Dorchester County part. Of the 165,000 acres the company bought, some of the finest was not on the Santee at all but in the swamp north of St. George: Four Holes Swamp, the blackwater tributary of the Edisto, with cypress a thousand years old standing in it. Beidler had bought it to cut. By the time the Ferguson mill closed he had stopped cutting, and he never started again. He held the Four Holes land as it was, through the rest of his life, and his family held it after him, and in 1969 it was sold to the National Audubon Society, which named it for him. Francis Beidler Forest, outside Harleyville, is the largest remaining stand of virgin bald cypress and tupelo in the world, and it’s ours. We’ve written about it at Four Holes Swamp and Beidler Forest.
Nobody fully knows why he left it standing. The usual answer is that it was too hard to get the logs out, and that is probably part of it. The other answer, which the Audubon people give, is that he changed his mind. He had built a town to cut the Santee cypress and watched the Santee cypress run out, and he had a swamp full of the same trees on the Edisto, and he let them be. The town he built is under a lake. The swamp he didn’t cut is the one place in the Lowcountry where you can see what the whole country looked like before Ferguson.
Visiting
- Ferguson: upper Lake Marion, Orangeburg County, by boat only. Best in late summer or any drought year when the lake is low. Protected site; look, don’t dig.
- Eutaw Springs Battleground Park: SC 6 east of Eutawville, on the lakeshore. The other history under the same water.
- Francis Beidler Forest: 336 Sanctuary Road, Harleyville, Dorchester County. A boardwalk through the cypress Beidler left standing. About 30 minutes from St. George.
If you came here for the sunken town
A whole town goes under the water and comes back up every dry summer, a little more worn each time. Every County Line Confidential dispatch is built on something like that. The one to read first is The Edisto Keeps Its Own, about what the other river does with what it’s given. Then The Fourth Hole, which goes into the swamp Beidler saved and doesn’t entirely come out.
Sources
- Tom Taylor, “The Ghost Towns of Lake Marion, Part 2: Ferguson,” RandomConnections (2013), with the railroad historian Tom Fetters’ figures on the town.
- U.S. Geological Survey, Geographic Names Information System, “Ferguson (historical).”
- Bob Janiskee, “Francis Beidler’s Long-Ago Decision Saved the Forest That Became Congaree National Park,” National Parks Traveler (2008); National Audubon Society, Francis Beidler Forest.
- The Times and Democrat (Orangeburg), “Ferguson: Visiting a Town That Has Been Underwater for Over 50 Years.”