Chapter 1 “A Town of Their Own”

Unlike the rapidly depleted forests of the Great Lakes and the Northeast, by the end of the nineteenth century the old-growth forests of the South were still plentiful. Encouraged by the region’s highly devalued timber lands and the relaxation of Reconstruction-era homestead laws, local and “foreign” lumbermen quickly capitalized upon the South’s seemingly boundless supply of timber. Major sawmills were established along South Carolina’s coast at Georgetown, where Henry Buck of Maine had previously established a successful shipbuilding operation using enslaved Black labor before the end of the Civil War.¹⁸ A number of lumbermen, however, also set their sights on the forests and timber-saturated swamplands deep within the state’s interior.

During the 1880s, portions of the Santee River stretching across the former St. John’s Berkeley Parish boasted some of the finest soils for the cultivation of black seed cotton and grazing livestock, while much of the region’s abandoned plantation lands were selling as low as fifty cents per acre. Of the timber available to prospective buyers, few praises were spared:

What shall I say of the timber, Mr. Editor, I wish you could come here and ride or walk through a piece of timber land near where I live. It is long leaf yellow pine. The trees are not large but they are long and straight. Much of it has been worked by turpentine men and that injures it some. But it would make as pretty lumber as any timber in the South. The swamp is filled with oaks which are splendid for staves. That business has never been pushed here at all and so the timber has never been picked. I would do injustice to the country if I did not call special attention to the cypress. Just the finest shingle timber in the world, and there is not a mill on the Santee river (in Berkeley) that I can hear of. Indeed there is almost any kind of timber of the very best grade, that one would desire. There is an excellent opening for a saw mill, and shingle machine combined.¹⁹

Page 15 →One such announcement made its way into the hands of two Chicago lumbermen, Benjamin F. Ferguson (1840–1905) and Francis Beidler (1854–1924). During the late 1880s, Ferguson and Beidler came to South Carolina to survey the state’s available timber lands. By the time they arrived, “the Santee River and its tributaries held some of the largest remaining stands of old-growth bald cypress in the nation outside the lower Mississippi valley and Florida.”²⁰ Likely working to avoid the competitive buying frenzy large-scale land purchases would provoke, they first relied upon local intermediaries to purchase smaller tracts, but still returned to Chicago “carrying with them, it is said, the titles to twenty thousand acres of land on the Santee River.”²¹ By 1890, Ferguson and Beidler formed the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company, chartered first in Chicago and later incorporated in South Carolina in 1910. Likely anticipating the need for a log pond to keep felled (cut) timber before processing, they selected a location on the south bank of the Santee River in close proximity to a natural lake for the corporation’s headquarters (see fig. 1.2).²² Once known as “Pond’s Landing” and “St. John’s Berkeley Township,” the company town was later named after the SRCLC’s cofounder, Ferguson.²³

As early as 1894, newspapers reported that the SRCLC was “doing a flourishing business,” producing close to 60,000 roof shingles daily, while nearly 20,000 felled (cut) logs lay in wait for transport to Ferguson.²⁴ Yet, as with many other industrial enterprises quickly celebrated in the New South, the praise of boosters can obscure a more nuanced assessment of industrial “success.” As Mark Kinzer notes, “In the early years, local [SRCLC] management expended a great deal of effort to maintain a steady supply of logs for the mill, but with only mixed success. Any interruption in felling and floating timber would shut down the mill, and the mill [at Ferguson] reportedly sat idle two-thirds of the time.”²⁵ The hiring of young lumberman Fred Seeley as general manager, however, marked a turning point in the company’s operations.

Serving as SRCLC general manager between 1896–1906 and 1909–1911, Seeley managed to increase the mill’s production capacity while reducing the company’s early debt. At the same time, Seeley led the SRCLC in an aggressive campaign of land acquisition, extending the company’s holdings along the Congaree River valley “even up to Columbia’s gates.”²⁶ After petitioning the state’s railroad commission and receiving permission from the United States Senate, in 1909 the SRCLC constructed a state-of-the-art steel drawbridge across the Santee River, allowing for the company’s railroad lines to extend deeper into the region’s swamps.²⁷

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By the end of 1910, a “watershed moment,” the SRCLC invested significant financial resources into Ferguson, spending an estimated one million dollars to enlarge the town’s saw and planing mills.²⁸ Ferguson would grow to possess one of the largest saw and planing mill complexes in South Carolina–second only, it would appear, to the mills operated by the Atlantic Coast Lumber Corporation at coastal Georgetown.²⁹ A 1910 SRCLC help-wanted advertisement requesting planing mill men; machine setters and feeders; edgermen; cut-up men; and re-saw operators further illustrates the SRCLC’s rapid growth, and specifically, the new and specified forms of skilled labor needed for its expanding operations at Ferguson.³⁰ The SRCLC’s rapid growth and corporate strategies, nevertheless, provoked an impassioned local response.

Beginning shortly after the SRCLC’s arrival, the company’s published newspaper notices aimed to restrict unauthorized trespassing, logging, and animal grazing on company-claimed lands—all practices integral to the livelihoods and economies of rural communities across the South.³¹ By 1910, Orangeburg’s The Times and Democrat published an editorial characterizing the SRCLC’s corporate practices as “turning the thumb-screws of Page 17 →oppression.”³² Local opposition mobilized around the SRCLC’s requirement that rural forest users acquire a permit and pay a fee for accessing the company’s forest lands, and the authors urged particular diligence and caution when signing contracts with “foreign corporations” like the SRCLC. Yet, for many forest users, the time for precautionary measures had unfortunately passed: “It may perhaps be too late to sound a warning now; we have however the consciousness of having done so when it was not too late, but we repeat it again for the benefit of those who have not yet been entrapped.”

In the Jim Crow South, rural Black landowners and forest users were particularly vulnerable to predatory timber-cutting contracts and the displacements wrought by the industry’s attempts at commons enclosure. According to historian Owen James Hyman, “The threat lumber firms posed to African American land ownership was simultaneously a threat to their autonomy and basic citizenship rights in a way that was incomparable for white folks.”³³ Even so, while the SRCLC appears to have pursued a corporate strategy of enclosure, other Southern lumber operations “came to the conclusion that the risks of antagonizing natives of the backwoods outweighed the costs associated with logging on the free range; hence, they did not dare fence their timberlands and abandoned their quest to secure the passage of county stock laws.”³⁴ Scholars have rightly centered themes of ecological devastation, rural dispossession, and forced labor in the history of industrial timber production, especially in the Jim Crow South. A growing body of scholars, however, are also working to demonstrate that African American lumber workers and their families were neither tragic victims nor passive participants in the far-reaching and at times radical transformations shaping rural life and labor in the New South.³⁵

Historian William P. Jones’s 2005 landmark study The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South marked a fundamental shift in scholarly theorizations and depictions of Black Southern lumber workers during the Jim Crow era. While attending to a set of core themes orientating research on Southern lumber workers and sawmill towns (i.e., company-town planning, corporate paternalism and welfare, unionized labor), Jones advanced a substantial critique of the ideological systems that have historically rendered African American lumber workers as aimless, morally suspect, and alienated figures of the Jim Crow era. “While they often left home in search of work,” Jones demonstrated that Black male lumber workers “maintained ties to families and communities, initially returning to them between seasonal industrial employment and eventually bringing loved ones with them when they settled permanently in sawmill towns.”³⁶ At Ferguson, census records documenting the Page 18 →presence of couples and families, and not solely unmarried male laborers, may suggest that this migratory process had begun. Removing sap-heavy logs from the deepest reaches of South Carolina’s swamps, and recruiting a dependable workforce to do so, however, was far from seamless.

When Ferguson and Beidler arrived in South Carolina, many considered the removal of sap-heavy timber from the state’s interior swamps a demanding, if not a foolhardy venture. Penn State researchers, for example, remarked that green cypress sought by the SRCLC was “so heavy that it scarcely floats and probably one third of the logs, especially those with the largest amount of sap wood were lost by sinking.”³⁷ Moreover, by the late 1880s, railroad infrastructure had not yet reached the remote areas of the Santee swamp, requiring the SRCLC to develop innovative practices to transport even successfully felled (cut) timber along the Santee River to Ferguson.

As elsewhere in the South, steam skidding and railroad transport increasingly supplanted the lumber industry’s reliance upon the pull-boat system, which required the construction of expansive canal systems to move felled timber to rivers.³⁸ The construction of tram roads and rail lines through South Carolina’s swamps, however, was still a technologically challenging and often costly endeavor, especially given that tracks constructed on elevated ground needed to anticipate unstable and varied terrain as well as periodic flooding.³⁹ By 1913, the SRCLC would come to employ two steam skidders specially engineered for swamp conditions, including a massive skidder once considered “one of the largest logging machines ever built.”⁴⁰

To reduce high sap levels, the SRCLC also engaged in “girdling,” a process involving the removal of tree bark so that the upper portions could dry out over time. In the case of sweetgum, this process initially involved leaving girdled trees in situ for months at a time before they could be floated, although this practice often resulted in a steady loss of valuable sapwood. To address these challenges, the SRCLC employed a modified process without girdling. According to Mark Kinzer, “As before, trees were felled in the fall and early winter months to take advantage of the low sap levels, but now they were immediately cut into standard lengths, skidded to the riverbank, and tied into rafts with more buoyant pieces.”⁴¹ Today, the visually deceptive qualities of “old growth” forests, and the “banal ubiquity” of forest products in everyday life, routinely obscures the history of past lumbering.⁴² The sunken logs found beneath the surface of many Page 19 →of South Carolina’s rivers, however, are material evidence of the South’s preeminent, yet oft-forgotten, industry.

Although Black and white South Carolinians would become the core demographic of workers employed by the SRCLC, the Chicago-based SRCLC did not restrict its recruitment efforts to the Palmetto State. As early as 1890, “Two hundred hale and hearty men from Maine landed at Charleston … and took the train for the mills of the Santee Lumber Company. They have come down to get employment at the mills of that Company in the Santee swamps and may bring their wives down next summer.”⁴³ The SRCLC also attempted to recruit “experienced white loggers” from Michigan and North Carolina, points of origin reflected in Ferguson’s 1910 census records.⁴⁴ Malaria-endemic swamps and low wages, however, discouraged many white lumbermen from responding to SRCLC recruitment efforts.⁴⁵

When the SRCLC attempted to hire newly arrived European immigrant workers through contractors in New York City, many of the men found work in South Carolina’s swamps unbearable, but also contrary to what they had been told.⁴⁶ After letters from Greek workers critical of labor and living conditions in South Carolina were published in the daily Greek language newspaper the Atlantis, in 1910 the federal Department of Justice concluded that labor agents had both deceived and exploited a large number of European immigrant workers later employed by the SRCLC.⁴⁷ According to Penn State researchers, local Black labor was ultimately desired by the SRCLC “on account of its cheapness and also on account of the fact that it is almost impossible to get high grade cutters to work in the swamps.”⁴⁸ By the turn of the twentieth century, almost all of the SRCLC’s felling (cutting) was done by Black men.⁴⁹

Despite countervailing efforts by former slaveholders to keep Black Southern workers tethered to plantations and restrictive labor contracts under the tenancy system, the episodic and seasonal recruitment of rural farm workers became a central and often expedient means for Southern lumber operations to meet their labor demands. The SRCLC’s operations relied upon bouts of temporary labor drawn from neighboring agricultural communities. Many African American lumber workers in South Carolina and the greater South, however, held strongly to their primary occupation as family farmers. During the post-emancipation period, industrial wage labor competed with the promises of family farming. Following the overthrow of Reconstruction and the erosion of Black citizens’ political rights, populism took root in many Black communities, and many Black writers contrasted family farming with the restrictions and alienating qualities of industrial wage labor. Still, Black farmers also considered “public work” in rural Page 20 →industries, and the sale of timber and woodland access to lumber firms, as a means to economic uplift.⁵⁰ Speaking of one laborer, Fred Seeley noted:

A Negro Edgerman in the sawmill heard of a place for sale. Got me to buy it for him. He didn’t have enough and I loaned him $200. Year later I needed an Edgerman. Wrote him. He came, said “Captain I came to help you out but can’t stay. I bought some more land and last year made 40 bales of cotton. I’ve got to get back. Cotton worth $30. He stayed two weeks and it was a big help at a time when good mill hands were scarce. Here at Beaufort in the early 20s I needed hands. I wrote a friend at Ferguson and within two weeks 30 showed up. They came from farms and other mills and several stayed for years.⁵¹

Local traditions of subsistence logging likely contributed to the desire of Black men employed by the SRCLC to retain their ties to agriculture. Black men’s strong ties to agricultural labor, however, also frustrated Southern lumber operators. During the cut-out-and-get-out era, the Southern lumber industry was marked by an exceptionally high rate of employee turnover, especially among Black workers. According to Jones, “Black men were so successful at combining agricultural and industrial work that southern industrialists sometimes took desperate measures, such as using convict labor, to force them into long-term employment.”⁵²

In 1911, six years following Benjamin F. Ferguson’s passing and a year after Ferguson town suffered a costly mill fire, SRCLC’s sole owner, Francis Beidler, addressed a series of rumors that Ferguson’s mills were shut down because “the big corporation has not been making any money.” Although the consequences of an over-saturated national cypress market likely contributed to the SRCLC’s challenges, Beidler chose to attribute the company’s financial troubles to the difficulties of securing reliable, and particularly Black, labor:

The conditions are as follows: The saw mill is temporarily closed for repairs, this being a propitious time on account of the great difficulty in securing colored labor to operate. Likewise the railroad logging operations are temporarily closed, for the same reasons, and also because we have ample river logs in sight to start the mill and run during the winter without the railroad logs. The balance of the plant is in full operation and will continue so. The company is not contemplating a sale of its plant.⁵³

Page 21 →Southern lumber operators articulated varying and often contradictory opinions on what exactly constituted—as well as how to effectively respond to—the industry’s persistent “labor problem.”⁵⁴ Black and non-English speaking European immigrant workers, more often than their white and American-born counterparts, were routinely described as lacking the intellectual capacity, self-discipline, and moral will required for industrial labor.⁵⁵ As one treatise on Black labor published in Columbia’s The State concluded, “The negro, as a class, is deficient in will power. … Deficiency of will power also leads to lack of dependability and lack of that persistency which is essential to success in any line of work.”⁵⁶ At the same time, white employers were well aware that Black labor was essential for the viability and success of their industrial ventures. As historian Brian Kelly has argued, New South elites exhibited a “contradictory, almost schizophrenic attitude” toward Black men and women. During Jim Crow, the Black working-class was often regarded as the South’s greatest resource, and simultaneously, its most enduring problem.⁵⁷ For some New South elites, Black workers were no different than forests: expendable commodities.⁵⁸

During the early Jim Crow period, African American lumber workers often struggled to make “permanent rather than seasonal homes in the industrial South.”⁵⁹ Before the 1920s, few Southern lumber firms invested in or supported the community-building efforts.⁶⁰ At Ferguson, the SRCLC did not provide brick-and-mortar buildings for churches, compelling Ferguson’s residents, both Black and white, to rely upon the irregular presence of traveling ministers and likely upon churches located in neighboring towns and rural communities.⁶¹ The decision to relocate oneself and one’s family permanently to a sawmill town like Ferguson, moreover, came with considerable risks. Even a temporary mill or plant shut down due to fire or other disasters could uproot workers and their families, undermining aspirations of permanency.⁶² Still, when the Southern lumber industry did begin to encourage the settlement of Black working-class families, they often did so relying upon the efforts of Black workers, and particularly, Black women.⁶³

Although often portrayed as a male industry, Black women carved out their own spaces of opportunity within the Southern lumber industry.⁶⁴ At Ferguson, Black women labored as domestics and laundresses; restaurant and hotel workers; at “odd jobs,” as well as boarding house proprietors and Page 22 →small business owners. By 1910, census records suggest that Ferguson’s domestic and service trades were held almost exclusively by Black women, followed by adolescent Black girls and a few young Black boys. Markedly, only Fredrika Rose, a white woman employed as a saleswoman at the SRCLC’s general store, was enumerated with an occupation at Ferguson. Other white women and children at Ferguson were likely engaged in some forms of unenumerated household labor not recorded by census enumerators. Black women and children, however, often labored within white homes as well as their own during Jim Crow.⁶⁵ Black women’s knowledge of Ferguson’s landscape, in turn, almost certainly extended beyond the segregated quarter where Black workers and their families resided.

Although industrial timber production placed Black men in routine and often close proximity to white male workers and managers, it was arguably the Black women who labored in the domestic and service trades “who, by virtue of their employment, had to traverse and were seen as ‘belonging in’ the widest range of spaces.”⁶⁶ At Ferguson, Black women, including Julia McMickel, labored as laundresses for private families, a role requiring movement across Ferguson’s landscape. The SRCLC’s broader industrial landscape, however, may have been marked by efforts to restrict the spaces and places that Black women could occupy. Unlike Ferguson town, according to SRCLC’s Fred Seeley, women were prohibited from residing in the company’s logging camps. Yet, much like attempts to enforce the color line, attempts to demarcate space according to gender within the Jim Crow South were not absolute, and could be bent. As Seeley recounts, he performed a common-law marriage for Mamie and Jim Henry, a Black couple residing at one of the company’s camps and subsequently allowed Mamie to stay.⁶⁷ Seeley’s memoirs, admittedly, routinely evoke the sort of paternalism structuring relations between white managers and Black workers within Southern industrial settings. Still, it provides partial insight into the interpersonal negotiations of labor and race under Jim Crow, and furthermore, the ways that Black women were fundamentally involved in cultivating the essential networks of care and support that upheld Southern lumber operations:

Men used to go to town on Saturday but the Negroes often found it too expensive. [Mamie] nudged her boys and they kept the camp cleaner. She showed them how to use chemicals on the bunks, got a set of clippers and every head was shaved. The boys didn’t drink quite as much white lightning over the weekend and when one did go overboard he went out and slept it off under the trees. She Page 23 →was no saint. A Negro is not given to profanity even one in groups with no white folks and she could let out as big a “damn” as any when she got provoked so I was told.⁶⁸

Because scholars have long considered women’s reproductive and domestic labor as peripheral to the narratives of the industrial working-class, Black women like Mamie Henry have all too often been left out of histories of Southern lumbering and rendered peripheral to industry’s daily operations and the survival of its workforce. Rather, as historian Joan Flores-Villalobos aptly contends, it should be clearly stated that industrial operations “could not have happened without them.”⁶⁹ Black women’s contributions to Southern lumber, however, were also not confined to reproductive labor. Notably, at least ten Black women at Ferguson appear on census records as sawmill laborers, complicating an often-held notion that women were completely excluded from industrial timber production.⁷⁰ The federal census’ imprecise “labor” category, however, leaves us to conjecture the forms of labor Black women like Julia Golden, Hester Hampton, and Mary Ladson performed. If excluded from tasks reserved for male employees, Black women may have cleaned equipment, swept sawdust, or constructed boxes.⁷¹ Black women laboring in Ferguson’s saw and planing mills, nevertheless, may have also been expected to perform roles traditionally held by Black men, especially during labor shortages.⁷²

Black children also worked as laborers in Ferguson’s sawmills, including twelve-year-old Joseph Bradford. By 1910, the South Carolina Child Labor Committee had not yet mobilized enough legislative support to alter the state’s preexisting child labor laws. Although South Carolina had placed restrictions on child labor and inspectors had begun to investigate South Carolina’s factories and mills, implementation of the laws and exceptions contributed to the persistence of child labor within the state’s industrial settings. “The twelve-year limit,” most notably, “did not apply to orphans, or to the children of widowed mothers or totally disabled fathers. The law also permitted anybody’s children under twelve to work during the summer months, provided they had attended school during the winter.”⁷³ According to Columbia’s The State, the first prosecution for a violation of child labor in South Carolina had only occurred in January 1910 after a white textile mill worker at Pacolet had changed “the date of his daughter’s birth in his family Bible so as to permit her to work under the child labor act.”⁷⁴

Enforcement of child labor, however, did not apply to all settings of labor, and largely excluded domestic work. Eleven-year-old James McMickel, for instance, performed “odd jobs” for wages at Ferguson along with his Page 24 →older sisters Ella, Ida, and Daisy. Prior to arriving at Ferguson, the McMickel family lived in Charleston’s 10th Ward, suggesting that urban settings also figured into the migratory trajectories of Ferguson’s African American workforce. The fact that their mother, Julia, was widowed, might suggest that James and his sisters may have entered wage labor at a young age depending on the timing of their father’s death. What is clear, however, is that when we look beyond the traditional spaces of industrial timber production, and when we question gendered and age-based assumptions of who labored in sawmill towns, a more expansive understanding of industrial lumbering can come into view.

Black lumber workers navigated a shifting terrain of felled timber, pack animals, and advanced machinery. Responsibility for employee safety was likely shifted further down the managerial chain, landing upon workers themselves. As historian Steven C. Beda notes, the “timber country’s informal apprenticeship system disseminated knowledge of the production process, taught young workers how to keep themselves and their crewmates safe, and perhaps most important of all, functioned to help preserve working-class control of job sites.”⁷⁵ Ferguson’s boarding houses, hotel, and company-owned residences likely became key spaces for these networks of informal education and knowledge transfer to circulate. Although taking in boarders was a common source of supplemental income (especially for Black women) and a response to limited housing, boarding likely facilitated the integration of migrant laborers into Ferguson’s social fabric. Yet, for new arrivals unable to draw quick access upon such social and knowledge networks, threats of injury or death were a reality. Saturday, October 14, 1911:

A negro was electrocuted and instantly killed at the Santee Cypress Lumber Company’s mill at Ferguson one day last week. The negro was a new hand at the mill, and not knowing the danger, stepped on the third rail which carries the electric current that moves the cars on the tramway in the lumber yards of the big plant and was instantly killed by the passage of nearly eight thousand volts through his body. The poor fellow was cut down so quickly that he did not know what hit him.⁷⁶

The conditions facing Southern lumber workers—both Black and white, American-born and immigrant—were perilous. During Jim Crow, lumber Page 25 →workers “were seven times more likely to be injured than in any other manufacturing industry,” and labor in swamps and rivers posed additional risks.⁷⁷ As early as 1890, a Black man employed by the SRCLC drowned while attempting to cross a creek.⁷⁸ Sickness (including pneumonia) caused other deaths, although direct causes were often difficult for coroners to ascertain. In late October 1900, a Black SRCLC camp worker dropped dead of “natural causes,” likely due to exhaustion.⁷⁹ Historian Mark Fannin argues that “the demand for greater efficiency and improved productivity also subjected workers to new threats and hazards,” including injuries attributable to fatigue. SRCLC expected crews of (two) men to cut 5,000 board feet (each, 1 foot long by 1 foot wide) per day. Penn State researchers noted that daily averages could reach upward of 20,000 board feet per crew.⁸⁰

Mechanization exacerbated the possibilities for injury and death, perhaps especially for workers laboring in Southern forests and swamps. Laborers employed as “graders” were particularly vulnerable to being crushed between logs pulled rapidly toward skidders. In a particularly gruesome 1895 case, an SRCLC worker had his leg crushed by a cog, “losing the limb at the knee joint.”⁸¹ During the Jim Crow period, Black men occupied these positions to such a degree that employers often conflated the position with racialized classifications, with some lumber operators referring to Black graders as “road monkeys.”⁸² Sawmill laborers were also injured or killed using advanced machinery, although federal investigators would conclude that injuries from hand tools, rapidly moving logs, and falling trees were often the most severe.⁸³

Even in cases where death was avoided, the impact of near-fatal injuries could “effectively end an individual’s working life.”⁸⁴ And while the absence of SRCLC corporate records makes it difficult to fully assess the extent of these occurrences, newspaper accounts indicate both the range and severity of hazards SRCLC employees faced in the mills, forests, and on rail lines.

Precarious conditions, however, were not restricted to those formally employed by the company. Penn State’s lumber researchers noted the company’s limited capacity to mitigate the range of health and environmentally related hazards faced by Ferguson’s residents—many of which arose from the town’s proximity to standing water, and particularly, the region’s mosquito-infested swamps. “Although every precaution has been taken to keep down the amount of sickness, still the summer months are of great danger. This is due largely to the mosquito carrying the malaria. Almost every inhabitant of the place is affected with the disease.”⁸⁵ Despite company investments in employee housing and town amenities, Page 26 →Seeley underscored that SRCLC workers and their families at Ferguson had “learned the gentle art of going without.”⁸⁶

Evidence of racial disparities, however, call attention to the unevenness of precarity. Although Black and white workers were often hired into general laborer positions at equal pay, the Southern lumber industry’s practice of excluding Black workers from skilled and supervisory positions created a differentiated landscape where Black workers faced disproportionate exposure to occupational hazards.⁸⁷ By the end of the 1920s, the racial segregation of lumber work was so pronounced that “employers came to associate certain skills with qualities that they believed were innately African American.”⁸⁸ In most cases, actual level of skill or length of employment did not allow Black men to escape relegation to “Black jobs,” hindering opportunities for upward advancement. New South elites, white politicians, and lower-level operators also trafficked in explicitly racist discourses intended to undermine recognition of Black workers’ skills and intelligence, contributing to long-standing assumptions that Black men were biologically and uniquely predisposed for harsh, physical labor.⁸⁹ Moreover, the lumber industry’s protracted opposition to a workmen’s compensation law in South Carolina likely exacerbated precarious conditions of Black South Carolinians already facing a general atmosphere of racial discrimination, legal disenfranchisement, and white racial terror.⁹⁰

Contrary to managerial assessments that African American lumber workers were “comfortable and happy” prior to the Great Depression, the Southern lumber industry’s investment in a racialized occupational hierarchy posed a considerable challenge to Black upward mobility.⁹¹ Of Black persons engaged in sawmill and lumber work at Ferguson in 1910, only one Black lumber worker was enumerated with a skilled occupation, machinist, while white employees occupied a significantly greater range of positions from sawmill laborers to engineers and mill inspectors. During Jim Crow, the hiring of Black workers into skilled and supervisory positions was often regarded as a threat to white economic security, and industrial elites used Black labor as a strikebreaker to thwart white unionism. In 1909, Ferguson’s (white) machinists walked out, allegedly over the “hiring of negroes to operate machines in the machine shop.”⁹² And while an occurrence of a white race riot is not documented in Ferguson’s history, the response of Ferguson’s white machinists to Black upward mobility may point to the limitations of working-class solidarity and may suggest “a much deeper social discord.”⁹³

During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, ethnicity, language, national origin, and perceived difference also shaped the racially Page 27 →segregated settings of Southern industry. “The period of mass European immigration, from the 1840s to the restrictive legislation of 1924, witnessed a fracturing of whiteness into a hierarchy of plural and scientifically determined white races.”⁹⁴ Although Southern industries routinely recruited European immigrants to “suppress Black agency and mobility,” immigrant laborers could just as easily be positioned outside of whiteness.⁹⁵ Alongside Black workers, immigrant laborers were likely among Ferguson’s most vulnerable groups—as suggested by the SRCLC’s Italian Cemetery, where thirty unidentified Italian laborers who succumbed to “ptomaine” [food] poisoning were laid to rest. Lower-wage American-born white workers, too, were not exempt from pathologization. As historian David L. Carlton writes of the reception of Progressive Era business elites and established “towns people” to the rural white proletariat who made their way to South Carolina’s Piedmont textile mills, “white supremacy need not entail white equality.”⁹⁶ A closer look at relationships within Ferguson’s white workforce may reveal a more complicated fabric of occupational precarity.

In Southern lumber towns like Ferguson, the taking in of lodgers or boarders also became a valuable economic strategy contributing to personal, familial, and collective survival.⁹⁷ Much like his own mother’s St. Matthews household, the residence of SRCLC sawmill laborer Daniel F. Major was both a multigenerational and a multi-familial space. Along with his twenty-year-old son, George, Major shared his Ferguson household with several boarders—including fellow sawmill laborers George Chisholm and Edmond Ottman, Ottman’s wife May, and the couple’s five-year-old son, John. Other Black households at Ferguson reflected such heterogeneous living arrangements, including a number of households headed by widowed and unmarried Black women who had taken in boarders, likely to supplement their household incomes. Yet, within contexts of economic precarity and racial discrimination, the taking in of boarders, extended family members, and non-blood relations held economic as well as social meaning for African Americans, especially during Jim Crow. As historian Holly A. Pinheiro argues of Black households in Philadelphia, “Their willingness to take in ‘fictive kin’ shows that northern African American families continually adapted their families in order to survive—and were genuinely concerned with assisting others in fighting racial discrimination and creating stability.”⁹⁸ At the same time, we should not overlook the conflicts and tensions that almost certainly arose within and between Black households across Ferguson’s segregated landscape. Still, we might hold space for boarding as a vital expression Page 28 →of social support, and potentially, what historical archaeologist Nedra K. Lee has termed “politicized community work.”⁹⁹

Ferguson’s Black working-class did not passively accept the precarious conditions they experienced. According to Seeley, employees and their families raised livestock and kept small garden plots near their residences; women and girls made clothes; and the company’s carpenters used lumber scraps from Ferguson’s mills to construct furniture for their rented households.¹⁰⁰ Some employees sought redress for workplace injuries through South Carolina’s legal system—including Anthony Patterson, a Black laborer who leveled a $25,000 damage suit after losing one of his hands due to the “carelessness of the company and its foreman.”¹⁰¹ Other workers pursued more indirect tactics of subversion, such as Charles Johnson, a Black worker who reportedly burned down a tenant house owned by the SRCLC in the town of Pinewood. According to the editorial, Johnson “was under the impression that if the organ was burned up, the company would give him another.”¹⁰² Still, most Black lumber workers at Ferguson likely used one of their most pragmatic, yet often less visible, tactics to navigate precarity: mobility.

During the Jim Crow era, Black lumber workers moved constantly in and out of the industry’s workforce. Many of these movements were initiated when work was slow and after logging operations shut down, but Black men and women also moved on when labor or living conditions were deemed unfavorable. As Robin D. G. Kelley argues, “Central to black working-class infrapolitics was mobility, for it afforded workers relative freedom to escape oppressive living and working conditions and power to negotiate for better working conditions.”¹⁰³ Some Black workers used their time in Southern lumbering to gain access to the migratory routes taking greater numbers of African Americans north and west along the routes of the Great Migration. Other Black workers, however, persisted in Southern lumbering over the long term—including former SRCLC sawmill laborer Daniel F. Major, who was laboring for Sumter’s Palmetto Hardwood Company at the time of his death in 1928 at the age of sixty-five.¹⁰⁴ By this time, the company town of Ferguson, South Carolina, had already begun to fade from memory.

Less than two decades following the industry’s arrival, the lumber boom had left a devastating mark on the old-growth forests of South Carolina. Page 29 →By 1910, commentators noted that of the over 400 mills operating in South Carolina, few engaged in replanting and they projected that the Palmetto State would be dependent upon external lumber industries for the bulk of its timber supplies in only a few years.¹⁰⁵ Citing cypress’ slow regenerative properties and the species’ susceptibility to “antagonistic conditions” in its youth, Penn State researchers similarly stated that the SRCLC’s namesake species was effectively a “doomed tree” and would be exhausted by the SRCLC within a generation.¹⁰⁶ Likely informed by these projections, as well as by lessons learned from the devastation of the Great Lakes forests, the SRCLC consulted with the US Bureau of Forestry by experimenting with “scientific forestry.” By most accounts, the SRCLC departed from the industry’s wasteful practices, and managed to hold onto much of its land base.¹⁰⁷ The story of the SRCLC is remembered today for Francis Beidler’s decision to place a large portion of the company’s landholdings into “timber reserve status”—a pivotal decision leading to the survival of the largest remaining old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the nation.¹⁰⁸ Yet, as with so many promising ventures of the New South, the story of Ferguson town is most often told today as a story of “great expectations followed by great disappointment.”¹⁰⁹

After a quarter century of operation, the SRCLC’s rapid growth was followed by an even more precipitous decline. By 1914, newspapers began to report that the SRCLC had all but stopped harvesting timber, and by the end of the First World War, Ferguson was by most accounts a shadow of its former self. Visitors quickly remarked on the withdrawal of life from Ferguson’s decommissioned mills, crumbling residences, and weed-infested streets. As one observer from neighboring Orangeburg remarked in 1916, only thirty workers employed by the SRCLC remained. “Probably the farmers of that part of the country will get better and cheaper labor now, but it is really sad to view the ruins of a once prosperous community … There are very few people even in this county who know of the demise of this thriving little place.”¹¹⁰ During the New Deal, South Carolina’s bid for hydroelectric power submerged what remained of Ferguson town (see fig. 1.3). Today, Ferguson lies almost completely beneath Lake Marion—one of the lesser-known places of memory and labor history all but erased from the Santee-Cooper landscape.¹¹¹

Historians have offered multiple explanations for the SRCLC’s rapid decline—from the consequences of an oversaturated national cypress market to the financial and managerial impacts of persistent mill fires and Francis Beidler’s failing eyesight.¹¹² Others, however, have claimed that Ferguson was “a town destined to die, a bustling community during its Page 30 →short lifetime but absorbed as quickly as it was conceived.”¹¹³ The time that hundreds of Black South Carolinians labored and lived at Ferguson, however, was far from insignificant—even if fleeting. The story of Ferguson is emblematic of the shifting entanglements of Southern lumber and Black labor during the early Jim Crow era and underscores the need to return Black lumber workers and their communities to the stories we tell about South Carolina’s forests.

1. 1. I thank the editors and reviewers, the University of South Carolina, and several individuals for supporting the development of this chapter. Thank you to coeditors Jessica Elfenbein and Mark Kinzer for your invaluable support and for improving this chapter with your constructive comments and suggestions. I extend my deepest gratitude to Maria Franklin, Kent Germany, William P. Jones, Kelsey A. Moore, Morgan P. Vickers, Eric E. Jones, Debora Heard, Catherine Adams, Andrea Richardson, and Gerald and Gail Davis for your insights and feedback during the research and writing process. Any remaining errors are my own.
2. 2. William P. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (University of Illinois Press, 2005), 1. According to Jones, “Eighty-three thousand black men worked in southern saw and planing mills in Page 31 →1910, more than the entire number of southerners employed by cotton textiles and four times those employed in iron and steel. That number grew steadily until 1950, when roughly 180,000 black men toiled in saw or planning mills and logging operations, nearly all of them in the South. Before World War II, no other industry employed more African Americans.” For an early treatment of African American lumber workers, see John C. Howard, The Negro in the Lumber Industry (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970).
3. 3. E. Horace Fitchett, “The Oldest Sawmill in the South: The Story of a Unique Negro Family,” Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life (1932–33): 10–11.
4. 4. For a foundational discussion of South Carolina’s textile mill industry following Reconstruction, see David L. Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920 (Louisiana State University Press, 1982).
5. 5. A note on terminology: For the purposes of this chapter, “Black” and “African American” are generally used interchangeably, while “Black Southerner” and “Black South Carolinian” are employed to refer more specifically to African-descended persons with lived experience and/or ancestral ties to South Carolina and the US South. At times, racialized terminology in census figures, newspapers, and other archival sources are used directly (i.e., “Negro,” “Mulatto”), although the malleable nature and political implications of these terms should not be confused with an argument of biological race. This critical approach to racialization also informs my discussion of persons classified as white, and when possible, I address considerations of ethnic, linguistic, and national difference. For further discussion, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998) and Jennifer E. Brooks, Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama (Louisiana State University Press, 2022).
6. 6. A note on sources: No corporate records and few eyewitness accounts of Ferguson’s landscape appear to have survived, and this chapter relies upon a range of primary sources and analogues drawn from contemporary sites of Black industrial labor during the late-19th and early-20th century to explore the experiences of the SRCLC’s African American workforce. The company-owned town of Ferguson, moreover, appears by name in the US Federal Census only in 1910 as “Ferguson Town,” presenting challenges for tracing demographic changes across Ferguson’s landscape. A future collection of oral histories from descendants of Ferguson’s workforce and former residents, in particular, would greatly enhance our understanding of the realities of life and labor at Ferguson.
7. 7. Unless otherwise specified, the 1910 US Federal Census for “Ferguson Town, Eutaw Township, Orangeburg County, South Carolina” is the source of demographic data for Ferguson’s population presented in this chapter.
8. 8. Fred Seeley, Beaufort, NC, Letter to Harvey Savage, Camden, SC, May 4, 1953, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, 19.
9. 9. Remembered today as the “cut-out-and-get-out” era, between 1880 and 1920 the American lumber industry pursued a rapid and ecologically devastating strategy of timber extraction. Under this corporate strategy, lumber firms would “move into a forested area, strip the land bare of trees to supply the lumber mills, and Page 32 →then move on to another forest to repeat the process, with little or no provision for replanting or leaving seed trees.” James E. Fickle, Green Gold: Alabama’s Forests and Forest Industries (University of Alabama Press, 2014), 42.
10. 10. Mark Kinzer, Nature’s Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), 134–35.
11. 11. Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), August 29, 1916; Charleston (SC) News and Courier, October 4, 1970. In 1910, the US Federal Census enumerated 380 Black persons and 257 white persons residing in Ferguson proper, the majority being employees of the SRCLC and their spouses and families. These census figures, however, do not necessarily account for the presence of employees who resided at the company’s logging camps and railroad lines; day laborers who commuted to Ferguson from neighboring Eutawville; workers who arrived weekly or seasonally from neighboring or more distant rural communities; or those who likely erected their own dwellings on the outskirts of Ferguson. Variation in Ferguson’s population figures are most likely attributable to the transitory nature of logging operations during this period, and available population estimates should be evaluated judiciously.
12. 12. Lesley-Anne Reed, “Transitional Generations: African American Workers, Industrialization, and Education in the Northern Louisiana Lumber and Paper Industries, 1930–1950,” Louisiana History 50, no. 1 (2009): 33.
13. 13. Based on a review of census records, marriage rates, and personal testimonies of workers themselves, Jones argues that most Black lumber workers during Jim Crow “maintained ties to families and communities, initially returning to them between seasonal industrial employment and eventually bringing loved ones with them when they settled permanently in sawmill towns” (The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 1–2). Jones’s work challenged decades of pathological portrayals of Black lumber workers as aimless, morally suspect, and alienated figures circulated during the early twentieth century.
14. 14. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and coauthor’s (1987) study Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, propelled a shift in scholarly depictions of Southern industrialization by focusing on the everyday lives of men, women, and children who settled in company-owned towns, centering on the cotton textile industry. For representative discussions of the social and familial contexts of work within the Southern lumber industry, see Thomas F. Armstrong, “Georgia Lumber Laborers, 1880–1917: The Social Implications of Work,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 67, no. 4 (1983): 435–50 and Jeffrey A. Drobney, “Company Towns and Social Transformation in the North Florida Timber Industry, 1880–1930,” Florida Historical Quarterly 75, no. 2 (1996): 121–45.
15. 15. N. M. Goodyear and R. F. Hemingway, “Penn State Report on Visit to Santee River Cypress Lumber Company at Ferguson, SC” (Pennsylvania State University, 1912), 31.
16. 16. Karla Slocum, Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 11.
17. 17. Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (1993): 75–112. For further discussion of Black community formation during the Jim Crow Page 33 →period, see Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
18. 18. Robert McAlister, The Lumber Boom of Coastal South Carolina: Nineteenth-Century Shipbuilding & the Devastation of Lowcountry Virgin Forests (History Press, 2013), 25.
19. 19. Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), March 4, 1884.
20. 20. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 136.
21. 21. Manning (SC) Times, August 7, 1889. For discussion of SRCLC’s land purchasing strategy, see Mark Kinzer’s chapter, “Industrial Logging: First Inroads, 1870–1910,” in Nature’s Return, 125–60.
22. 22. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 151; Goodyear and Hemingway, “Penn State Report on Visit to Santee River Cypress Lumber Company at Ferguson, SC,” 22.
23. 23. On February 13, 1890, the Swain County Herald (Bryson City, NC) referred to the company town as “Pond’s Landing,” likely referring to Ferguson’s proximity to the natural lake later used as a log pond.
24. 24. Watchmen and Southern (Sumter, SC), April 18, 1984.
25. 25. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 155.
26. 26. Daily Record (Columbia, SC), April 14, 1909.
27. 27. Jessica Elfenbein, “Extractive Industries-Lumbering Congaree,” in Historic Resource Survey, Congaree National Park (2019), 168.
28. 28. Watchman and Southern (Sumter, SC), September 15, 1909. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 151.
29. 29. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 134–35. For a history of the Atlantic Coast Lumber Company and South Carolina’s coastal timber industry, see McAlister, The Lumber Boom of Coastal South Carolina.
30. 30. The State (Columbia, SC), January 29, 1910.
31. 31. Manning (SC) Times, December 5, 1900; County Record (Kingstree, SC), June 23, 1910.
32. 32. Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), August 20, 1910.
33. 33. Owen James Hyman, “Jim Crow’s Cut: White Supremacy and the Destruction of Black Capital in the Forests of the Deep South,” in Capitalism’s Hidden Worlds, ed. Kenneth Lipartito and Lisa Jacobson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 81–98.
34. 34. Steven A. Reich, “The Making of a Southern Sawmill World: Race, Class, and Rural Transformation in the Piney Woods of East Texas, 1830–1930” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1998), 94.
35. 35. Reich, “The Making of a Southern Sawmill,” 6–7. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 2–3.
36. 36. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 1–2.
37. 37. Goodyear and Hemingway, “Penn State Report,” 22.
38. 38. SRCLC newspaper help wanted advertisements state that pull-boats were being used by the company along with steam skidders. Past scholarship has questioned whether the pull-boat system was used by the SRCLC in all of its operations, as no canals have been found in what is now Congaree National Park. The State (Columbia, SC), Friday, March 26, 1909. For discussion, see Elfenbein, “Extractive Industries-Lumbering Congaree,” 149–50.
39. 39. Goodyear and Hemingway, “Penn State Report,” 11–12.
40. 40. Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), September 2, 1913.
41. 41. Page 34 →Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 153.
42. 42. According to Mark Kinzer, long prevailing notions of South Carolina’s forests as “virgin” or “old growth” may readily obscure the full extent of historical clearing and other traces of past human activity. As Kinzer notes, for many of the tracts within the contemporary boundaries of the Congaree National Park, which contains areas logged by the SRCLC: “Today, it takes a comparably experienced eye to distinguish second growth from old growth in the Beidler Tract. In those parts of the floodplain where loblollies cluster in large numbers, the possibility of past clearing is quite evident, but in other areas the signs of human disturbance become more obscure with every passing year.” See Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 102. For Mary Kuhn, the “banal ubiquity” of forest products has made histories of forest labor difficult to see. Kuhn also contends that the significance of Southern forest labor has been further overshadowed by the weight of plantation agriculture, especially within African American history. “Modern scholarship has focused on the agricultural plantation as the heart of economic and political activity in the antebellum South and on the legacy of the plantation during Reconstruction. But as powerful as the plantation was in organizing coerced labor, it was just one part of the southern ecology that was subjected to the extractive regime.” See Kuhn, “Chesnutt, Turpentine, and the Political Ecology of White Supremacy,” PLMA 161, no. 1 (2021): 51.
43. 43. Camden (SC) Journal, November 27, 1980.
44. 44. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 136.
45. 45. Elfenbein, “Extractive Industries,” 154. General Manager Fred Seeley, however, maintained that wages for workers were “more than the other mills paid.” Seeley, Letter to Harvey Savage, 20–21.
46. 46. Elfenbein, “Extractive Industries,” 155.
47. 47. Elfenbein, “Extractive Industries,” 155–56.
48. 48. Goodyear and Hemingway, “Penn State Report,” 11–12.
49. 49. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 136; Goodyear and Hemingway, “Penn State Report,” 11–12.
50. 50. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 19.
51. 51. Seeley, Letter to Harvey Savage, 21–22.
52. 52. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 21.
53. 53. “Plant Not Shut Down,” Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), November 18, 1911. The repairs mentioned were likely associated with a fire that destroyed Ferguson’s warehouse and machine shop during the previous year, recounted in “Destructive Fire at Ferguson,”Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), August 9, 1910.
54. 54. James E. Fickle, “Management Looks at the ‘Labor Problem’: The Southern Pine Industry During World War I and the Postwar Era,” Journal of Southern History 40, no. 1 (1974): 61–76.
55. 55. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 2–8; Mark Fannin, Labor’s Promised Land: Radical Visions of Gender, Race, and Religion in the South (University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 13–14.
56. 56. “The Negro Needs Moral Training,” The State (Columbia, SC), March 10, 1910. For further discussion of these racialized and pathological ideologies, see Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 1–14.
57. 57. Page 35 →Brian Kelly, “Sentinels for New South Industry: Booker T. Washington, Industrial Accommodation and Black Workers in the Jim Crow South,” Labor History 44, no. 3 (2003): 339–40.
58. 58. “Lumber operators commonly viewed black laborers as virtual commodities.” James E. Fickle, ‘Comfortable and Happy’?: Louisiana and Mississippi Lumber Workers, 1900–1950, Louisiana History 40, no. 4 (1999): 416.
59. 59. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 69.
60. 60. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 73.
61. 61. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 69–70. For discussion of Black religious life at Ferguson, see Rachel Young, “Race, Lumber, and Presbyterians: The Story of Reverend Coyden Uggams,” (Paper, Department of History, University of South Carolina, 2020).
62. 62. Sitton and Conrad, Texas Sawmill Communities, 18.
63. 63. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 73. For Jones, “Over time, large mill owners came to support community-building efforts that black employees and their families initiated in the late 1910s and early 1920s.”
64. 64. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 56–59.
65. 65. For a foundational discussion of Black women’s domestic and household labor within white homes following emancipation, see Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997).
66. 66. Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball, “Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,” Journal of Urban History 21, no. 3 (1995): 320.
67. 67. Although Black men could often acquire certain forms of cultural capital through industrial wage labor, unmarried and widowed Black women in industrial settings confronted interlocking racialized and gendered tropes of deviance and promiscuity. SRCLC efforts to prohibit women from residing in the company’s logging camps, markedly, provokes potential comparisons to Joan Flores-Villalobos’s framing of industrial settings as a “moral battleground,” where Black women faced heightened scrutiny over their activities, movements, and moral behavior in The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 77–109.
68. 68. Flores-Villalobos, The Silver Women, 15–16.
69. 69. This argument is indebted to Joan Flores-Villalobos’s history of West Indian women within the Panama Canal zone, The Silver Women, 4. As Flores-Villalobos writes, “What is less visible, and less understood, is the project’s dependence on the domestic and care labor of West Indian “Silver Women,” without whom neither Black Caribbean nor white American workers and their families would have survived.”
70. 70. Mark Fannin, Labor’s Promised Land: Radical Visions of Gender, Race, and Religion in the South (University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 134.
71. 71. Personal conversation with William P. Jones, Thursday, August 4, 2022.
72. 72. Fickle, “Management Looks at the ‘Labor Problem,’” 64.
73. 73. John Porter Hollis, “Child Labor Legislation in the Carolinas,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 38 (1911): 114.
74. 74. Page 36 →The State (Columbia, SC), January 27, 1910.
75. 75. Beda, Strong Winds and Widow Makers, 91.
76. 76. Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), October 14, 1911.
77. 77. Fannin, Labor’s Promised Land, 13; Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 91–96; Joe William Trotter Jr., Workers Upon Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (University of California Press, 2021), 86–96.
78. 78. Manning (SC) Times, April 15, 1891.
79. 79. The State (Columbia, SC), October 29, 1900.
80. 80. Goodyear and Hemingway, “Penn State Report,” 13.
81. 81. Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), May 22, 1895.
82. 82. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 93.
83. 83. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 94.
84. 84. Fannin, Labor’s Promised Land, 17.
85. 85. Goodyear and Hemingway, “Penn State Report,” 21–22.
86. 86. Goodyear and Hemingway, “Penn State Report,” 14.
87. 87. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 90.
88. 88. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 93.
89. 89. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 93–94.
90. 90. Greenville (SC) News, May 24, 1935. Although South Carolina passed a Workmen’s Compensation Law in 1935, sawmill and planing mill workers were excepted along with agriculture and domestic service. “Workmen’s Compensation,” Monthly Labor Review 42, no. 5 (1936): 1270. African Americans in South Carolina’s interior also faced white racial violence during this period. In 1904, Kitt Bookard, a Black tenant farmer, was lynched by six white men from Eutawville along the Santee River a short distance away from Ferguson town. Reportedly, nearly a thousand Black men and women responded to the coroner’s inquest. The State of South Carolina, however, was unable to obtain a conviction and the jury acquitted the white defendants within sixteen minutes. Terence Finnegan, “To Hell with the Constitution: Lynching in South Carolina,” in A Deed So Accursed: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940 (University of Virgina Press, 2013), 48.
91. 91. Fickle, “‘Comfortable and Happy’?: Louisiana and Mississippi Lumber Workers, 1900–1950,” 407; Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 48, 51–52. Fred Seeley, SRCLC general manager, echoes much of this sentiment, underscoring what he perceived to be harmonious relations between workers and management across the color line: “Some got more pay and some less but the mills [cut (?)] steadily. The pay was more than the other mills paid. Advancement was possible … We were a great big happy family. Never during [twenty-four] years of operation was there any [negative] feeling between the owners and the employees. Discharges were a rarity. If a man, white or black, had anything the other employees helped him to learn his job. If he didn’t he knew he didn’t fit in and went someplace else. We all helped each other . . .” Seeley, Letter to Harvey Savage, 20–21.
92. 92. Daily Record (Columbia, SC), Wednesday, July 14, 1909.
93. 93. Thomas E. Wagner and Phillip J. Obermiller, African American Miners and Migrants: The Eastern Kentucky Social Club (University of Illinois Press, 2004), 38. It is imperative to note, however, that the history of the Southern lumber industry contains Page 37 →numerous examples of interracial labor organizing, perhaps most clearly articulated by the activities of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers (1910–1916). Working at a comparative scale, Jones found “significant variations in the development of lumber towns, patterns that produced striking differences in the transformation of race and class relations” Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 8. The realities of labor within the Southern lumber industry, admittedly, placed Black and white workers in regular, and at times intimate, contact, across the color line, leading to conflict as well as the potential for class-based solidarities. Examination of dynamics is certainly worthy of further exploration. For discussion of contemporaneous interracial union activity in South Carolina during this period, see Eli A. Poliakoff, “Charleston’s Longshoremen: Organized Labor in the Anti-Union Palmetto State,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 103, no. 3 (2002): 247–64.
94. 94. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 7.
95. 95. Jennifer E. Brooks, Resident Strangers, 7.
96. 96. Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 11.
97. 97. On boarding, see Nedra K. Lee, “Boarding,” 91–104 and Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr., The Family’s Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice (University of Georgia Press, 2022).
98. 98. Pinheiro, The Family’s Civil War, 7.
99. 99. Lee, “Boarding,” 92. Several scholars have argued for nuanced portrayals of family and community life within the Southern lumber industry. Steven A. Reich argues that “Divorce, infidelity, domestic violence, abandonment, and premature widowhood (from the high rate of accidents in the industry) were all part of black family life in the lumber industry.” Reich, “Reviewed Work(s): The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South by William P. Jones,” Journal of Southern History 73, no. 1 (2007): 212–13. This perspective on Black familial dynamics, however, should not detract from the centrality of family in the formation of Black sawmill communities. Based on oral histories and corroborated by marriage rates and evidence of job stability within Southern lumbering over time, Jones argues that “industrial lumberwork was seen by African Americans themselves as a basis for strengthening their families and communities.” Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 7.
100. 100. Seeley, Letter to Harvey Savage, 14.
101. 101. Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), July 20, 1909.
102. 102. Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), April 20, 1892.
103. 103. Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem,’” 95.
104. 104. On October 31, 1928, Orangeburg’s The Times and Democrat reported that Daniel F. Major was tragically killed by a falling tree limb while laboring for the Palmetto Hardwood Company. He was buried in St. Matthews, South Carolina, where he had resided with his mother before arriving at Ferguson. Certificate of Death, “Dan Major,” 1928; Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), November 1, 1928.
105. 105. Georgetown Semi-Weekly Times quoted in McAlister, The Lumber Boom of Coastal South Carolina, 78.
106. 106. Goodyear and Hemingway, “Penn State Report,” 5–6.
107. 107. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 134.
108. 108. Page 38 →Bob Janiskee, “Francis Beidler’s Long-Ago Decision Saved the Forest that Became Congaree National Park,” National Parks Traveler, October 18, 2008, https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2008/10/francis-beidler-s-long-ago-decision-saved-forest-became-congaree-national-park. For further discussion of the SRCLC’s environmental legacy, see chapters three, six, and seven of this volume. See also Jessica Elfenbein’s chapter, “Extractive Industries-Lumbering Congaree,” Historic Resource Survey, Congaree National Park (2019).
109. 109. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 108.
110. 110. “Prosperous Town Decaying,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), August 29, 1916.
111. 111. Robert T. Hart, “The Lowcountry Landscape: Politics, Preservation, and the SanteeCooper Project,” Environmental History 18, no. 1 (2013): 127–56.
112. 112. Elfenbein, “Extractive Industries-Lumbering Congaree,” 175–76.
113. 113. “Santee Cooper Country: History Changes Priority,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, October 4, 1970.