Chapter 3 “A Question of Community Salvation”

Chicago lumbermen Francis Beidler and B. F. Ferguson invested in extensive swaths of old growth hardwood in post–Reconstruction South Carolina, creating the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company (SRCLC), the earliest big lumber concern with extensive timber holdings located near Sumter (see fig. 3.1).

By 1890, with an eye to permanence, SRCLC built the town of Ferguson along the swampy banks of the Santee River, near Eutawville and roughly fifty miles south of Sumter. For more than a quarter century, SRCLC operated Ferguson as its state-of-the-art corporate headquarters and company town, featuring sawmills, kilns, lumbering equipment, railroads, and company housing along with an artesian well, a school, and a hospital. Before 1920 and about when the boll weevil arrived, Francis Beidler, the surviving founder, closed the business and abandoned the town and lumber camps. Unlike other lumber company owners, Beidler retained his extensive acreage “up and down the Santee, Wateree, and Congaree Rivers,” leasing some land to hunt clubs and selling timber rights on 77,000 acres to Brooklyn Cooperage Company, a barrel maker and wholly Page 73 →owned subsidiary of American Sugar Refining Company, soon to build a plant in Sumter.¹⁴

While the majesty and financial promise of cypress trees initially attracted SRCLC’s founders to South Carolina, sweetgum trees were, in fact, most prevalent on their land and on hardwood bottomlands throughout the American South.¹⁵ Before 1900, without marketable value, sweetgum (also known as “red gum”) was often left standing after more valuable trees were logged. Their large size, coupled with the labor required to cut them, made sweetgum a serious obstruction to clearing valuable land for agricultural pursuits. If land was clear cut, gum trees were girdled and allowed to rot, then felled and burned as trash. Gum’s tendency to warp and twist reduced the incentive to work it. In 1906, the national Bureau of Forestry published a hopeful report on “Red Gum” that used some of SRCLC’s acreage as a case study. Predicting both its increased value and the likely establishment of additional sawmills, the report suggested that red gum’s utility (after controlling for twist)¹⁶ would enable lumber operations to use all hardwoods on their land, allowing a cleaner lumbering job and increasing the land’s value for forest management because “where only a few trees in the forest are of merchantable quality forest management is out of the question; where nearly all are of value it will often pay to hold the land for a second crop.” These advances moved the National Hardwood Manufacturers’ Association to rank gum as a commercial wood with recognized Page 74 →standing, providing it a class and a special grading. As a market for red gum developed, lumber companies cut it with other hardwood, making land clearance cheaper.¹⁷

While SRCLC used some sweetgum to manufacture rough, wide stock, and short lumber (boards eight feet or shorter), as well as flooring, beveled siding, beaded ceiling, and moldings, many of their gum trees were left untouched.¹⁸ Standing red gum attracted Brooklyn Cooperage to purchase timber rights to SRCLC/Beidler land in the Santee Basin where “only the best of the cypress” had been cut.¹⁹

At about the same time Brooklyn Cooperage purchased timber rights to SRCLC/Beidler land, two experienced wood products manufacturers first arrived in Sumter: veteran “veneer man” Oliver Lafayette (O. L.) Williams and Ohio lumberman Chester F. Korn.

O. L. Williams came to Sumter in 1919 to establish his fifth veneer plant (joining those in Camden and Conway, SC, and Mockville and Rural Hall, NC). Quickly, Williams’s Sumter Veneer and Panels spread across five acres and employed eighty men specializing in poplar and gum veneer for pianos, furniture, graphophones (phonographs) and wood-paneled trunks (see fig. 3.2).²⁰ In 1923, the veneer company received a state charter. The company’s charter was broad. In addition to buying and selling timber, timber rights, and real estate, the company could operate saw mills, planing mills, and veneer mills and manufacture lumber, building material, and veneer timber products.²¹

In 1921, C. F. Korn, newly remarried and with thirty years’ experience, came to Sumter from Cincinnati for a lumber-cutting trip. Finding that “the possibilities looked so good,” Korn stayed, creating Sumter Hardwood Company on the city’s south side. The new firm consumed 30,000 feet of logs per day.²² For five years, Sumter Hardwood logged and milled. Then, embracing the city’s furniture fever, Korn created Sumter Cabinet for furniture production, with high quality bedroom suites its signature.²³ Later he founded Korn Industries which, like Brooklyn Cooperage, entered into a long-term cutting contract with the Beidlers on former SRCLC land.²⁴

In 1923, hoping to stave off further economic decline by increasing and developing manufacturing in the city, 250 Sumterites pledged to support a Page 75 →new board of trade.²⁵ With an optimistic “Sumter could, if it would” rallying cry, residents pledged $6,050 (roughly $100,000 today) per year for three years to support the group’s work.²⁶ Touting Sumter’s central location in “a good agricultural county” featuring “splendidly equipped” school and railroad facilities and a road system “without equal in the south,” Richard B. Belser, attorney and president of the new board of trade declared “from a standpoint of accessibility our rating is A-1.”²⁷

Looking for a manufacturing industry “peculiarly adapted to Sumter,” the board of trade engaged Lockwood, Greene and Company, industrial surveyors, and Frank Van Ness and Associates, industrial engineers, both nationally known consultants.²⁸ For eighteen months, Lockwood, Greene collected data about the area’s industrial possibilities while Van Ness proposed a plan for the organization of a furniture factory to spur the development of a new industry.²⁹ In August 1924, the Van Ness plan was presented to Sumter’s business leaders.³⁰ A logical extension of the city’s extant wood Page 76 →working industries (Korn and Williams, among a handful of others) then generating a modest $2 million annually, the proposal concluded that the city offered “exceptional opportunities for the successful development of a profitable furniture manufacturing industry … superior to those possessed by any of the furniture centers of North Carolina or other states.”³¹

The board of trade enthusiastically embraced the consultants’ findings, emphasizing that with cotton income halved, Sumter simply could not count on agricultural returns to provide “adequate support in the future.” Instead, given the “magnificent system of paved highways, a school plant excelled in no town of the state” and major investments in lighting, water, and sewerage plants, creating the furniture factory was not a matter of community pride but rather “a question of community salvation.”³² The ambitious Van Ness plan promised many things: increased population and property values; decreased taxes; a market for local banks to invest and lend locally; stimulation of the city’s retail and wholesale trade; opportunities to teach trades to the unskilled; and steady income for industrial workers including “high class employment to intelligent white labor.” With its “tremendous resources of hard wood, labor and finances,” Sumter’s furniture industry would likely be quick to expand “beyond the idea of just one factory.” Designed to serve as “a school for our citizens to learn the business into which they can invest their money and manage plants for themselves,” the first factory required an investment of $100,000.³³

As Sumter pondered its industrial future, comparisons to High Point, North Carolina, the center of the South’s furniture industry, were inevitable.³⁴ In the late 1880s, with one railroad and little local hardwood, High Point’s first furniture factory was begun. By 1910, High Point’s population was just over 9,000 while Sumter’s was 4,100. Then, as High Point’s furniture industry developed, the cities veered apart. By 1924, with a population of about 25,000 and more than one hundred manufacturing establishments, nearly half in furniture and wood working-related fields, High Point’s annual revenue totaled $25 million, while Sumter, with 10,000 residents, had manufacturing industry (including wood working) of just $2 million.³⁵ The contrast showed “what the furniture industry can do for a town” and suggested that Sumter’s advantages—both natural and economic—boded well for its prospects of becoming a furniture manufacturing center.³⁶ With proximity to raw materials and good transportation, supporters concluded that a Sumter furniture factory could “sell its Page 77 →output at the cost price of factories located in High Point and still make a profit.” Direct rail connections to all “principal centers of the population in the southeast” including access to Charleston’s water transportation via a short rail line, together with excellent roads allowing for truck delivery, made significant cost savings possible.³⁷ The combination of raw materials, transportation, and labor would allow Sumter “at least a ten percent advantage” over High Point.³⁸

Key to establishing a furniture plant in Sumter was securing $100,000, mostly in local funds from “savings accounts and strong boxes of those who have unproductive capital.”³⁹ The proponents of the plan noted that while more than $6 million was then deposited locally, neither the banks nor the board of trade could “wave a wand and change Sumter into an industrial center.”⁴⁰ Neill O’Donnell, president of First National Bank and a leading Sumter citizen, believed that the furniture factory would be a fiscal and civic success and quickly pledged to be one of the donors to provide $50,000, half of the total needed.⁴¹

Inventor Charles T. Mason Jr. was another early supporter. A native Sumterite who went north twice before returning and organizing the Sumter Telephone Company in 1899, Mason’s firm manufactured telephones that did not infringe on Alexander Graham Bell’s patents. Recalling how, when he created the phone company without trained labor available in Sumter, he hired those “he could find” and taught them not only to build switchboards and other telephone exchange equipment, but also fine wooden cabinets, Mason addressed concerns about Sumter’s labor force. Preferring to make mechanics of untrained Southern men to supervising experienced northerners, Mason encouraged the new furniture factory: “Why hesitate? The raw material is here. The labor is here. The transportation question is in our favor. The money is here too.”⁴²

Still, despite the endorsements of O’Donnell and Mason, the ravages of the boll weevil, major crop losses, and stark economic disparities between agricultural and industrial workers, Sumter’s business-minded citizens only slowly committed financial support for a new factory.⁴³ By July 1923, though most of the funds had been subscribed, two of the biggest pledges—one for $25,000 from Arkansas and another for $10,000 from North Carolina—were from out-of-towners hoping to manage the plant! At the same time, a committee of five (O. L. Williams; R. B. Belser, attorney, real estate agent, and board of trade president; Edward S. Booth, physician; Page 78 →Lang D. Jennings, Sumter’s mayor, and Hampton N. Forester, lumber dealer) committed to raising the remaining capital stock needed.⁴⁴

By October 1924, “self-preservation” demanded the completion of pledges.⁴⁵ Frank W. Van Ness and Associates—the consultants who wrote the plan—committed to underwriting $20,000, making Van Ness an equal partner to local stockholders and removing “all the obstacles raised by local business men.”⁴⁶ The factory applied for a state charter to do business with capital of $100,000.⁴⁷ Formally organized in December 1924, the Sumter Furniture Corporation sold a thousand shares each of common and preferred stock to 103 stockholders.⁴⁸ Elected officers were O. L. Williams, president; Frank Van Ness, vice president; Neill O’Donnell, treasurer; and Julian T. Buxton, plant manager, secretary.⁴⁹ Buxton was recruited from the Mengel Company, Winston-Salem, NC, which, with specialties in wooden boxes and crates, was “one of the largest woodworking plants in the United States.”⁵⁰

Recognizing Mr. Williams’s stellar reputation, the board of trade named the new furniture factory O. L. Williams Top and Panel Company, “a great satisfaction” to the stockholders, and a choice for which the “whole town seems to be happy.” Opening in the fall of 1925 and located on ten acres on East Calhoun Street between the American Coast Line and Seaboard Air Line tracks, the factory made not furniture but instead veneers sold exclusively to furniture manufacturers, for which “the market … has been found to be good.”⁵¹

Three years after its establishment, O. L. Williams Top and Panel expanded to become Williams Furniture Corporation, a full-scale furniture operation with a capital stock of $200,000 and total assets of $340,000. A new plant was built, “the realization of the dream of a large number of our forward looking citizens who have been agitating this subject for a number of years. … [T]he determination to erect this new plant demonstrates the faith of our own citizenship in the future of our city.”⁵² Williams Furniture, with eighty stockholders, became South Carolina’s only large furniture manufacturer (see fig. 3.3). Meanwhile, the veneer business O. L. Williams founded in 1919 continued under his sole ownership, producing wooden garment hangers for wardrobe trunks as well as veneers.⁵³

By the mid-1930s Williams Furniture employed 400 with a weekly payroll of $5,000.⁵⁴ Manufacturing seventy-five wooden bedroom suites (“suits”) from local sweetgum, poplar, water oak, and soft maple daily, the company’s lumber (except walnut) came from within a 100-mile radius. With a permanent showroom in Chicago, early on Williams Furniture did Page 79 →no advertising, selling directly to large department stores and mail order houses including Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. The company even shipped twenty carloads annually to Grand Rapids, Michigan, “the very heart of the furniture manufacturing district” and the home of Marie Kirkpatrick, the firm’s first furniture designer (and one of the few women in the industry nationally). Kirkpatrick’s designs for Williams included Cape Cod Maple, Pennsylvania Dutch Maple, Chinese Chippendale, Modern Classic, Art Moderne, and Borax. Specializing in mid-priced solid wood furniture with annual sales of $750,000, Williams soon ranked sixth or seventh in furniture sales in the South.⁵⁵

As impressive as Williams Furniture was, successfully recruiting barrel maker Brooklyn Cooperage Company (BCC) and its sister lumber company Page 80 →Galloway-Pease (GP) to Sumter was the board of trade’s most notable economic development coup. BCC and GP, wholly owned subsidiaries of American Sugar Refining Company (producers of Domino and Franklin sugar), announced the relocation of their stave and heading plant from Poplar Bluff, MO to Sumter in 1927, having been wooed by the city’s board of trade for four years.⁵⁶ Critical for the transport of sugar to retail grocers, BCC’s barrels were constructed with staves, narrow wooden strips that form the sides, and heads, flat, circular ends, the parts the new factory would produce.

Headquartered in New York City with timber operations in the Adirondacks, the Ozarks, and the Poconos, BCC scouts came to South Carolina in 1920 seeking timber to replace their exhausted Pennsylvania land holdings and mills.⁵⁷ In search of 500 million feet of gum timber, BCC forester Victor C. Barringer, secured timber rights on 77,000 acres of SRCLC/Beidler-owned land along 65 miles of the Santee river (including the abandoned company town of Ferguson) in Sumter, Williamsburg, Orangeburg, and Clarendon counties.⁵⁸ This land, including sweetgum among other prime old growth hardwoods, provided BCC with 600-plus million board feet of timber, more than two-and-a-half times their holdings in any other single state and more than the combined totals of all their other holdings.⁵⁹ BCC’s timber rights in South Carolina and Louisiana totaled a billion-plus feet on 500 square miles served by 113 miles of railroad, enough to meet the firm’s international needs for decades to come, replacing operations in New York, Missouri, and Pennsylvania, where they had cut all the timber.⁶⁰ By 1920, BCC’s five plants produced nearly three million slack barrels and half a million tight barrels annually.⁶¹

Having acquired access to the desired timber, BCC built a mill in Georgetown, South Carolina, that began operations in 1921. Almost immediately, a second location for a stave and heading operation was scouted. Timber exhaustion near their Poplar Bluff, MO, operation was the immediate impetus for the development of Sumter’s purpose-built plant.⁶²

In their quest to locate the new stave and heading plant, BCC representatives visited towns across South Carolina, including Sumter as well as Manning, Summerton, Greeleyville, and St. Paul, in search of “a site for a plant to cut the timber in and around Santee swamp in the near future.”⁶³ Planning to employ “white labor largely,” the cooperage bluntly asserted that they could not get white men to work in a “malaria infested Page 81 →community” and asked the state health department to identify towns “free of malaria.” Unable to offer such assurances, officials worried that BCC money and wages—“a concern whose capital is said to be written in some six or seven figures”—might go elsewhere.⁶⁴

Beginning in 1923, the board of trade mounted a “quiet campaign” to interest the cooperage in Sumter “as the logical and most advantageous location for the mill.” Unrelenting in promoting Gamecock City as the best site despite BCC’s clear preference for a location closer to its timber holdings, boosters believed the firm “might be compelled to locate” in Sumter.⁶⁵ Still, despite its advantages, “matters of this kind are slow moving, and at best, in their present status, represent possibilities ONLY. No reasonable effort will be spared to convert them into realities.” The board of trade stayed in contact with BCC’s president.⁶⁶

Finally, in July 1927, the cooperage, “by long odds the largest and most important industrial enterprise” ever to come to Sumter (furniture factory included), was swayed by the city’s irresistible package of economic inducements combined with rail and road access.⁶⁷ Davis D. Moise, a Sumter attorney and former state senator, presented a deed to seventy acres along the Atlantic Coast Line’s tracks southeast of downtown and adjacent to Turkey Creek for the new million dollar three-knife stave mill with a sawmill and head plant.⁶⁸ The title, “without any strings tied to it or any condition,” provided “substantial evidence of the interest of the citizens of Sumter in this enterprise and as a testimonial of their good will.”⁶⁹ Corporate citizens also contributed: Carolina Power and Light Company gave $1,000 even though the cooperage’s steam plant required no electricity.⁷⁰

By September 1927, with its Poplar Bluff, MO, plant closing, BCC general manager Collins B. Scott transferred to Sumter. Will Walker, an “engineer of exceptional ability,” prepared the new plant to take over manufacturing of staves and heads, the same goods Missouri produced.⁷¹ “[G]ratified by the cordial reception and the fair treatment,” BCC recognized that South Carolina’s abundant timber would allow the mill’s tenure to be long; those relocating would be “citizens and not transient sojourners.”⁷² BCC’s Sumter plant (the building of which Collins Scott oversaw) was the largest and most modern stave and heading mill in the United States and probably the world.⁷³ While anchored by cutting-edge technology, equipment from SRCLC in Ferguson and recently closed BCC plants was also reused.⁷⁴ Anticipating a workforce of more than 1,000 between the woods and the mills and an annual payroll of $800,000, the Sumter plant alone was expected to employ 350, including 50 “trained men”—superintendents, foremen and expert stave mill operatives—recruited from the company’s other plants, Page 82 →mostly Poplar Bluff.⁷⁵ BCC also hired a large local workforce, presumably majority African American, for its lumber camps.⁷⁶

The seventy-acre BCC Sumter plant housed many purpose-built structures beginning with an office building, sidetracks, and a machine shop that featured tracks to allow heavy equipment through the building on flat rail cars. These were followed by two big sheds and dry kilns to convert cypress, gum, and hickory into sugar barrel heads and staves. Designed to produce 150,000 staves and 8,000 pairs of barrel headings daily for national shipment, the “largest cooperage concern in the world” opened in the summer of 1928.⁷⁷

Sumter’s similarities to Poplar Bluff were many. When Dee Fann, BCC Sumter’s woods boss, featured photos of Santee timber in a photography show in Poplar Bluff, observers marveled at the likeness between the two locations. The South Carolina photos reminded viewers “very much of the Butler County (MO) forest lands of 30 years ago. The timber is of much the same type, the topography of the country is similar, and the trees are about the same size and equally as dense.” According to Fann, ash, elm, sweetgum, black gum, all varieties of oak, hickory, and even holly trees large enough to log grew in quantities enough to last thirty years or more. And, like the Ozarks, BCC’s timberlands in the Santee River valley flooded, too, “sometimes reaching a depth of fifteen feet in the swamps.”⁷⁸

As a sister firm to the cooperage, Chicago-based Southern hardwood lumber company Galloway-Pease (GP) shared with BCC “logging rights for certain kinds of hardwood on an immense acreage” (the same 77,000 acres of SRCLC/Beidler land in the Santee River valley), closed its Poplar Bluff, MO mill, and co-located on the Sumter site. With a workforce of seventy-five to one hundred mostly local hires with some skilled managers and experienced hands from Missouri and an annual payroll around $100,000, GP built a $150,000 band mill plant to cut 40,000–75,000 feet of hardwood lumber each day, a very high level of production.⁷⁹ Constructed with massive 14 by 14-inch timbers supporting its structure, Sumter observers found it “hard to imagine a more substantially built mill,” advising “a visit to this place is well worth the time required.” BCC and GP plants, both connected to the Atlantic Coast railroad via new spur lines, were visible to travelers on the Manning Highway.⁸⁰

Like SRCLC before them, BCC and GP laid railroad tracks into the great Santee Swamp with spurs into logging areas.⁸¹ Connecting with the Atlantic Page 83 →Coast Line at Greeleyville and near Rimini and the Northwestern railroad at St. Paul, logs were then sent to Sumter.⁸² In a symbiotic arrangement designed to eliminate waste, the cooperage handled lower grade logs (including lots of twisty red gum) for barrel staves, sawdust from the saw and cooperage mills for fuel, and the slabs, listings, and goosenecks for chemical, acid, or pulpwood, while GP sold the more valuable furniture stock including poplar and cypress, as well as some pine. This innovative partnership, a kind of lumber ecosystem, begun in Missouri and transferred to South Carolina, wasted less than 12 percent of lumber, half the industry standard.⁸³

The arrival of new plants along Sumter’s Turkey Creek necessitated additional housing. For cooperage and GP workers, “a number of responsible citizens … obligated [themselves] to build 75 white tenant dwellings and 110 negro tenant dwellings.”⁸⁴ New houses in the city’s southeastern area made “quite a thriving community … where there was formerly only scattered houses and bare fields.”⁸⁵ When BCC Sumter opened in 1928, at least sixty-seven Missouri employees had transferred, a community further enlarged by transplanted GP workers.⁸⁶ The newly built and appropriately named Missouri Street, walking distance from the new plants, was a residential enclave where city leaders hoped new arrivals would find “life pleasant and profitable in Sumter” and “work with the older inhabitants in the building up and bettering of the city.”⁸⁷ As Sumter industrialized, the creation of hundreds of new woodworking jobs for men provided “opportunities for knitting mills, shirt factories, and other lines,” including a zipper factory, for the “abundant supply” of women workers.⁸⁸

Sumter and nearby communities embraced the newcomers.⁸⁹ Summerton, about twenty miles south, welcomed “a small colony of people from Missouri,” providing a larger school bus to transport the children of cooperage employees living at Log’s Port lumber camp.⁹⁰ City National Bank elected BCC manager Collins Scott to its board of directors in 1929, a year before he was named president of the cooperage in New York City and head of Great Western Land Company, owners of BCC and GP land in Missouri.⁹¹ Peter Handte, who transferred from his position as assistant general manager at Poplar Bluff to Sumter in 1928, then became cooperage manager, a position he held for twenty years.⁹² So successful was the Sumter board of trade in bolstering wood products manufacturing that by 1929, wood working was the city’s chief industry, balancing agriculture. In Page 84 →addition to welcoming BCC, GP, an expanded Williams plant, and the new Korn Industries, the city was also home to pine and hardwood sawmills and lumber yards, planing mills, veneer plants, top and panel plants, and a wooden coat hanger factory. In addition, a large novelty woodworking plant opened, and another new furniture factory was under construction. Nu-Idea Desk Company, a manufacturer of school desks and supplies, was building a modern plant. Like BCC, GP, and Williams Furniture, several of these operations acquired timberlands and began logging operations.⁹³ Sumter’s concentration and range of wood products along with rail and truck connections allowed furniture to be manufactured more cheaply and unnecessary freight costs to be avoided.⁹⁴

As nearby rural communities suffered, Sumter’s furniture factories and woodworking plants weathered the first years of the Great Depression intact.⁹⁵ Meanwhile, the lingering effects of the collapse of agriculture—especially cotton—fueled a continuing and deeply political effort to expedite the Santee-Cooper project, a major New Deal hydroelectric initiative that would engulf 170,000 acres, more than a third (61,000 acres) of which consisted of SRCLC/Beidler/BCC land that spanned four counties in the Santee Basin and fed some of Sumter’s wood products industries.⁹⁶

St. John’s Parish (Berkeley/Orangeburg counties), where Huguenot planters and enslaved people had toiled, was Santee-Cooper’s center.⁹⁷ From St. John’s “much of the early history of South Carolina was written” through the production of rice, indigo, and cotton that made Charleston a great center of trade and commerce. Home to an antebellum canal that connected the Santee and Cooper Rivers for navigation and trade before its mid-nineteenth century eclipse by the railroad, by the early twentieth century cotton, corn, sweet potatoes, and livestock were farmed there, while companies like SRCLC and later BCC and GP cut old growth hardwood. In the 1930s, its homes and plantations housed 2,500 to 3,000 individuals, about 80 percent of whom were African American.⁹⁸

In April 1934, South Carolina created a Public Service Authority (“Authority”) to revitalize industrial growth “as a substitute for a failing agriculture” and to employ state residents. Controversial from the start “mainly because the dividing line between fact and fancy” was “obscured by a haze of unyielding controversy,” opponents included landowners whose property would be drowned, conservationists, historic preservationists, and even “levelheaded businessmen.” Few other projects had “so Page 85 →disturbed the conservation equilibrium [or] generated so much confusion in the conservation mind.” Two questions fueled the controversy: was it needed and was it possible? Arguing that it was an “enormous waste of money and resources,” doubters wondered if an earth dam of “tremendous proportions” could back up the waters of the Santee River. “[A]n amazing number of people” argued it would not. The chief doubt was whether the limestone stratum under the Santee basin could support an eight-mile-long earth dam. The engineering and technology concerns caused many (including most local white landowners) to doubt its viability. Knowing their own properties were scheduled for flooding, plantation owners were “thoroughly convinced” that the project would not reach fruition. The region’s adaptability to industrial development and the need for hydro-electric power were also questioned.⁹⁹

Internal navigation and hydroelectric power had been contemplated for decades. Because private utilities in South Carolina were slow to extend electrical lines into rural areas (though SRCLC had electrified the town of Ferguson before 1900), only 3 percent of the state’s farms had electricity by 1929. As the Depression deepened, support for government intervention and control over rural electrification increased. Many believed it was the “only way to escape the debilitating inefficiency of the state’s agricultural sector.” Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1932 election provided federal support to stimulate industrial growth, economic prosperity, and regional reform. Designed to divert the “voluminous Santee River watershed into the smaller Cooper River to generate inexpensive electricity and revive Charleston’s economy by facilitating inland shipping,” Santee-Cooper aligned with Roosevelt’s vision of “maximizing the utilitarian potential of natural resources.”¹⁰⁰

While the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was Roosevelt’s first Southern attempt to combine flood control, hydroelectric power, and soil conservation, South Carolina’s supporters hoped that federal funding would also provide rural economic development. In 1935, a state delegation lobbied the federal Public Works Administration for funding. Citing regional differences within the state—successful textile mills in the Upstate as compared to the Low Country’s foundering economy—supporters saw diverting the Santee River and the removal of stagnant water for flood and malaria control, along with the creation of an inland shipping lane from Charleston to Columbia, as differentiating their plan from those of rivals in Savannah, GA, and Wilmington, NC. Sometimes referred to as Little TVA, Santee-Cooper exceeded the scope of what regional stakeholders could achieve alone, requiring “the full power of the federal government’s Page 86 →financial resources, modern engineering and landscape management.” Proponents’ desire for “projects heavily freighted with labor, the public power policy of the New Deal and, on the state level, the backing of politically powerful groups overcame all objections.”¹⁰¹ Despite St. John’s rich and complicated history, project planners saw only swampland. Inconvenient truths of outdated technology were also overlooked: by the 1930s, “practical inland navigation on the Eastern seaboard had been dead a hundred years, and only a wishful romantic could seriously visualize painfully slow barge traffic in an age of high-speed highway and rail transportation. And … hydroelectric plants had become almost as passe as inland navigation.”¹⁰²

Between 1938 and 1942, 15,000 Santee-Cooper workers razed 170,000 acres, built two dams, two reservoirs, two canals, a hydroelectric plant, and the world’s largest single-lift lock (see fig. 3.4).¹⁰³ The creation of Lake Marion drowned the lumber town of Ferguson along with nearly 61,000 acres of SRCL/Beidler/BCC land. The flooding of Old St. John’s farmland and Santee Basin swamp doomed nine plantations (The Rocks, Walnut Grove, The Oaks, and Belvidere, among others) and many houses, schools, and churches where, prior to European and African settlement, the Kiawah, a branch of the indigenous Cusabo people, camped and hunted. Other cultural losses included the oldest highway in the Southeast, along with arrowheads, pottery, Indian burial mounds, and “the crystal clear springs among the moss-hung cedars and lofty pines at Eutaw … not only one of the loveliest spots in South Carolina, but … the [site of] the last battle of the Revolution in the Southern colonies.”¹⁰⁴

Santee-Cooper’s plans required flooding the productive hardwood forest where 204 million board feet of timber grew. SRCLC/Beidler/BCC acreage contained 134 million board feet, more than two-thirds of the timber in the project area.¹⁰⁵ In 1920, when the cooperage secured timber rights to 77,000 acres of SRCLC/Beidler land, it was estimated that this land then contained more than 600 million board feet.¹⁰⁶ While it is not possible to separate out lumber totals from SRCLC/Beidler/BCC land not sold to Santee-Cooper, we know that BCC/GP cut significant timber over nineteen years. What is not known is whether BCC and GP respected the plan of Sumter’s boosters to use “available resources slowly instead of cutting the lands and Page 87 →leaving them denuded.”¹⁰⁷ State Forester H. S. Smith argued that—as timber rights owner—the companies were “admittedly not interested in the future of the land” and lacked “regard for future timber supplies” by logging virgin hardwoods and cypress without forestry practices in force. Smith contended that removing 170,000 acres from timber production would not affect forestry “if we mean by forestry the best utilization of wild lands from the standpoint of timber production.”¹⁰⁸

The loss of timberlands and its probable ill effects on Sumter’s wood product industries did not go unnoticed. In December 1939, the Charleston News and Courier published short, targeted articles inviting key federal officials to visit Sumter’s furniture factories to better understand the power project’s damaging potential. The articles highlighted the city’s “great furniture making industry” long supported by electric power “purchased for all purposes in that town from a private corporation” even as Sumter was “in the immediate territory to be supplied with the project’s subsidized power.” That furniture-making existed there “on account of the supply Page 88 →of timber in the neighborhood and that the Santee-Cooper construction menaces in some degree that supply” would be evident. That Williams Furniture by 1939 employed 835 men while “the furniture industry of the town employs a number of persons comparable with the whole number now at work on the Santee-Cooper project” was also pointed out. Unlike the taxpayer-funded wages of the dam project, these were private employers paying wages “out of private pockets” to permanent employees.¹⁰⁹ Wyndham Manning, a Sumter state legislator, was concerned that Santee-Cooper was destroying the Low Country’s timber industry.¹¹⁰

Politics along with the bifurcation of land and timber ownership vastly complicated Santee-Cooper’s land acquisition. Following the 1938 passage of South Carolina’s eminent domain act, Elizabeth L. Beidler and Francis Beidler II (children of SRCLC founder Francis Beidler) knew their land would be condemned. With the contentious and protracted land sale still incomplete, Beidler attorneys allowed dam construction to begin. Having set aside $1 million to purchase Beidler land, the Authority first offered only $400,000.¹¹¹ Despite three appeals referees (one chosen by the lumber company, one by the Authority, and the third by mutual agreement) valuing the land at $800,050, the Beidlers ultimately received only $650,000, more than a third less than what had been budgeted by the State.¹¹² This painful episode did not end Beidler family ownership of old growth South Carolina hardwood forest, but it did affect their attitude to federal land acquisition, which in time would form a major hurdle for those wishing to establish a national park using family land along the Congaree River.¹¹³

Meanwhile, in October 1939 Santee-Cooper paid BCC $1.1 million for timber rights, a logging railroad, and 104 million board feet of the “finest type of virgin hardwood timber on the eastern seaboard.” BCC retained 30 million board feet for its own use and released all damage claims.¹¹⁴ With competitive bidding “cast aside,” “closed door trades entered into,” and the highest bid “rejected and given no consideration,” in March 1940, JLM Irby, Santee-Cooper’s former director of land acquisition, claimed the cooperage’s payout was more than 40 percent above the value of its timber. Charging that “incompetence, mismanagement and waste of public funds” was causing “a scandal and stench,” Irby sought a legislative inquiry.¹¹⁵

Still, Santee-Cooper’s construction continued. Whether hardwood forest and second growth pine could be salvaged before the inundation was uncertain.¹¹⁶ Delays in land acquisition, especially those involving Beidler/SRCLC/BCC, led observers to wonder if it was possible to cut and remove the timber before the water began backing up from the Santee dam early Page 89 →in 1941.¹¹⁷ In truth, there was simply too much for the cooperage or any single lumber company to cut. When the Authority’s plan to sell 104 million board feet of BCC/GP hardwood timber solely to companies operating “contiguous to the Santee-Cooper dam project” became untenable, lumber manufacturers from “all over the country” were invited to bid on logging and manufacture as well as sale on the stump of “the finest stand of virgin timber in the Southeast,” featuring cypress, sweetgum, ash, tupelo gum, oak, and maple located largely in Clarendon County. Railroads (including the BCC’s) transported the timber.¹¹⁸ We know that Williams Furniture bought some of this lumber for use at their Sumter factory.

For Brooklyn Cooperage, Santee-Cooper’s land clearance was decidedly mixed. Consumer preferences for sugar had already begun shifting from bulk to smaller, individual paper packages, reducing the need for wooden barrels. Still, the purchase of their timber rights did not immediately end the Sumter cooperage’s work. Only in 1945, after American Sugar replaced barrels with cartons and small paper bags, did BCC’s Sumter stave and heading operations end. Its sawmill operated until Santee-Cooper logs were exhausted. In 1949, BCC abandoned all barrel manufacturing nationally, selling the Sumter plant and its remaining timber rights to New York’s Esdorn Lumber Company for a profit of $462,450.¹¹⁹

For Sumter’s furniture industry, the best years were still to come. Williams Furniture grew steadily in the 1940s and 1950s, expanding into a national concern that advertised directly to retail consumers, with fifty or more salesmen traversing the country. Under Julian Buxton’s leadership, Williams itself acquired extensive timberland of more than 175,000 acres.¹²⁰ Corporate customers included Holiday Inn, Macy’s, the May Company, Sears Roebuck (for whom exclusive furniture groupings were designed and manufactured), and dozens of other regional and national retailers. In 1967, Georgia-Pacific bought the Williams factory and its timberlands, interested far more in the latter than the former (see fig. 3.5). In 1983, Georgia-Pacific sold Williams Furniture to Webb Turner who quickly sold it (at a great loss and nearly dead) to North Carolina’s VaughnBassett Furniture empire in partnership with local investors. VB Williams Furniture in Sumter breathed its last breath in 2004.¹²¹ Korn Industries’ Sumter Cabinet Company, a producer of high-end bedroom furniture, also continued into the twenty-first century when it was sold to Chromcraft Revington.¹²²

Page 90 →

The rise of the wood products industry in Sumter in the period between the World Wars was not inevitable. Rather, it resulted from innovative leadership, path-breaking, community-supported economic incentives and development, and the oft-ignored legacy of big lumber enterprises of the late nineteenth century. Fuller and more nuanced understanding not only of Sumter’s ambition for its economic and industrial reinvention, but of the history of economic development writ large is a topic worthy of deeper inquiry. Its ties to contemporary economic development efforts like the recent recruitments of BMW, Volvo, and Scout Motors EV to South Carolina need to be better recognized. In addition, the environmental impact of these initiatives along with large-scale government projects like Santee-Cooper are ripe for fresh research.

1. 1. Page 91 →For a new more cynical interpretation of the role of railroads in the South’s postbellum economic development, see R. Scott Huffard, Jr., Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
2. 2. Annie King Gregorie, History of Sumter County, South Carolina (Library Board of Sumter County, 1954), 488; https://www.state.sc.us.
3. 3. The new form of government was initiated in 1912. Annie King Gregorie, History of Sumter County, South Carolina (Library Board of Sumter County, 1954), 402–7, 478, 481.
4. 4. Board of Trade News,” R. B. Belser, Sumter (SC) Daily Item, June 24, 1924, 4.
5. 5. “Back up the Board of Trade,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), October 4, 1924, 2. Value calculated on January 1, 2023: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/.
6. 6. “Manufacturing Must Come, Strong Plea Made for Remainder of Money Needed to Insure Establishment of Furniture Factory,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, October 17, 1924, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), October 22, 1924, 8.
7. 7. “Sumter’s New Industries,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), October 8, 1927, 2.
8. 8. “A Live Board of Trade Becomes Reality for Sumter,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), February 10, 1923, 3. At about the same time, Hattiesburg, MS, another lumber center, also struggled. Unlike Sumter, its chamber of commerce’s work appeared “both desperate and dull.” Like Sumter, they sold municipal bonds to finance a new downtown hotel. See William Sturkey, Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 105–6, 110–14.
9. 9. F. J. Knight and J. J Riley, “Twelve Large Plants Swell Payrolls: Sumter is now recognized as one of the South’s leading hardwood centers–form important part of city’s assets today.” Manufacturers Record, reprinted in The State (Columbia, SC), December 19, 1930, part V, 13. For information on the recruitment of textile mills, see David L. Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina 1880–1920 (Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 13, 33–34.
10. 10. “Board of Trade News,” R. B. Belser, Sumter (SC) Daily Item, June 24, 1924, 4.
11. 11. Knight and Riley, “Twelve Large Plants Swell Payrolls,” 13.
12. 12. Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), November 5, 1927, 4; Poplar Bluff (MO) Republican, July 13, 1930, 1.
13. 13. Knight and Riley, “Twelve Large Plants Swell Payrolls,” 13. By 1950, according to Annie King Gregorie, Sumter County’s population of almost 60,000 was more than 99 percent native born. History of Sumter County, South Carolina (Library Board of Sumter County, 1954), 484.
14. 14. John Mitchell, “Growth of Sumter’s Big Lumber Industry Traced,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, May 22, 1953, 10. While a Map of Holdings of the SRCLC, LA Emerson, 1916 (revised 1927), shows the company owning 133,502.5 acres, numerous earlier reports estimated the company’s total land holdings (land owned outright as well Page 92 →as timber rights held) at between 170,000 and 200,000 acres. Collection of Francis Beidler Foundation, Chicago, IL.
15. 15. N. M. Goodyear and R. F. Hemingway, “Report of Lumber Operations of the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company, Ferguson, South Carolina,” in Lumber Reports: A Collection of Typewritten Reports by Penn State College Students on Lumber Camp Operations, 1907–1916, 5.
16. 16. A report from Purdue University Extension describes the problem: “with its interlocked grain, it tends to warp severely.” Still, “sweetgum in one form or another has been used for a large variety of applications. Old-growth red gum was prized and used for furniture, electronic cabinetry, millwork, doors, and paneling where a decorative effect was desired. Before the advent of reconstituted wood products, the wood was frequently used as core stock, and the flat surfaces were veneered. Any profile and turnings were made from solid lumber. The entire assembly could then be stained to look like a number of more expensive woods. The wood is easily rotary cut into veneer and used in baskets and plywood core. Frame stock, pallets, boxes, crates, railroad ties, and pulp are all uses for lower grade stock.” https://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/fnr/fnr-300-w.pdf.
17. 17. Alfred K. Chittenden, “The Red Gum,” in US Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Forestry (Forest Service), Bulletin No. 58, rev. ed. (US Government Printing Office, 1906), 7–8. The Himmelberger-Harrison Lumber Company’s land in New Madrid County, Missouri, was the other case studied. This land was similar in character to extensive tracts of bottomland controlled by Brooklyn Cooperage Company in nearby Butler County, MO, and Clay County, AR. The latter lands were largely logged out by 1927, at which point Brooklyn Cooperage moved its manufacturing operation (hardwood barrel staves and heading) from Poplar Bluff, MO, to Sumter, SC. files.usgwarchives.net/mo/butler/history/butlerco.txt. See discussion in main text below.
18. 18. Santee River Cypress Lumber Company Price List, November 1, 1909, Lawrence B. Romaine Trade Catalog Collection, University of California Santa Barbara, 15–16.
19. 19. Howard A. Hanlon, The Bull-Hunchers: A Saga of the Three and a Half Centuries of Harvesting the Forest Crops of the Tidewater Low Country (McClain Printing Co, 1970), 266–67.
20. 20. “Veneer Plant of O. L. Williams & Company an Asset to Sumter,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, April 27, 1923, 42.
21. 21. “Sumter Concern Chartered. The O. L. Williams Veneer Co. has Capital of $50,000,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), May 12, 1923, 6; and “Notice,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, April 23, 1923, 4.
22. 22. “Local Industry is Described for Kiwanians,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, February 5, 1955, 1.
23. 23. “Logs to Finished Furniture: Korn Industries Supplies All,” Sumter Daily Item, September 20, 1955, 10.
24. 24. Steven Anderson, Oral History, Bartow S. Shaw Factory Consultant (Forest History Society, 2017), 59, https://foresthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/BoShaw_interview.pdf.
25. 25. Page 93 →“Back up the Board of Trade,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), October 4, 1924, 2; and “A Live Board of Trade Becomes Reality for Sumter,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), February 10, 1923, 3.
26. 26. “A Live Board of Trade Becomes Reality for Sumter,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), February 10, 1923, 3.
27. 27. “Board of Trade News,” R. B. Belser, Sumter (SC) Daily Item, June 24, 1924, 4; and “A Live Board of Trade Becomes Reality for Sumter,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), February 10, 1923, 3.
28. 28. “Plan to Establish Furniture Factory Under Consideration. Board of Trade Takes Offer of Van Ness and Co. Under Advisement,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, August 7, 1924, 1. In 1923, Frank W. Van Ness and Associates Industrial Engineers out of New York and Charlotte, NC, placed paid advertisements eighty-eight times in the Wall Street Journal touting that that they provided, “Increased profits through the installation of improved methods in management.” See for example, December 15, 1923, 4.
29. 29. “Plan to Establish Furniture Factory Under Consideration. Board of Trade Takes Offer of Van Ness and Co. Under Advisement,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, August 7, 1924, 1; and “Bankers to Consider the Furniture Factory,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, August 8, 1924, 1; and “The Furniture Factory Proposition,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, August 12, 1924, 2.
30. 30. “Bankers to Consider the Furniture Factory,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, August 8, 1924, 1; and “The Furniture Factory Proposition,” Sumter Daily Item, August 12, 1924, 2.
31. 31. “Board of Trade News,” R. B. Belser, Sumter (SC) Daily Item, June 24, 1924, 4; and “Plan to Establish Furniture Factory Under Consideration. Board of Trade Takes Offer of Van Ness and Co. Under Advisement,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, August 7, 1924, 1.
32. 32. “Manufacturing Must Come, Strong Plea Made for Remainder of Money Needed to Insure Establishment of Furniture Factory,”Sumter (SC) Daily Item, October 17, 1924, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), October 22, 1924, 8; and “A Great Deal is at Stake, The Development of a New Industry and the Future Prosperity of Sumter Depends Upon the Success of Plan to Organize Furniture Factory,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, October 9, 1924, 1; and Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), October 11, 1924, 3.
33. 33. “A Great Deal is at Stake, the Development of a New Industry and the Future Prosperity Depends Upon the Success of Plan to Organize Furniture Factory,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, October 9, 1924, 1; also appearing in Wachman and Southron (Sumter, SC), October 11, 1924, 3; and “The Furniture Industry. Why the Board of Trade Endorses the Movement to Establish a Factory in Sumter,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, September 25, 1924, 5; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), September 27, 1924, 2.
34. 34. “Community Discusses Furniture. Factory to Use Hard Wood of This Section in Manufacture of Furniture Now Seems Reality for Sumter,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, July 27, 1923, 1.
35. 35. “Community Discusses Furniture. Factory to Use Hard Wood of This Section in Manufacture of Furniture Now Seems Reality for Sumter,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, Page 94 →July 27, 1923, 1; and “A Story that Bult a Town,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, July 24, 1925, 4.
36. 36. “A Call to the Community. Mr. Belser Urges Development of our Manufacturing Industry,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, August 29, 1924, 3; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), September 3, 1924, 4.
37. 37. “The Furniture Industry. Why the Board of Trade Endorses the Movement to Establish a Factory in Sumter,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, September 25, 1924, 5; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), September 27, 1924, 2.
38. 38. “Manufacturing Must Come,” Strong Plea Made for Remainder of Money Needed to Insure Establishment of Furniture Factory,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, October 17, 1924, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), October 22, 1924, 8.
39. 39. “Plan to Establish Furniture Factory Under Consideration. Board of Trade Takes Offer of Van Ness and Co. Under Advisement,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, August 7, 1924, 1.
40. 40. “Manufacturing Must Come, Strong Plea Made for Remainder of Money Needed to Insure Establishment of Furniture Factory,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, October 17, 1924, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), October 22, 1924, 8; “The Furniture Industry. Why the Board of Trade Endorses the Movement to Establish a Factory in Sumter,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, September 25, 1924, 5; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), September 27, 1924, 2.
41. 41. “The Furniture Factory Proposition,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, August 12, 1924, 2. O’Donnell engaged in many of Sumter’s economic and civic ventures. At his death in 1937 he left $400,000 to Tuomey Hospital (about $8 million today).
42. 42. “More About the Furniture Factory. An Interview with Mr. C.T. Mason Regarding Furniture Factory,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), August 23, 1924, 1.; and Annie King Gregorie, History of Sumter County, South Carolina (Library Board of Sumter County, 1954), 473–4.
43. 43. Sumter County then had 500 people engaged in manufacturing with an annual output of $2.5 million as compared to 8- to 10,000 farm workers producing only $6 to $7 million annually. “A Great Deal is at Stake, The Development of a New Industry and the Future Prosperity of Sumter Depends Upon the Success of Plan to Organize Furniture Factory,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, October 9, 1924, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), October 11, 1924, 3.
44. 44. While $80,000 had been subscribed, $25,000 was conditioned on an Arkansas man being named plant manager. A separate $10,000 subscription came from a North Carolinian and hinged on his becoming the plant supervisor. It appears that neither condition was met. “Community Discusses Furniture. Factory to Use Hard Wood of This Section in Manufacture of Furniture Now Seems Reality for Sumter,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, July 27, 1923, 1; and “Plan to Establish Furniture Factory Under Consideration. Board of Trade Takes Offer of Van Ness and Co. Under Advisement,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, August 7, 1924, 1.
45. 45. “Manufacturing Must Come, Strong Plea Made for Remainder of Money Needed to Insure Establishment of Furniture Factory,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, October 17, 1924, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), October 22, 1924, 8.
46. 46. Page 95 →“Committees at Work Securing Stock for Furniture Factory,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, October 2, 1924, 5.
47. 47. “Board of Trade Notes. Furniture Factory Charter Application Authorized in the Name of O. L. Williams Top and Panel Company,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, July 24, 1925, 1.
48. 48. “Notice,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, December 12, 1924, 3; and “Furniture Factory Company Organized,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), December 6, 1924, 1.
49. 49. The original factory manager was probably a Frank A. Schinn, who was also secretary. His tenure in Sumter appears to have been very brief as he is not easily found in census or other records. “Furniture Factory Company Organized,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), December 6, 1924, 1.
50. 50. “Notice,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, July 25, 1925, 2; “Williams Veneer Company Began Operations in 1919,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, November 29, 1944, 5; and Georgia-Pacific Corporation, “Brief History and Comments on the Development of Williams Furniture,” January 30, 1979, Williams Furniture Company Collection, Sumter County Museum, 105A, 105–4.
51. 51. “Board of Trade Notes. Furniture Factory Charter Application Authorized in the Name of O. L. Williams Top and Panel Company,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, July 24, 1925, 1. It is interesting to note that Georgia-Pacific reported that the Williams Furniture Plant was always located on Hauser Street. “Brief History and Comments on the Development of Williams Furniture,” January 30, 1979, Williams Furniture Company Collection, Sumter County Museum, 105A, 105–4.
52. 52. “Furniture Factory Now Assured. O. L. Williams Top and Panel Co. to Extend Its Manufacturing Operations,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, September 24, 1928, 4.
53. 53. Chlotilde R. Martin, “Sumter Furniture Factory Can Compete with Best: Suites of Quaint, Antique and Modern Designs Are Made of Woods From South Carolina’s Own Forests,” The State (Columbia, SC), March 17, 1935, 10-A.
54. 54. A massive fire in March 1936 caused Williams Furniture to relocate to a larger purpose-built factory building on Fulton Street. Portia Myers, “People, Places & Things,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, December 7, 1985, 4.
55. 55. Martin, “Sumter Furniture Factory Can Compete with Best.” Just before World War II, Williams Furniture began land and timber acquisitions. After O. L. Williams’s death in 1952, Julian Buxton became president. In 1967, the Williams Corporation was sold to Georgia-Pacific. At that point the firm had about 1,500 Sumter employees, 200 more in Alcolu, SC, and another 2,000 across the state. In 1983, Georgia-Pacific sold Williams Furniture to Wall Streeter Webb Turner who sold it again four years later to Vaughn-Bassett Furniture Company. For more information on the sales of Williams Furniture, its resurrection, and ultimate death, see Beth Macy, Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local—and Helped Save an American Town (Little, Brown and Company, 2014), 184–92. In 1938, Williams also founded Southern Coatings and Chemical Company, which came to control Dimension Timber, Kingstree Lumber and Manufacturing, Palmetto Forest Products, Russellville Lumber Company, and Tupelo Dimension Manufacturing Company.
56. 56. Page 96 →BCC began in Brooklyn, NY in 1891 when nearly all granulated sugar was packed in barrels and hundred-pound bags. It manufactured barrels for a variety of purposes and served all of American Sugar’s refineries as well as most of the refineries then operating in New York harbor. In addition to sugar barrels, BCC made slack (flexible) barrels for flour, fruit, fish, meat, vegetables, lime and other chemicals; tight barrels for syrup, oil, meat, alcohol and extracts; and shooks or boxes for export. BCC quickly became one of the largest cooperages in the world. Though all of the cooperage’s capital stock was owned by the sugar company, BCC operated separately. In addition to the BCC’s purchase of timber rights on 77,000 acres of SRCLC land, the firm also purchased in fee 1,870 acres elsewhere in the state. “Notice,” Manning (SC) Times, April 20, 1921, 12; County Record (Kingstree, SC), August 11, 1923; “Large Plant to Sumter: Million Dollar Stave Mill Chooses to Locate in Gamecock City,” Camden (SC) Chronicle, August 5, 1927, 1; and American Sugar Refining Company, 1927 Annual Report (Brooklyn Historical Society), 13.
57. 57. “Notice,” Manning (SC) Times, April 20, 1921, 12; “Huge Cooperage Plant to Begin Work Soon,” The State (Columbia, SC), January 4, 1928, 1; American Sugar Refining Company, 1920 Annual Report (Brooklyn Historical), 12; and Charlotte (NC) Observer, February 20, 1922, 9; and “Georgetown Plant Brooklyn Cooperage Destroyed by Fire,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), December 7, 1927, 5.
58. 58. American Sugar Refining Company, 1940 Annual Report (Brooklyn Historical), 13, 6–7; “Notice,” Manning (SC) Times, April 20, 1921, 12; “Local News,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), June 8, 1927, 4; and “Sumter to Get Big Stave Mill, Largest in Country Will be Erected,” The State (Columbia, SC), July 129, 927, 1; and “Brooklyn Cooperage Company Will Locate Here … Site for Sumter’s Largest Industry Tendered by Committee of Citizens … Work on Plant Begins at Once,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, July 28, 1927, 1; “Large Plant to Sumter: Million Dollar Stave Mill Chooses to Locate in Gamecock City,” Camden (SC) Chronicle, August 5, 1927, 1; American Sugar Refining Company, 1927 Annual Report (Brooklyn Historical Society), 13.
59. 59. American Sugar Refining Company, 1920 Annual Report (Brooklyn Historical Society), 13; Annual Report for the 32nd Year, Ending December 31, 1922 (Brooklyn Historical Society), 12. In South Carolina, BCC’s holdings included both the timber rights on 77,000 acres on SRCLC/Beidler land and an additional 1,870 acres held in fee. The origin and location of the latter is not known.
60. 60. American Sugar Refining Company, 1920 Annual Report (Brooklyn Historical Society), 13; “Santee-Cooper Buys Million Dollars Timber: Huge Bond Issue on Project to be Sold to the Federal Government,” The State (Columbia, SC), October 10, 1939, 1.
61. 61. American Sugar Refining Company, 1920 Annual Report (Brooklyn Historical Society), 8.
62. 62. American Sugar Refining Company, 1927 Annual Report (Brooklyn Historical Society), 13.
63. 63. Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), June 8, 1927, 4; The State (Columbia, SC), July 29, 1927, 1; “Brooklyn Cooperage Company Will Locate in Sumter. Site for Sumter’s Largest Industry Tendered by Committee of Citizens … Work on Plant Begins at Once,”Sumter (SC) Daily Item (Sumter, SC), July 28, 1927, 1; also appearing in Page 97 →Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), July 30, 1927, 1; “Large Plant to Sumter: Million Dollar Stave Mill Chooses to Locate in Gamecock City,” Camden (SC) Chronicle, August 5, 1927, 1; American Sugar Refining Company, 1927 Annual Report (Brooklyn Historical Society), 13; and Sumter (SC) Daily Item, April 18, 1924, 1; April 19, 1924, 4; and The State (Columbia, SC), July 29, 1927, 1.
64. 64. The State (Columbia, SC), May 29, 1921, 5; “Huge Cooperage Plant to Begin Work Soon,” The State (Columbia, SC), January 4, 1928, 1. Company officials also reached out to the state’s secretary of commerce who touted the advantages of Conway, a small city far from the Santee River. Because it would have been “prohibitive to bring timber from that point,” a plant there was never considered. Horry Herald (Conway, SC), June 9, 1921, 1.
65. 65. Sumter (SC) Daily Item, April 18, 1924, 1; April 19, 1924, 4; The State (Columbia, SC), July 29, 1927, 1; “Brooklyn Cooperage Company Will Locate in Sumter. Site for Sumter’s Largest Industry Tendered by Committee of Citizens … Work on Plant Begins at Once,”Sumter (SC) Daily Item (Sumter, SC), July 28, 1927, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), July 30, 1927, 1. The board of trade’s efforts to recruit BCC were begun by Emmett I. Reardon. A Sumter native, Reardon served as secretary to a precursor board of trade and chamber of commerce from at least 1915 until he left for the Camden and Kershaw County Chamber of Commerce in 1923. Reardon had also served as Sumter’s health officer. Sumter (SC) Daily Item, April 14, 1923, 3; “A 1915 Tribute to Sumter’s Chamber of Commerce,” from a 1915 issue of The Daily Item reprinted in The Sumter Daily Item, November 29, 1944, 2.
66. 66. Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), December 1, 1926, 4.
67. 67. “Brooklyn Cooperage Company Will Locate in Sumter. Site for Sumter’s Largest Industry Tendered by Committee of Citizens … Work on Plant Begins at Once,”Sumter (SC) Daily Item, July 28, 1927, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), July 30, 1927, 1; Index-Journal (Greenwood, SC), July 29, 1927, 4; The State (Columbia, SC), July 29, 1927, 1.
68. 68. The State (Columbia, SC), July 29, 1927, 1; Index-Journal (Greenwood, SC) July 29, 1927, 4. Moise headed a group of citizens who successfully lobbied the county to widen and deepen Turkey Creek Canal from the city’s northern limits to Dingle’s Mill. The creek, which formed a natural drain for the entire eastern part of the city, provided strong industrial development possibilities for Carolina Power and Light as well as for BCC and GP. In January 1928, with plant construction underway, Turkey Creek’s drainage began. “Huge Cooperage Plant to Begin Work Soon,” The State (Columbia, SC), January 4, 1928, 1; Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), March 20, 1929, 4; May 5, 1928, 2.
69. 69. “Brooklyn Cooperage Company Will Locate in Sumter. Site for Sumter’s Largest Industry Tendered by Committee of Citizens … Work on Plant Begins at Once,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, July 28, 1927, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), July 30, 1927, 1.
70. 70. “A Liberal Contribution,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, August 15, 1927, 4; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), August 17, 1927, 3. The utility’s presence appealed to other prospective industries considering locating in Sumter. Its power supply and distribution system—from high voltage lines of the Wateree River plant Page 98 →of the Southern Power company and the Yadkin River plant of their own system—together with a Lake Murray power development fifty miles away, gave Sumter “double assurance of an unlimited and uninterrupted flow of power 24 hours a day.” Knight and Riley, “Twelve Large Plants Swell Payrolls,” 13.
71. 71. “Big Cooperage Mill Planned at Sumpter [sic], SC,” Poplar Bluff (MO) Republican, September 29, 1927, 2; “Huge Cooperage Plant to Begin Work Soon,” The State (Columbia, SC), January 4, 1928, 1; “Collins Scott to have charge of big factory,” Poplar Bluff (MO) Republican, January 20, 1927, 1. While the article references North Carolina, South Carolina was likely meant.
72. 72. “Brooklyn Cooperage Company Will Locate in Sumter. Site for Sumter’s Largest Industry Tendered by Committee of Citizens … Work on Plant Begins at Once,”Sumter Daily Item (Sumter, SC), July 28, 1927, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), July 30, 1927, 1.
73. 73. The State (Columbia, SC), July 29, 1927, 1; “Brooklyn Cooperage Company Will Locate in Sumter. Site for Sumter’s Largest Industry Tendered by Committee of Citizens … Work on Plant Begins at Once,”Sumter (SC) Daily Item, July 28, 1927, 1; also appearing in and Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), July 30, 1927, 1; and Camden (SC) Chronicle, August 5, 1927, 1.
74. 74. Camden (SC) Chronicle, August 5, 1927, 1; “Huge Cooperage Plant to Begin Work Soon,” The State (Columbia, SC), January 4, 1928, 1.
75. 75. The State (Columbia, SC), July 29, 1927, 1.
76. 76. Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), June 8, 1927, 4; and “Plant at Sumter … Employ[s] 325 Workers,” Index-Journal (Greenwood, SC), July 29, 1927, 4; “Brooklyn Cooperage Company Will Locate in Sumter,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), July 30, 1927, 1; and “Large Plant to Sumter,” Camden (SC) Chronicle, August 5, 1927, 1. To date, no BCC corporate records have been located but given the preponderance of African American lumber workers in the American South, a majority Black workforce in the lumber camps is likely. William P. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (University of Illinois Press, 2005).
77. 77. Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), September 3, 1927, 4; The State (Columbia, SC), July 29, 1927, 1; and “Huge Cooperage Plant to Begin Work Soon,”The State (Columbia, SC), January 4, 1928, 1.
78. 78. Poplar Bluff (MO) Republican, August 13, 1931, 7.
79. 79. Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), November 5, 1927, 1; “Galloway-Pease Mill to Leave … Moves to Sumter, SC,” Weekly Citizen Democrat (Poplar Bluff, MO), October 27, 1927, 5; “Galloway-Pease Plant is Closed,” Poplar Bluff (MO) Republican, November 17, 1927, 8; Dunklin County (MO)News, April 17, 1928, 2; “New Industry Goes to Sumter, Galloway-Pease Lumber Company,” The State (Columbia, SC), November 2, 1927, 2; and Weekly Citizen Democrat (Poplar Bluff, MO), November 17, 1927, 3; Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), May 5, 1928, 2. P. R. Pease, local manager, and A. J. Bauman, bookkeeper, relocated to Sumter.
80. 80. Greeleyville, Rimini, and St. Paul are communities on the north side of Lake Marion/Santee River. Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), May 5, 1928, 2; and July 28, 1928, 4.
81. 81. Page 99 →“Huge Cooperage Plant to Begin Work Soon,” The State (Columbia, SC), January 4, 1928, 1; Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), May 5, 1928, 2.
82. 82. “Brooklyn Cooperage Company Will Locate in Sumter. Site for Sumter’s Largest Industry Tendered by Committee of Citizens … Work on Plant Begins at Once,” Sumter Daily Item (Sumter, SC), 28 July 1927, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), July 30, 1927, 1.
83. 83. American Sugar Refining Company, “The American Sugar Family,” vol. 1, no. 1, 10 February 1920 (Brooklyn Historical), 8; The State (Columbia, SC) July 29, 1927, 1; “Brooklyn Cooperage Company Will Locate in Sumter. Site for Sumter’s Largest Industry Tendered by Committee of Citizens … Work on Plant Begins at Once,”Sumter (SC) Daily Item, July 28, 1927, 1; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), July 30, 1927, 1; “New Lumber Industries Plan to Start August 1st,”Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), May 5, 1928, 4; and Poplar Bluff (MO) Republican, July 27, 1933, 2.
84. 84. “Large Plant to Sumter: Million Dollar Stave Mill Chooses to Locate in Gamecock City,” Camden (SC) Chronicle, August 5, 1927, 1; “Is Sumter Standing Still? We Should Say Not!,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), August 13, 1927, 2.
85. 85. “Brooklyn Cooperage Running Full Time,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), May 25, 1929, 4.
86. 86. Poplar Bluff (MO) Republican, August 30, 1928, 2.
87. 87. “New Industries in Sumter,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), February 8, 1928, 2.
88. 88. Knight and Riley, “Twelve Large Plants Swell Payrolls,” 13. Roseknit Hosiery Company relocated from Rhode Island to Sumter around 1927 and employed mostly women.
89. 89. Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), June 23, 1928, 4.
90. 90. Index-Journal (Greenwood, SC), February 2, 1929, 6; “Negro Man Drowns,” The State (Columbia, SC), February 14, 1929, 4.
91. 91. Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), August 10, 1929, 6; Poplar Bluff (MO) Republican, July 27, 1933, 2.
92. 92. Scott died in 1933, the result of a botched appendectomy in New York City. “Scott Gets Promotion,” The State (Columbia, SC), May 29, 1930, part 2, 1; January 20, 1944, 7; and March 28, 1948, 8-F; Poplar Bluff (MO) Republican, June 5, 1930, 4; July 27, 1933, 2.
93. 93. John Mitchell, “Growth of Sumter’s Big Lumber Industry Traced,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, May 22, 1953, 10.
94. 94. “Furniture Factory Now Assured. O. L. Williams Top and Panel Co. to Extend Its Manufacturing Operations,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, September 24, 1928, 4; “Sumter Offers Every Advantage to Manufacturer, Farmer and Laborer. Woodworking Industry Shows Great Development During Last Few Years—Balanced Agriculture Backbone of Prosperity,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, January 28, 1929, 5.
95. 95. Sumter’s wood products producers experienced relatively full employment in the early years of the Depression: “Sumter Business Interests are Optimistic Over Prospects for 1929—City Banks in Fine Shape,” Columbia (SC) Record, January 7, 1929, 1; “Industrial Employment Situation in Sumter,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, Page 100 →November 6, 1930, 1; September 23, 1931, 6; “Board of Trade,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, March 22, 1932, 6.
96. 96. While the federal government was its “principal stockholder,” Santee-Cooper was never a federal project. Though several New Deal agencies supported it, the Forest Service and Biological Survey disapproved, as did Harold I. Ickes, secretary of the interior. Still, by the end of 1935, South Carolina senator, James Byrnes reached an agreement with Ickes and Harry Hopkins, commerce secretary, for loans. The Department of the Interior lent $5.5 million for building the dams while the Department of Commerce lent $4.5 million for the labor needed to clear the land. Although the project eventually received $48.2 million from both federal and state sources, these early commitments were key. Ultimately, nearly $15.5 million came from a direct grant from the Public Works Administration; $6 million came from the Works Project Administration as a direct grant for labor in land clearing; and almost $19 million resulted from bonds issued by the South Carolina Public Service Authority, some of which were purchased by the federal government. Erle Kauffman, “Conservation over the Dam: Is Conservation Struggling with a Concept in South Carolina? Or is the Santee-Cooper Project Merely Another Political Plum?,” American Forests, Part I of II, October 1939, 487–88; Part II of II, November 1939, 561; T. Robert Hart, “The Lowcountry Landscape: Politics, Preservation, and the Santee-Cooper Project,” Environmental History 18 (January 2013): 148.
97. 97. “Santee-Cooper Appeals Filed on Valuations,” The State (Columbia, SC), December 26, 1939, 1.
98. 98. Erle Kauffman, “Conservation over the Dam: Is Conservation Struggling with a Concept in South Carolina? Or is the Santee-Cooper Project Merely Another Political Plum?,” American Forests, Part I of II, October 1939, 488; “Conservation over the Dam: Can Timber, Wildlife and Man Prosper Together in the New Land Pattern Being Cut in Coastal South Carolina by the Santee-Cooper Project?,” Part II of II, November 1939, 546 and 561; T. Robert Hart, “The Lowcountry Landscape: Politics, Preservation, and the Santee-Cooper Project,” Environmental History 18 (January 2013): 133–35.
99. 99. A two-part series in the magazine American Forests in 1939 asked: “Is this $40 million Santee-Cooper hydro-electric and navigation project—the largest ever to be undertaken in the southern coastal region—nothing more than a giant political plum, as some conservationists … maintain? Or is it a conservation project, as its creating act states, for the “benefit of the people of South Carolina and for the improvement of their health and welfare and material prosperity?’” Reporter Erle Kauffman came to South Carolina to investigate. Sanctioned by the State, the Federal Power Commission, the New Deal’s PWA and WPA, “and even the Supreme Court of the United States,” by the time of Kauffman’s visit Santee-Cooper’s executives and technicians were on the job; 16,000 acres of land was secured; and one of the dams was under construction. Still, there was great skepticism: the project was too expensive, “nebulous in its program for industry,” and, generally, relied “entirely on hope.” Kauffman, American Forests, “Conservation over the Dam: Is Conservation Struggling with a Concept in South Carolina? Or is the Santee-Cooper Project Merely Another Political Plum?,” Part I of II, October 1939, Page 101 →487, 490, 510; and Henry Savage, Jr., River of the Carolinas: The Santee (NY: Rinehart & Co), 1956, 357.
100. 100. T. Robert Hart, “The Lowcountry Landscape,” 128, 129–30, 136.
101. 101. T. Robert Hart, “The Lowcountry Landscape,” 138, 149.
102. 102. Henry Savage, Jr., River of the Carolinas: The Santee (Rinehart & Co), 1956, 360.
103. 103. T. Robert Hart, “The Lowcountry Landscape,” 129, 151.
104. 104. Edward C. Gilmore, New York Times, “Bit of South is Doomed,” March 19, 1929, 12.
105. 105. SRCLC/Beidler had sold timber rights to BCC for 77,000 acres. Kauffman, American Forests, “Conservation over the Dam: Can Timber, Wildlife and Man Prosper Together in the New Land Pattern Being Cut in Coastal South Carolina by the Santee-Cooper Project?” Part II of II, November 1939, 546, 548–49.
106. 106. American Sugar Refining Company, 1920 Annual Report (Brooklyn Historical Society), 13.
107. 107. “The Furniture Industry. Why the Board of Trade Endorses the Movement to Establish a Factory in Sumter,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, September 25, 1924, 5; also appearing in Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), September 27, 1924, 2. About 16,000 acres of SRCLC/Beidler/BCCGP land near Camp Sylva (not far from Greeley-ville) were excluded from the sale to Santee-Cooper.
108. 108. “No Harm to Conservation: Santee-Cooper Project Will Not Interfere with South Carolina Forestry,” Southern Lumberman, November 15, 1939, 26.
109. 109. The federal officials included: Clark Foreman, director of the Public Works Administration, C. Russell Shetterly, the PWA’s assistant general counsel, Alan Johnstone, general counsel of the Federal Works Agency, and Fred Sevier. “Should Visit Sumter,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, December 1939 (reprinted in Sumter [SC]Daily Item, December 18, 1939, 8); “To Mr. Johnstone and Friends,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, December 12, 1939 (reprinted in Sumter [SC]Daily Item, December 19, 1939, 7).
110. 110. Lacy K. Ford, Jr. and Jared Bailey, Empowering Communities: How Electric Cooperatives Transformed Rural South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press), 2022, 19.
111. 111. Columbia (SC) Record, October 26, 1939; “Agreement Reached,” Southern Lumberman, November 15, 1939, 26; “Santee-Cooper Condemnation Hearings Here,” The State (Columbia, SC), November 1, 1939, 9.
112. 112. The State (Columbia, SC), “Santee-Cooper Appeals Filed on Valuations,” December 26, 1939, 1; Report, 1934–42, South Carolina Public Service Authority, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b3031073; The State (Columbia, SC), “Santee-Cooper Appeals Filed on Valuations,” December 26, 1939, 1. The three referees were: B. M. Edwards of Columbia for the authority; Sam H. Swint of Aiken for the lumber company; and Charles B. Elliot of Columbia, chosen by mutual consent.
113. 113. See Thomas M. Lekan’s discussion of the creation of Congaree National Park in chapter 7 of this volume.
114. 114. The BCC railroad extended from the Atlantic Coast Line railroad at Greeleyville about eighteen miles into the swamp and crossed the Authority’s Santee dam site, hauling construction materials and removing salvaged timber from the swamp. “Santee-Cooper Buys Million Dollars Timber: Huge Bond Issue on Project to Page 102 →be Sold to the Federal Government,” The State (Columbia, SC), October 10, 1939, 1; Southern Lumberman, November 15, 1939.
115. 115. The State (Columbia, SC), “JLM Irby, Fired by Santee-Cooper, Asks Inquiry,” March 7, 1940, 1.
116. 116. Also unknown was what the likely destruction of wildlife from the reduced flow of water below the Santee Dam would mean and how hundreds of landowners would be compensated for the losses of homes and property. Compensation to those who lost homes and smaller properties depended on race. While the Authority purchased white-owned plantations and other “old places,” smaller African American-owned land holdings received “a program of resettlement” that proposed transplanting “more or less intact whole communities, the ancient graveyards included, to greener fields, where new homes, new churches and new schools will be built, simulating as far as possible the environment of the old locations” in lieu of cash. Observers found the plan “far too fantastic for achievement.” In all, 901 households, the vast majority African American, were removed, upsetting schools, churches, and graveyards in long established communities. Erle Kauffman, American Forests, “Conservation over the Dam: Is Conservation Struggling with a Concept in South Carolina? Or is the Santee-Cooper Project Merely Another Political Plum?,” Part I of II, October 1939, 488; “Conservation over the Dam: Can Timber, Wildlife and Man Prosper Together in the New Land Pattern Being Cut in Coastal South Carolina by the Santee-Cooper Project?,” Part II of II, November 1939, 546, 561.
117. 117. Erle Kauffman, “Conservation over the Dam: Can Timber, Wildlife and Man Prosper Together in the New Land Pattern Being Cut in Coastal South Carolina by the Santee-Cooper Project?,” American Forests, Part II of II, November 1939, 549.
118. 118. Southern Lumberman, November 15, 1939; “Santee-Cooper Invites Bids on Hardwood Timber,” The State (Columbia, SC), November 18, 1939, 2.
119. 119. The State (Columbia, SC), March 27, 1937; “Rising Swamp Waters Hamper Sumter Loggers,” Columbia (SC) Record, April 8, 1936, 1; American Sugar Refining Company, 1940 Annual Report, 6–8; 1948 Annual Report (Brooklyn Historical Society), 7. The disposition of GP is a mystery as it disappears from newspaper accounts by 1937.
120. 120. Sumter (SC) Daily Item, “A Look Back at Williams Furniture,” July 24, 1986, 17. The New York Times reported that 157,000 acres were included in the sale of Williams Furniture to Georgia Pacific. New York Times, “Georgia-Pacific Maps Acquisition,” July 27, 1967, 55.
121. 121. L. Stanley Dubose, “Williams Furniture Corporation: A Brief Narrative Covering Sales and Marketing et al., at Sumter’s Largest Industry in the Distant Past,” (unpublished memoir, 2016), Williams Furniture Collection, Sumter County Museum; Beth Macy, Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local—and Helped Save an American Town (Little, Brown and Company), 2014.
122. 122. Author’s meeting with Drewry H. Penn, former manager, Sumter Cabinet Company, December 2021.