Chapter 8 Seven Hours of the Santee Cooper Century

I saw that fog over that bridge through a car windshield. Parked on the side of the road, I had a mountain bike strapped on the back. As a historian of the American South who was teaching a class at the University of South Page 212 →Carolina in Columbia called “History Outside: A Field School in Finding America,” I had come to scout a possible place for students to use bicycles to explore history outside, to experience what I thought of as the Santee Cooper century.

This part of the world had become known nationally by another name, “The Corridor of Shame.” A widely viewed 2005 documentary film with that title exposed the poor conditions of education systems in the I-95 region. Presidential candidate Barack Obama used the term as a way to highlight needed changes in American schools.⁸ As a historian of the Civil Rights Movement, I knew this area mostly through histories of Clarendon County, the jurisdiction on the northern side of the 301 and I-95 bridges. That county has been an essential part of modern America’s historical identity. Its local struggle over liberty, equality, and racial segregation helped define the national one. Clarendon’s school desegregation case, Briggs v. Elliott, was a central part of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the US Supreme Court that ended the “separate but equal” doctrine that had anchored the Jim Crow system of white supremacy. I had not considered seriously enough, though, the history of the area’s land and its trees.

After all, Levi Pearson, the African American father and farmer who filed a critical school bus equalization case prior to Briggs had to cut his timber in an attempt to generate operating capital because white lenders denied him credit. Then white operators would not buy his logs. What he wanted was for his children not to walk nine miles to school.⁹

This area’s timber-dominated landscape had been obviously and profoundly transformed by the massive hydroelectric project that began as legislation in 1934 and was still going strong ninety years later. A controversial development of the New Deal, it had a bureaucratic name, the South Carolina Public Service Authority, but the popular one that stuck was Santee Cooper.

The Santee Cooper project created a 160,000–180,000 acre equivalent of a freshwater inland sea (the Dead Sea, for comparison, is approximately 150,000 acres).¹⁰ Covering 300 square miles, it forced several thousand people, most of them African American, to abandon their lives and leave for higher ground.¹¹ In geological time measured in thousands and millions of years before humans, this land had been underwater for a very long time.¹² In the human age, according to the Indigenous-led Native Digital Land nonprofit, the general area has been home to numerous Indigenous groups, including the Santee, Winyah, Cherokee, Congaree, Wateree, Catawba, and Sewee.¹³ In the 1700s and 1800s, it was dominated Page 213 →by planters, particularly French Huguenots that had begun to arrive in the 1600s, many of whom farmed it with many thousands of enslaved people. The Industrial Revolution, though, triumphed and turned America into a land of machines needing energy, and in the 1930s, the Santee Cooper century began.

My corridor through this part of “Santee Cooper Country” was part of a larger green and watery wedge of South Carolina south of Columbia and Sumter. In 2023 in a lovingly restored old opera house in Sumter, I heard historians and community members unwrap the stories of the people and these timber-dominated lands. Represented here in the chapters of this book, their research has opened that basket in rich, new ways.

I knew of those lands not as the location of raw materials for global capitalism but as places of recreation, mostly because the Palmetto Trail ran through them. The Palmetto Trail is a mountains-to-sea route founded in 1994. In 2024, the trail included 380 miles of finished passages. If it is completed, it is expected to be an uninterrupted path through 500 miles of South Carolina, from Walhalla near the Blue Ridge to Awendaw at the coast.¹⁴ A remarkably scrappy conservation effort, it makes it permissible to access those lands, and it offers a fascinating place to hike or ride a bicycle. Its route from the state capital of Columbia offers a human-powered opportunity to experience the diverse forests, fields, and small towns of South Carolina. From Columbia, a traveler on foot or bicycle can look at a solitary longleaf pine at the State Capitol Grounds and head toward the sea. That tree lives in a grove in between the James F. Byrnes Monument, the African American History Monument, and the Revolutionary War General’s Monument. Its needles are longer than my forearm. I measured one. It was 14.7 inches. They flow with the wind, bending in the way a student choreographer might ask a fellow dancer to move despite it being impossible for a human. The tree can do it, though. It used to dominate this land.¹⁵

A few miles downhill from there, a traveler can glance at a lake named Katherine that was the longtime home to James Dickey (the poet and author of the novel Deliverance) and then pass through the war machines, training facilities, longleaf pines, and hardwood bottoms of the US Army’s Fort Jackson—mostly within sight of a busy highway. In the new Boyd Passage beyond that, travelers can inhale the sweet molder of a massive trash landfill while traversing sandy pine lands, ascend Cook’s Mountain to peer across the Wateree River towards Sumter and Shaw Air Force Base, and descend through earth carved at one time by enslaved people at a plantation called Goodwill. During the Civil War, almost 1,000 enslaved humans reportedly lived there.¹⁶

Page 214 →Hikers or bikers can go past a paper mill and the Kensington Plantation before the Palmetto Trail’s Wateree Passage begins. It passes along the edge of a coal-fired energy plant, crossing the river on an old steel bridge a few miles above the swampiness where Lake Marion begins to spread out. On a bike, the fist-sized rock ballast of an old rail line offers a jarring rhythm for watching the river bottoms of the Manchester State Forest roll out from the steep embankments. After a few miles, a traveler can rise through hills and gulleys into the once-white-only Poinsett State Park. The Palmetto Trail goes though deep, difficult sand in the High Hills of Santee not too far from the Millford Plantation until entering the once-African American-designated Mill Creek Park.¹⁷

After that, it settles into a path near Lake Marion’s shore, carrying a hiker or biker past the access landing for Sparkleberry swamp, cutting between the lake and the toxic landfill disaster of the Pinewood Site. After a long meander close to the lake, the trail arrives at the Highway 301 bridge and the two miles to the town of Santee.

I pedaled slowly for seven hours southeast of Santee, paralleling and occasionally intersecting the shoreline of Lake Marion. I began in the morning and rode approximately thirty miles, then turned around in the afternoon, retracing a line back to the start. My route followed two sylvan sections of the Palmetto Trail: the Santee Passage and the Eutaw Springs Passage.

I found myself mostly on isolated public dirt roads in an area with few people but seemingly endless amounts of clean air, pine trees, sand, dogs, roadside death, and trash.¹⁸ Weaving in and out of industrialized pine tree farms, agricultural fields, orchards, small towns, and wildlife management areas, I got turned around multiple times and took several wrong turns. I questioned my sense of time and my feelings about history. I tested my memory.

Memory, after all, is an action word. Moving in the woods, along sandy roads, and through empty fields, for me and many others, is an endlessly active process of remembering. It is also one of not forgetting. I cannot explain why, in a place I had never been, I got tears in my eyes from smelling pine straw, from looking at live oaks, from watching water move in unrehearsed ways. Somehow, they tell time to my mind, tell me my lost loved ones are still somewhere alongside me, and tell me not to worry about other things that disappear. Everyone experiences the land in their own ways, imagining and reimagining how they fit in.

Page 215 →On this day in March, I fixated on things that my friends and family might have ignored. By that I mean that I spent seven hours thinking about ditches, trees, death, fast cars, and southern history. The Santee Cooper project created a big ditch (Lakes Marion and Moultrie) fed by thousands of smaller ditches.¹⁹ These specific ditches, trees, and trailsides from Santee through Eutaw Springs highlighted the ironic conservation consequences of creating a massive water barrier when the automobile was about to fundamentally dominate the American landscape and consciousness. Destroying rural land here almost certainly accelerated urbanization and suburbanization, literally siphoning its water and electricity to fuel the post–World War II boom.

One of the underplayed realities of the Santee Cooper project is how much it is has been a major obstruction for regional transportation and for the connectivity demanded by modern capitalism. In its near-century of existence, the project has generated enormous amounts of energy and related economic development, particularly tourism, but one of its consequences is its inconvenience.²⁰

Oddly, what stood out in my time in Santee Cooper country was not the water. It was the role of roads and the power lines as corridors to speed things through as quickly as possible. A central story of the Santee Cooper century is about the triumph of portable power, how automobiles and motorboats have separated our experiences outside the home into private spaces shared only by a few and how those boundaries carry over into our minds, too.²¹ The spectacularly creative engineering of the outdoors helped drive us indoors. It often has made us more alone.

What I found along the Palmetto Trail in this part of the “wood basket” was an often mysterious, mostly dirt-road world made up of the discarded, of the wildness that somehow thrives in the margins, of the things that live and die at the edges. It was a place designed for production and for speed. Behind its pine curtains, though, a slower story is underway. Its hints are out there in the land.

Almost one hundred years ago, only a few years before the beginning of the Santee Cooper project, F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby wrote about the fictional Jay Gatsby’s attempt to reconcile his early life in rural North Dakota with the one he created for himself in a rapidly changing and urbanizing America. Gatsby struggled to understand his dream. “He did not know that it was already behind him,” the book’s narrator explained, “somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”²²

Page 216 →The reason for all of this is the great Santee River.²³ Collecting water from much of the Carolinas, its watershed is the third largest in the United States along the Atlantic coast.²⁴ It is the center of what the historian Robert Hart, Jr. calls a “great hydraulic machine” that emerged with the manipulations of rice planters in the 1700s and expanded through the centuries to include duck hunters and engineers. Beginning with a federal license in 1926, the Columbia Railway and Navigation Company tried to do a private version of the Santee Cooper hydroelectric project, but it took the New Deal to make it happen, overcoming the protests of conservationists and powerful landowners.²⁵

For the past eighty-plus years, the river has slowed to pool stages contained behind approximately forty miles of dams and dikes. In 1944, these pool stages, formerly known as the Santee Reservoir and Pinopolis Reservoir, were renamed to honor two prominent slave-owning leaders of the American Revolution, “The Swamp Fox” Francis Marion and William Moultrie. The locations of homes belonging to Marion (Pond Bluff) and Moultrie (Northampton) lie beneath those pool stages.²⁶ Today, a “rule curve” determined by the US Army Corps of Engineers sets the target elevation of Lake Marion at 72.0 feet in winter, 75.5 feet in summer.²⁷ By design, some of that water goes back into the Santee below the Lake Marion dam. The rest flows into Lake Moultrie and out either to the Cooper River through the electric-generating Pinopolis Dam or back to the Santee River through an electric-generating rediversion canal built in the 1980s to reduce silt accumulation in Charleston Harbor. According to a 1970s navigation study, 85 percent of the Santee ended up in the bowl-shaped Moultrie.²⁸

Those massive, controversial lakes were, in part, a national response to the need for local electricity. Highway 301 was a response to the need for speed. It became one of those muscular thoroughfares that made modern America. South Carolina had the good fortune of being located between New York and Florida, and when the construction of the 301 began in South Carolina in the early 1930s, it made the state essential to American consumers in ways that few other things could. National politicians saw the South as a major problem. In fact, in 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt called the region “the nation’s number one economic problem.”²⁹ Massive federal investment was one way to address it.

Santee Cooper fit into a much larger effort to remake the American landscape and to squeeze more productivity from it. The planners for Santee Cooper wanted it to light up the rural night and make room for ships Page 217 →to head far upstream from the coast. They envisioned it spawning factories and taming floods. They believed it would help save democracy and win a world war.

It grew deer, ducks, fish, and fun. It did not grow cities, at least not in Santee Cooper country. Population boomed elsewhere. Growth requires connections, and cities need other cities. One of the best examples is the economic boom later linked to Interstate 85. The regional vitality of that road made the metropolitan areas along it into anchors for the US economy, connecting Atlanta to Charlotte to Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill and eventually to Richmond.

After the 1930s, the American future lay in metropolitan areas and inside its cars. The bridges of the 301 and then I-95 funneled the future as fast as possible through the Clarendon and Orangeburg County line. The 301 bridge made it possible to cross two miles of otherwise impassable water in about two minutes. In the economic boom of the post–World War II era, that highway, and its ability to get people and products across a permanently flooded valley, temporarily anchored dozens of small towns in South Carolina that catered to travelers.³⁰

The heyday for Highway 301 was brief. It was fast for the 1940s, but not fast enough for the 1960s. Since then, I-95 has become the most powerful thing in this part of South Carolina, especially if one lumps it with Interstate 26 that it intersects fifteen miles to the southwest. The two miles of I-95 across the lake at Santee might be its most important section in the mostly rural six hundred miles between Richmond, Virginia, and Jacksonville, Florida. If those bridges were closed, the detours to get to the opposite shore would be measured in hours instead of seconds. The shortest route around to the south would take about eighty miles of driving, to the north almost 90. The planners for I-95 specifically put its route through this spot, refusing to bow to enormous pressure to have it curve toward Charleston by passing just south of Lake Moultrie.³¹

By the 2020s, the Interstate 95 bridges were proving that they, too, had become too slow, too narrow, too dangerous, a national-level problem for the next phases of modernization. Miles traveled by automobile in the United States has tripled over the past fifty years, growing from 1.1 trillion annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in 1971 to almost 3.3 trillion in 2019 (before a temporary drop from COVID-19).³² Designers currently are getting ready for a new bridge that is bigger and faster, as dreams of electric-powered self-driving cars attract hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. In 2023, transportation planners said they wanted to start building the new I-95 bridge in Summer 2025. The cost was estimated at $350 million for six Page 218 →lanes, four shoulders, and a 14-foot-wide pedestrian-bicycle shared use path on the southbound side.³³ To compare funding, the original Santee Cooper project construction was $31 million, approximately $690 million in 2024 dollars.

Today, what remains of the 301 bridge is a two-mile by two-lane public park. Midway, a giant striped bass on a billboard highlights the attraction under it. “*Not Quite Actual Size” describes the fish whose fins are too large for the frame.

Engineers closed it to pedestrians in 2017 after determining it to be unsafe for large crowds expected to view a total solar eclipse. It remained closed for approximately six years until a complicated effort resulted in its reopening in late 2023. Its long closure showed how dominant motor-travel had become to American minds and how walking had come to be seen as a luxury, as recreation. So few people needed to cross a flooded, fifty-mile stretch of South Carolina on foot or bicycle that it took the state government six years to fix the bridge and make it legal for footsteps again.³⁴ Without the 301 bridge, crossing Lake Marion was illegal unless one did it in an automobile, a boat, an aircraft, or a freight train (or by swimming). The nearest pedestrian-legal crossing upstream was thirty miles away, downstream over twenty-five miles away.

The area’s longtime US representative, James C. Clyburn, a local civil rights leader who had ascended the political ranks in the early twenty-first century to be the Democratic Party whip in the House of Representatives, had highlighted for years the ways that the Santee Cooper project cut the state in half and made it difficult for local people to go from one side to another. His late-1990s to early-2000s plan for a nine-mile road across Lake Marion included an almost three-mile bridge upstream near the crossroads town of Rimini on the east side and Lone Star on the west. The census tracts for both sides of the lake in that area have some of the lowest population per square mile in the state. They also have some of the highest African American-to-white population ratios in the state. Detractors called it “the bridge to nowhere.” The State newspaper in Columbia called it “The Great Divide.” Reporting by them and the New York Times revealed yet again the power of race to define South Carolina and its social and economic divisions. The Clyburn Connector was never built, and according to reports, its potential funding was eventually redistributed to other road projects.³⁵

Page 219 →The town of Santee shares its name with Santee Cooper, but its automobile bridges put it on the map. In fact, it was not officially on the map until 1949 when it became an incorporated town. A 1921 topographic map shows a few paths near Chapels Branch where Santee is today, but no Santee. The closest named place was Milligans on the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad.³⁶ In 1927, the first bridge crossing the Santee there was one of several Santee River bridges built in the 1920s, ushering in the east coast automobile age. That 1927 crossing was the last key link in the Lafayette Highway that was supposedly “the shortest route from the North to Florida,” and it set the location for future bridges.³⁷

Now, two I-95 interchanges deposit traffic into Santee. In 2024, US Highway 301 at Exit 97 was big and almost empty. It was part of the Palmetto Trail official route. It looked dangerous for a bike, despite a speed limit of 45 mph. At the end of my trip, I rested on the shoulder there for a few minutes. I counted two cars and decided to give it a go.

Old Number 6 Highway at Exit 98 to the north was the opposite. It was full. It may have had as many signs per square foot as it had storefronts. This congested place had all of the fuels, oils, candies, and high-caffeine sugar drinks a modern American traveler expects. It had a Holiday Inn, a new Hilton-brand hotel, a Hampton Inn, and several other lower-cost brands. It offered a Starbucks, a Cracker Barrel restaurant, a large grocery store, and fast-food restaurants. One convenience store had a local feel, the Santee General Store. A whole section was stuffed with cast-iron pots and pans. Its massive candy aisle had high-protein and sugar-rich bars with bright orange price tags stuck individually to each one.

Santee has more price tags than people. In 2020, the US Census located 797 residents, down 17 percent from the 961 in 2010. Of the 797 people in 2020, 527 identified themselves as African American and 208 as white.³⁸

In 2024, the Palmetto Trail sent users off the 301 bridge and south through the commercial hub. Golf courses flanked each side just beyond view from the trail. The trailhead for the Santee Passage was a mile or so down the road at a large public park that was also home to the local government. It was connected to a convention center, ball fields, and a popular water park.

It was surrounded by a pine curtain.³⁹ In the distance to the east, a large red rectangle stood alone above the pines. A billboard for Chick-fil-A, the massive Atlanta-based chain, alerted drivers to keep driving for twenty minutes northbound. In Santee, though, it was “Bo-Time.” A franchise of Page 220 →the massive Charlotte-based chain, Bojangles Famous Chicken and Biscuits, was a half mile from the Chick-fil-A sign. I saw logos from both on wrappers and cups all day on my bicycle, mixed in with the leaves that drifted along the side of the road.

Two hours after sunrise, the mist still kept the light in grayscale. Recent rain, enough to put the Congaree River into flood stage upstream at Congaree National Park, had darkened the soil on the dirt roads that started a few hundred yards from the trailhead. The trash started there, too. Every day, the only places I did not see trash were the places where automobiles could not go. The American roadside is an outdoor archive of American life.

I have lived in the South my whole life, and I have seen trash in its countryside my whole life. I have a deep, emotional love for that country-side. I am connected to it in ways that cannot be explained, only felt. I know to expect the trash to exist next to the beauty. I know that sometimes the pollution can have a haunting allure. Flickering acres of an oil refinery at night or the relentless yellow of a burn-off gas flare in the near distance at dusk are core memories from an earlier time of life. The litter and the pollution are, to my specific world that began in the early 1970s, inseparable from the grandeur. It is a traditional theme of the South. Southern literature is filled with things that are both sacred and profane, destructive and redemptive. Growing up in the rural South, I could learn that toxic lesson everywhere I looked.

In early childhood I lived for a while in a trailer in a pecan grove at the edge of a town of 1,000 people. Our beloved green and white mobile home was next to a drainage ditch that connected the Trinity River to one of the largest electric-generating plants in Texas. It was a time of some of my favorite memories. I was a little kid fishing under trees with a cane pole cut by my father, watching ducks and cows, mesmerized by the ways cattail plants never fell down and snakes never drowned. I am still in awe of the three enormous coal smokestacks that were across the fence 250 yards away. They were built in the 1920s. As a child, I did not understand exactly what they did, but I got the message that they mattered. Everyone I knew talked about those smokestacks like family. They were how people understood where they were.

In South Carolina, near Santee, almost five decades later, the first trash pile of the day had a feeling of home. Not my home, but it had to have been part of someone’s home at some point. A living room was dropped into the Page 221 →roadside scrub. A large sectional couch-recliner in mauve-colored fabric was broken into separate pieces. If put back together, it could have seated six adults comfortably. An ice chest was nearby, painted bright pink. Down the way a bit, diapers bulged from the rain.

A railroad track crossed a few hundred yards away, as did a tall electric power transmission line. They continued to run alongside or intersect with parts of the Palmetto Trail route for miles. The railroad is now part of the CSX Corporation but had its beginnings in the late nineteenth century. A wave of consolidation around the turn of the twentieth century made it part of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. That company operated it until merging in 1967 with the Seaboard Air Line to form the Seaboard Coast Line. This section of rail comes south from Sumter, crosses Lake Marion near Rimini and shoots down to this point outside Santee before pushing on through Vance. At Eutawville, it turns sharply south and continues toward Holly Hill. A now long-gone spur in Eutawville once split northeasterly toward the sawmill town of Ferguson at the Santee River. Along its route, the trains on that spur skirted the edge of the historic site for the Eutaw Springs battlefield from the Revolutionary War.⁴⁰ Hikers and bikers on the Palmetto Trail follow the historical momentum of those rail lines for almost thirty miles.

Close to the railroad crossing, a large power substation stood out near a farm field covered in small purple flowers. Close by, too, were concrete culverts, contoured catch basins, and a pond, parts of a relatively new water management project. The infrastructure was here to complement the two major high-speed highways. The land was prepared for growth.

Ducks on the pond were easy to hear. Several mallards spooked as I rounded a corner, and I heard that familiar muscular fluff from birds taking off from still water, the last drops of liquid leaving a ripple-line as they cleared the shore on their way to resettle beyond the trees. Around a bend, cutover timber lands began to alternate with flourishing pine sections.

Most of the pines seemed to be doing what obedient subjects do in authoritarian regimes. They grew in the ways they were allowed. They fit a pattern. They had their purpose. They blended into the background, tall and straight. They were good at seeking the sun and spreading their roots, crowding out the sky, their aggressiveness making a stronger group, prioritizing the good of the whole, adhering to the logic of the saw blade.

Bright orange plastic posts warned of a fiber optic cable crossing. Yellow flower blossoms marked the toxic Carolina Jessamine that grew in lines to the tops of the pines. Jessamine has been the South Carolina state Page 222 →flower for a century. I understood why it got that honor. It has good timing. Producing yellow trails of blossoms is a gift at a time of year when the world is bare and gray. While resting under them, I started to hear loud frogs in a pond I could not see.

I did not see much trash on this stretch of sand until I rounded a corner. A blue trash dumpster sat beside the road in a turnaround. “SC WASTE” it read in all-caps. It was directly underneath two power lines that crossed paths, each going in different directions. They passed through a mowed and maintained high-line right-of-way. Fifty yards away a tea-tannin ditch flowed full under the road and through the woods. A dense foam curdled on top as water rushed out one side.

It was all there: water, sand, trees, trash, electricity, and ditches, the Santee Cooper century on a soft, slow road, obscured but not invisible. The attempts to control nature and human nature, the containment of energy in wires and waterways, and the opportunities to shape the future—they all operated in the landscape almost by themselves, almost as if it had been designed that way. Around another corner was an elevated deer stand that offered occupants clear sight lines to fire hunting rifles along the road. I soon stopped hearing the frogs.

I was in a land focused on outcomes. It was built for harvest.

The downpour from the previous days had compacted the seemingly never-ending sand that made up most of the dirt roads of the Palmetto Trail’s Santee Passage. There is so much sand in the lower half of South Carolina that the entire trail from Columbia to the coast could be retitled the Palmetto Trail of Sand (see fig. 8.2). This landscape is a sandscape.

That sand is the long story of Santee Cooper country, the leftovers from being a seafloor. Chipped off, broken off, worn down, submerged for so long, pushed and crushed by water and wind and tectonics, these grains mixed with whatever was here to form the slow-moving soil. They mark time in a way that challenges the human clock and encourages human experience as a substitute for the exacting time counted with atomic precision on all of our devices.

As measures of time, grains of sand are infinite increments on the move, heading somewhere subtly. Old Testament writers liked to use sand to explain unexplainable things, a way to calculate the incalculable. “The sand of the sea, which cannot be counted,” says Genesis 32:12 in the New International Version. “Joseph,” according to Genesis 41:49, “stored up huge Page 223 →quantities of grain, like the sand of the sea; it was so much that he stopped keeping records because it was beyond measure.”

A sandy lane at the beginning of my ride near Santee passed under I-95. It shook every few seconds from tractor trailers hitting seams overhead. Those vibrations were not as precise as ones from a ticking clock, but they were as relentless. Cycling through the soft roads of the Santee and Eutaw Springs Passages was like riding through acres of kitchen sponges. The trail took my calories and spread them outward into the ground, keeping the energy while taking more.

Sand is good at that. That is what it does. It drains.

As the morning warmed, tiny damp crystals crunched under my tires, almost squeaking. A pedal turned a shaft that pushed a rubber tire that compressed them into stillness. Something else would eventually come along to force them along again. The process is not new. The sand has always been secondary in our stories. The hourglass has been what matters. Page 224 →It is how we measure what is beyond measure, how we fit the infinite into our attention span.

Much of this sand adjacent to Lake Marion has defied modernization. Isolated here on the margins of capitalism, there is far more supply than demand. Without a shell of asphalt, this sand forces a traveler to slow down and adapt to the uncertainty. It is one of the gifts of the Palmetto Trail. Our bodies become actively engaged in determining how we experience time, how we decide our own angle of repose.⁴¹

On this ride on an officially winter day in early March that reached almost eighty degrees, the sand roads were beige, off-white, and gray. In a few places, they were dark and muddy. For some stretches they glowed with an orange tint, the color of beach that wealthy people tend to avoid. The farther south that I rode, the color of the trail seemed to get more gray, almost as though it were aging alongside me.

The sun did that. The brighter it got, the harder it was to see what lay ahead. The fog burned away, and an hour before noon the clouds started to glow. Slants of bright light poked through repeatedly. I could almost feel my pupils constrict in their evolutionary defense, narrowing in order to survive.

The sand roads changed to paved ones a few miles from the small town of Vance. A white-painted cinder block church with a white steeple sat where the dirt road ended. “How you treat others will return to you” was the advice on the marquee of the Refuge New Cavalry COOLJC Inc. Church. COOLJC stood for “Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” A black and white plastic yard sign declared “Only One Way To Heaven.”

The one way to Vance was clear. It is literally called Vance Road and takes a person to Vance in about a mile (three miles in the other direction, Vance Road crosses I-95). Just before the CSX railroad track crossing in Vance, the town sign proudly announces it to be the home of Mike Williams, a star National Football League wide receiver who played at nearby Lake Marion High School and then Clemson University. In 2010, around the time of his high school days, Vance had 170 residents. By 2020, that number was down to 128.⁴²

Small towns are the backbone of rural America, despite their being described by scholars as worlds lost, hollowed out, and left behind.⁴³ Vance has a post office, a Family Dollar store, a locally named restaurant, and a small locally named gas station. It is thirty-one miles from the nearest Page 225 →Wal-Mart (and sixty miles to the nearest Amazon distribution center—a gargantuan complex that the chain box stores could not stop from locating in South Carolina).

It is almost six miles to the nearest Dollar General and grocery store (of the IGA chain that specializes in small town locations). They are in Eutawville. The Palmetto Trail route heads that way, passing the Vance-Providence Elementary School on the way out of town. That school, in the year of the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision, had approximately 230 students. Almost 90 percent of the students identified as African American. Students who identified as white accounted for less than 6 percent. Almost 65 percent of students had family incomes that qualified as free lunch eligible.⁴⁴

In the six miles from Vance to Eutawville, I followed the sand through a large farm of tall, mature pine trees with black singe lines from regular prescribed burns (see fig. 8.3). The view is similar to the geometrical pinescape found in South Carolina’s Sumter and Marion National Forests, with an open, grassy understory that offers a savanna feel despite the scientific spacing of the one-crop tree garden. Sliding my bike tires back and forth between ruts, I saw ahead of me the first car on a dirt road that day, a late model grey sedan with a faded USC Gamecocks sticker. The driver was going half my speed, and I eventually passed her. She dangled a lit cigarette out an open window. We waved. She was looking at the pines.

Page 226 →The approach to Eutawville was dominated by peach orchards. The peach trees were beginning to bud out. I worried it was happening too early. The rhythm of pines and peaches between Vance and Eutawville gave way at one point to a field of mostly empty, apparently abandoned mobile homes. A bent and weathered sign at the edge of the field described a USDA-linked demonstration project in “plasticulture” that the sign identified as a “Conservation Survival System for Small Farmers.”

Seeing mobile homes in the rural South is common. They are essential for providing affordable shelter. Seeing abandoned ones was uncommon on this route. They are a big business in rural South Carolina. For Orangeburg County from 2017–2021, mobile homes were an estimated 31 percent of the total housing units. Across the lake in Clarendon County, the number was 37.5 percent (the second-highest in the state, behind neighboring Williamsburg County at 39.7 percent). For South Carolina as a whole, the percentage was 15 percent, a decline from almost 20 percent in 2000 when the state led the nation. The lowest percentages for 2017–2021 were in the urban counties of Greenville, Charleston, and Richland (home of Columbia, the state capital), at 8.2 percent, 5.5 percent, and 4.9 percent respectively.⁴⁵

The pattern of alternating pine-peach-pine stopped abruptly at a turn onto a deceptively busy two-lane highway into Eutawville. Across the ditch in front of a fence-deep line of pines, two waist-high white crosses held the top of the ridge. Sunflowers were in the middle of the crosses. Solar lights were inserted beside blue and white fabric flowers, ready to illuminate the names of two young men killed there in a car crash on Halloween in 2020. One was twenty-eight years old. One was thirty-two. They had grown up in the Eutawville community and had large, grieving extended families.⁴⁶

“Eutaw” is reportedly a Catawba word for “pine tree.” The city seal of Eutawville has a pine cone in it, and as the legend goes, the name comes from that connection. In the nineteenth century, it was considered a place of reprieve from Low Country mosquitoes and what we know of today as their deadly bloodborne pathogens.⁴⁷ One major public health development after the 1940s was the end of malaria in the Santee Cooper area, which was perhaps the deadly parasite’s last remaining holdout in the United States.⁴⁸ In the mid-nineteenth century, Eutawville grew into a small commercial anchor for the plantation-centered economy and culture in the Santee region. Place names throughout the area reflect the intermarried quasi-aristocracy of the plantation elite, many tied to the French Protestants Page 227 →who dominated the Lowcountry before and after the American Revolution. Limestone deposits in the soil were reputed to have made the local lands more fertile, encouraging large scale landowning and slaveholding.

As the historian Robert Hart chronicles, those families established a plantation culture that was the principal shaper of the landscape until Santee Cooper surpassed them and their control of the land. He captures that change poignantly in a scene from 1936, two years after the Santee Cooper project began, as the old families carried on a favorite pastime, a medieval-flavored jousting match with thirteen knights. “Charging down the field,” Hart writes, “Berkeley Palmer, the Knight of Etowah, dressed in a black velvet coat, collected eight two-inch rings on his eight-foot lance to win the competition.”⁴⁹

Eutawville thrived as a small town well into the post–World War II era. It had handsome buildings and a tidy Episcopal chapel. In 2024, at first glance, its thriving time had passed. While the post office was busy, downtown was mostly vacant. Immediately beyond the highway sign for St. James Gaillard Elementary School was an empty storefront, solid brick with its glass intact.⁵⁰ It advertised a rare combined service—bicycle and gun repair.

Across the street, a defunct cold drink machine with a rusted front leaned beside a vacant, brick building with broken upstairs windows. At one point in the past, the machine had offered Sprite and Coke, and presumably a smile. The electric meter for the building was gone, and the wires descended to nothing. A sign on the structure signaled that it was once a place of hope as the location of the “Full Gospel Deliverance Headquarters.”

The population of Eutawville has declined from 315 in 2010 to 235 in 2020. The number of white residents has dropped from 193 to 139, African American residents from 114 to 75.⁵¹ One of the buildings with its lights on was the Dollar General chain store that has built its business by milking profits from isolation, selling common goods on the geographic margins of in-person consumer capitalism. But the days of dollar stores might be numbered. Our new digital-machine age makes it easy to buy and sell without storefronts, further eroding the infrastructure for sustaining a sense of community.

People who live in Eutawville undoubtedly can see beyond what appears to be the gradual vanishing of their town and know the sense of community they feel, but it is much harder for a traveler without the ties of family or land or personal memories.⁵² I did see some clear signs of community. Men at the grocery talked and laughed as they leaned against Page 228 →the bed of a pickup truck. The word “Community” was literally in the sign of the Eutawville Community Center. The center appeared to be well-maintained. It had bathrooms and a ball field. A home run to the left side could easily hit the railroad tracks a few feet away.

The curve of those tracks goes back over a century. Part of the old Atlantic Coast Line (now the CSX) I crossed earlier, it has made its sharp turn to the south along that outfield fence for generations. The city’s water tower still stood over the intersection by the ball park. A rail station had once operated close by it. The foundation of an old building remained visible in 2024.

A 1972 photograph shows that building with a sign of the Kerr-McGee energy corporation, a once booming petrochemical-nuclear company whose name slipped away amid mergers in the early twenty-first century.⁵³ It is probably best remembered now for the toxic pollution its facilities left behind and its role in the case that became the nuclear contamination story for the film Silkwood, starring a young, Oscar-nominated Meryl Streep.⁵⁴ Robert S. Kerr was a founder of that company in the Oklahoma boom days of the late 1920s. He became Oklahoma’s governor in the early 1940s, and then in 1948, was elected to the US Senate as a Democrat.

Joining Kerr as a first time US senator that year was Lyndon B. Johnson, the future president who became known as “Landslide Lyndon” after winning in 1948 by only eighty-seven votes. One of his proudest accomplishments had been bringing electricity to his beloved Texas Hill Country by damming up the Colorado River. South Carolina’s senators that session of Congress were also Democrats, as were the vast majority of southern elected officials. Olin Johnston had been elected in 1944. His colleague as the senior senator from the Palmetto State was Burnet Maybank, the former mayor of Charleston, former chair of Santee Cooper, and former governor of South Carolina who was perhaps the state’s single-most aggressive and persistent proponent of the Santee Cooper project.

Maybank was elected to the US Senate in 1941, the same year that the Santee Reservoir (Lake Marion) began to fill. He replaced James F. Byrnes, another crucial advocate for Santee Cooper. Byrnes had resigned his senate seat to join the US Supreme Court. Bringing power to the people was a good way to get elected, and reelected—and to rise.

Other changes in 1941 shaped the landscape in other ways, too, and ultimately made this 2024 ride through the land possible. In November 1941, the Atlantic Coast Line asked the US Interstate Commerce Commission for permission to abandon the almost six-mile branch railroad line that had connected Eutawville to Ferguson. The once-thriving mill town Page 229 →of the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company had been flooded by Santee Cooper, and the lands owned by that company’s owners made up about a third of the acres purchased by the government project.⁵⁵

Today, the Palmetto Trail flows in the general direction of the now-gone Ferguson spur, though not on it as a converted rail-trail. It leaves it and comes back to it, hugging its edges, raising questions about what vanished here and what remains. A series of topographic and aerial maps from the 1920s through the 1940s shows the 5.6-mile spur leaving the mainline near what is today 1st Street and 2nd Street in Eutawville and crossing today’s Gaillard Street at its 90-degree bend and then heading into the countryside. Its old path seems to be near what is today Bounty Road adjacent to the Palmetto Trail through the Gardensgate section. (Before 2016, the Palmetto Trail followed Bounty Road). That old rail route passed just south of the Eutaw Springs battlefield monuments before shifting northward toward Ferguson.⁵⁶

With the glaring exception of the Ferguson railroad spur being gone, the field and forest configuration of the Gardensgate section of the Eutaw Springs Passage has held for at least ninety years (see fig. 8.4). The 1921 Eutawville Quadrangle map and a series of aerial photographs from 1937, 1948, and 1973 capture forests, fields, and ponds similar to how they appear now.⁵⁷

Page 230 →This section through the privately owned Gardensgate property builds backward in time toward war and revolution from 250 years ago. In March 2024, its surface was thick with soft leaves and downed branches. The section began in familiar pine forest, but as the trail climbed a few feet, a thick, bare oak appeared. More oaks around a corner populated a rise in the land, forming an edge. Soon, Spanish moss hung from a line of oaks that grew at a sharp angle toward an open field. Boy Scouts had built a campsite with a fire pit. As the trail turned to share the fence line with the sand path called Bounty Road, the Palmetto Trail became a moss tunnel. A wire fence was covered with it on one side. Trees with arcing limbs were covered with it on the other. The tunnel only lasted a couple hundred feet, but it was unforgettable. I wanted to believe train cars once passed close by with passengers witnessing some of these same trees.

Trees tell time. Trees are increments of time. Children learn about their rings early in life. Some trees are called “mother trees,” which help govern the forest over long periods. Scientists can use their contributions to chart the story of the soil as a community.⁵⁸ Some experts can analyze human history from the way trees have reacted. Other experts can cut them down in a few seconds. Landscape scholars can find “wolf trees,” solitary trees so different from the trees around them that they stand out like lone wolves.⁵⁹ A full canopied oak alone on a ridge surrounded by tall pines suggests that the oak had grown in an open field there long ago.

Some trees are actually called witness trees, ones that have been alive so long that they shared the space where something notable happened in history. They can tell us about fence lines and rail lines, and battlefields, too. A few of them stopped time for me outside Eutawville. They had thick trunks and old bends and were tasseled with grey moss that glowed in the sun.

One of the trees on the Palmetto Trail’s Eutaw Springs Passage is specifically celebrated as a “Witness Tree.” A magnificent live oak over 250 years old, its roots were in this soil at Eutaw Springs in September 1781 when the British and the Americans fought one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolutionary War (see fig. 8.5). Its cells may have sensed the concussive ripples from the deadly cannons of both armies. Its leaves may have been engaged in photosynthesis at the moment of human truth when men felt their muscles tighten, their sweat soak into their clothes, and their hands reach for steel. Its bark might have filtered bitter soot from smoke that built toward eventual victory.

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More than 300 people on both sides died because of what happened near that tree. The rest lived to die on a different day. Now, a few yards away from that eighteenth-century oak with its wide roots, Old Number Six Highway is so well engineered that cars regularly carry human bodies past at over sixty miles an hour. The pavement is so close that the tree must sense those modern vibrations and machine-made winds.

The Eutaw Springs battlefield site is on a pleasant hill by that busy highway. It is covered in old oaks, pines, and other trees. The monuments, burial memorials, and historic markers anchor a manicured and welcoming place. A peninsula funnels a visitor down to Lake Marion and gives a chance to read historical markers about the old springs, the limestone, the clay, and the caves that drew the interest of scientists like Charles Lyell in their quest to find the origin of human existence in the earth’s subsurface.

I did not know that witness tree was so special. It appeared to be part of a construction zone. As I have learned, it is being preserved as part of South Carolina’s Revolutionary War effort called The Liberty Trail. The American Page 232 →Battlefield Trust has engaged an effort to restore the landscape around the tree from private property to a field more reflective of the 1781 viewscape.⁶⁰ Witness trees have become subjects of federal preservation policy. The National Park Service initiated the Witness Tree Protection Program in 2006 to systematically identify and preserve notable living memorials.⁶¹ The Eutaw Springs battlefield live oak is most deserving of care and protection.

Past the battlefield, the railroad spur to the lost town of Ferguson disappeared into the land long ago. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it had connected this part of the world to the great boom of nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial capitalism. A motorized artery of Gilded Age wealth, it drew board feet of lumber from the Santee swamps to build the modern world.⁶² Now, a dirt road remains in the vicinity. Maps from 1921 show the rail line paralleling a road in the same basic space. In 2024, that road is called Ferguson Landing Way. It cuts through the Santee Cooper Wildlife Management Area and ends at Taylor’s Landing and Campground, a commercial enterprise with places to park small RVs and trailers. Several semi-friendly dogs were out at the crowded camp spots when I pedaled by to look at the lake. The boat launch area had food and kayaks. By boat, one can float over the old town of Ferguson and look at the ruins that remain above the water.⁶³

That dirt road to what was once Ferguson is not officially part of the Palmetto Trail route, but it is an easy, flat 1.7-mile diversion through a picturesque tunnel of trees and Spanish moss. The Palmetto Trail passes by its turn off as the trail heads down an arrow-straight road named Fredcon. It is paved and flat for two miles until it turns to sand. Geometric-industrial pine gardens flank both sides, disrupted by low spots where Lake Marion shows up. Signs declare it officially Santee Cooper country, primarily as a wildlife management area for hunting and population control for wild game.

Where the paved part of Fredcon turned to sand, a dead bat lay on the edge of the road. One wing lay flat. One wing was not visible, either torn off or curled under its small body. Its face was turned toward the earth. Its ears pointed straight out. I assumed that it, like all the other roadside dead, was done in by an automobile. I had never seen a road-killed bat and assumed their echolocation gave them a superpower to avoid it. But, as the scholarship shows, even bat senses can be no match for automobiles. Among many factors possibly contributing to bat roadkill is navigation Page 233 →interference caused by traffic noise. And their bodies are so small, and maybe so delicious, that they do not remain visible long enough for humans to get an effective count.⁶⁴

The sign beyond the bat said, “End State Maintenance.” Shotgun blasts left pellet marks in the white paint. Fredcon Road narrowed to a grey line. The land around it got wetter, the trees harder, the shrubs denser.

I encountered more wildlife on this two-mile stretch of sand road than on all the other miles of this day combined. The birds there were the loudest of the whole day. A startled deer ran across the sand and splashed away to the right into thick swamp. At the same time, two others went in the opposite direction into brush so dense that the deer vanished except for a brief line of wiggling and shaking as the sound of cracking faded. Overhead, six vultures swirled on thermals.

The wind was gentle. Spanish moss hung from the trees. Carolina Jessamine grew in swaths, continuing to serve as a pre-spring highlight on the trail. It grew thicker here, though, than in any other place.

The trash was multicolored, and it, too, was thicker here than at any other place. It lay at my feet as I watched the vultures and moss sway overhead. Its presence was not a surprise, but this wildest stretch of this Palmetto Trail passage turned out also to be the trashiest. In this postcard-worthy part of Fredcon, the trash was more than litter. It was splatter. It was not a cup here or a chip bag there or a fast-food chicken sack trapped in debris. This stuff was vacation trash: three large, black plastic bags hurled into the ditch.

On display was a solid weekend’s worth of Styrofoam takeout, plastic packets of A.1. steak sauce torn at the corner, Fanta, Sprite, Mountain Dew, Heineken, Nissin brand chow mein noodles, and some kind of Russian cream. A particularly popular beverage was a juice-flavored tea drink with a label that declared “contains 0% juice.” Its logo had a man in sunglasses with a large, curly white mustache that resembled a surfing wave. A message on the opposite side of the bottle from his face commanded users to “Refresh then Recycle.”

The road ran straight to the east from there until it turned sharply to the south. A small culvert passed under the road (see fig. 8.6). In the dark water beyond it, one car tire lay flat, halfway submerged. Another tire was jammed upright into the culvert’s opening, though not enough to stop the current from passing through. The lake was rising that day. A beer can floated straight up and down, its top was open, and its colors were bleached by the sun. Small, dry leaves had fallen atop mounds of floating algae. The flow from the culvert moved them in a slow counterclockwise circle that looked like a hurricane map. The shriek of a red-shouldered hawk persisted for several minutes.

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Figure 8.6 Fredcon Road, Santee Cooper Wildlife Management Area, Eutaw Springs Passage. Photograph taken where Lake Marion crosses under the dirt road through a small culvert. Author photograph, March 4, 2024.

A duck blind stood in the water of a Lake Marion cove. My mind might have imagined that as a duck blind, transposing a common sight from my watery Louisiana and Texas childhood into this moment. It might have just been a tight group of trees too far away for me to see clearly. I wanted it to be a place where people gathered before dawn to anticipate something. I wanted it to be a place where people ate meat from a can, listened for birds, and found meaning in shadows.

Not far beyond, an abandoned house or corporate retreat, once grand, was now in collapse. Pine trees had taken over, the young ones giving a camouflage of evergreen to the dark rust of a downed porch roof. The rural South is full of these buildings slowly dripping back to earth. They decay that way because it must be easier that way. They are symbols of surrender, of burdens borne, of prices paid (or unpaid). Like trees and sand, they provide hints of the past, and they connect observers to the mysteries of unexplained time.

It was here that it dawned on me that these roadside ditches were an active archive of modern America. I suspect the bottles and plastics in them will last as long there as they would in an acid-free box in a humidity-controlled library. The food from the trash was gone. The containers were what remained.

Page 235 →Fredcon Road followed the edge of Lake Marion and made a turn onto Nelson Ferry Road. Near the Palmetto Trail marker, brown vines veined around the signpost. Green leaves and Jessamine blossoms fluttered when the wind came. Soon, the dirt road ended abruptly at a paved street, Rocks Pond Road (see fig. 8.7). It is a straight street that leads vacationers and boaters to the Rocks Pond Campground, a fifty-year-old lakeside resort popular with campers who camp in motorized recreational vehicles (RVs).⁶⁵

I turned to the right and headed away from the lake. A few yards to the south, a common sight emerged. A turkey vulture was on the side of the road, a few feet into the ditch.

This time it was not feeding on roadkill. It was roadkill. Its mass of dark feathers made its red head and tubular neck stand out in the greening grass.⁶⁶

Fifty yards beyond, as I slow-pedaled and tried to suppress thinking about the irony of that vulture’s life and death, a malnourished dog walked out of tall, dead growth along a fence and watched me from the ditch. It was one of four dogs like that during the day. They all emerged from a ditch, rib cages and loose skin at odds with the momentum of their legs. Floppy and soft-footed, they were the kind of dogs familiar to rural pet shelters and animal control, some blend of hound, terrier, and who knows what else. This one, like the others, was alive for another day, a survivor on the move. One of them back near the town of Vance was clearly a mother, pendulous with milk and wary of what she was seeing.

Page 236 →This section of the Palmetto Trail is mostly on rural public roads, and there is an active dog culture. That can be said about any route in the rural South. Most of them this day were contained and well-cared for. A Labrador retriever was at home looking through the open window of a large pickup truck stopped along a sand road. Fun-loving yard dogs ran along chain link fences. Chains attached to collars kept others in their places. At least one Chihuahua stood on a couch, ears larger than its face, and raged behind a picture window.

The most memorable dog was not contained. It was an athlete. Tall and thick, ideally proportioned for rounding up feral hogs, this dog ran after me for over 200 yards on a dirt road holding at least a twenty-three-mile-per-hour pace. I kept turning my head around to look, and it kept being there. At some point it stopped barking and just breathed at cruising speed.

Several dogs had died recently from automobiles along the paved parts of the ride. I got off-track a couple of times (in part to avoid that athletic yard dog on my return) and had to do some extra pavement riding that included the high-speed Old Number Six Highway. Its roadside, in particular, was a morgue. The edge of the road in America holds an endless record of its technological progress.

The animals there are reminders that the people there are in danger, too, whether inside the cars or outside of them. Needing to get back to my own automobile before dark, I turned around and was soon back on Fredcon Road. On the paved, straight, fast portion, a memorial stood out in the pine tunnel a mile and a half from the formal memorials of Eutaw Springs battlefield. I had not seen this one in the industrial-garden-straight-line-grids when I had come through earlier. Six years before, a local high school student had died tragically in an automobile crash.⁶⁷

A large pine tree surrounded by seedlings had become a shrine to a beloved child and friend. It held a boat paddle, waterproof waders, mallard duck decoys, Mardi Gras beads, deer antlers, and an orange life preserver. An American flag angled out from the tree trunk. Statues of angels were spread out on the ground. Several tablets and stone markers carried messages about loss and love and the quickness of time. Inside a miniature Page 237 →wrought-iron-appearing fence was a large cross with a camouflage background. It held the name of a male child born in the first month of 2001 who had died in the third month of 2018, a few days after the official start of spring.

In the final two hours of my seven hours of the Santee Cooper century, I pedaled steadily to try to get back home on time. Riding an out-and-back route gave the chance to replay the day in reverse. Despite having ridden over 50,000 miles on a bicycle in the past decade and spent thousands of hours along the edge of the road, I could not stop thinking about that edge and how it can be a solitary and hazardous place. Being overtaken from behind by a fast car is not a time for community-building and conversation. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, it is, by far, the leading cause of death in car-cyclist crashes, accounting for 51 percent of fatalities in car-cyclist collisions.⁶⁸ I knew that statistic before the ride and knew I would be sharing some of the route with automobiles, so I was wearing a bright orange vest with a red helmet and had a fluorescent yellow and orange triangle on the rear of my bike. I had a blinking white light on the front and a blinking red light on the back with a car-sensing radar.

Dogs noticed me. Birds noticed me. The nonhuman world clearly reacted to my intruding on their world. The human world was more complicated. Drivers wanted to avoid me, and I wanted to be avoided. We all did it right this day, safely and politely along this American corridor, through this thin thread of this southern wood basket. I cannot avoid wondering, though, about what I avoided and what I failed to see, rolling through these forests and fields, crossing over bones and broken glass.

Back in Santee, when the ride was over, a light-yellow dust covered my bike frame. In these pine lands, pollen season was beginning. In other rides in the Carolina springtime on nearby Fort Jackson’s vast pine forests, I have ridden through enormous clouds of pine pollen suspended in breezes over the road. Yellow fog can last for days. On skin and clothes, the grains can feel like sandy soil.

I blew on the pollen to watch it whirl away as I put my bike on the car. I drank water and coffee. I finished my last orange-sticker-priced protein Page 238 →candy bar and started the car toward home. On a two-lane road, the sun settled to my left, to the west. I ignored the computer telling me the fastest way to return from beyond the city.

I followed the rivers back to Columbia, turning to the left after crossing the Congaree (on a new bridge that had replaced the first one built in 1949).⁶⁹ The Wateree was to the right, along with a massive coal-sourced energy plant and its three enormous smokestacks. North of that lies a massive paper mill where pulpwood trucks regularly line up for hundreds of yards with their cargo of stacked pines. They thunder down the highway to get there, sending shock waves that can be felt far from the road.

I kept going to the left and passed along the edge of Congaree National Park at twilight, guided by headlights, accelerating into the coming darkness.

1. 1. In 2016, according to the Federal Highway Administration, I-95 had 57 billion “vehicle miles traveled” in the United States. The next closest highway was I-10 at 44 billion and I-75 at 40 billion. Federal Highway Administration, “The Nation’s 15 Longest and Most Traveled Interstates,” no. 8, Twitter, July 3, 2018, https://x.com/USDOTFHWA/status/1014162087348785154; Marilyn Geewax, “Starting A Journey On I-95, The Road Most Traveled,” Weekend Edition, National Public Radio (NPR), August 20, 2010, https://www.npr.org/.
2. 2. SCDOT, “Average Daily Usage Orangeburg County, 2023,” Report from March 20, 2024, 16, https://www.scdot.org/.
3. 3. For a history of water and electricity in the Carolinas and Georgia, see Christopher J. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power: How the Politics of Cheap Energy and Water Scarcity Shaped a Region (University of North Carolina Press, 2015); “Francis Marion Bridge To Open Monday Morning,” The State (Columbia, SC), July 27, 1947; “Three Contracts Let for Second Longest Bridge in the State,” The State (Columbia, SC), August 31, 1941.
4. 4. US Highway 301 and US Highway 15 are both north-south highways that briefly share the same roadway before and after the Lake Marion crossing. This essay tends to refer to it as the 301 because of that highway’s role in national tourism. “Inland Charleston-Columbia Waterway Nears Realization,” The State (Columbia, SC), August 31, 1941.
5. 5. Richard Goodwin, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (Little, Brown and Company, 1988), 258.
6. 6. For a history of land policy and the New Deal, see Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
7. 7. William Yelverton, “Santee Mourns Bridge’s Closing,” The State (Columbia, SC), February 3, 1987.
8. 8. Page 239 →Corridor of Shame: The Neglect of South Carolina’s Rural Schools, directed by Bud Ferillo (Ferillo & Associates, 2005), DVD; Barack Obama, “Remarks in Manning, South Carolina: ‘A Challenge for Our Times,’” November 2, 2007, Public Papers of the Presidents, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/.
9. 9. Claudia Brinson Smith, Stories of Struggle: The Clash Over Civil Rights in South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2020), 43.
10. 10. Santee Cooper, “Licensed Through 2073,” January 2023, https://www.santeecooper.com/; T. Robert Hart, Jr. “The Santee-Cooper Landscape: Culture and Environment in the South Carolina Lowcountry” (PhD diss., University of Alabama, 2004); T. Robert Hart, “The Lowcountry Landscape: Politics, Preservation, and the Santee-Cooper Project,” Environmental History 18 (January 2013): 127–56; Matthew Allen Lockhart, “From Rice Fields To Duck Marshes: Sport Hunters and Environmental Change On the South Carolina Coast, 1890–1950” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2017), 298–300, 352–75; Walter B. Edgar, History of Santee Cooper, 1934–1984 (R. L. Bryan Company, 1984); Lacy K. Ford and Jared Bailey, Empowering Communities: How Electric Cooperatives Transformed Rural South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2022), 17–30; Jack Irby Hayes, Jr., South Carolina and the New Deal (University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 75–84.
11. 11. Hart, “The Santee Cooper Landscape,” 106–40; International African American Museum, “The Santee-Cooper Relocation Project,” online exhibit, https://iaamuseum.org/; Morgan P. Vickers, “Un/Drowned: Black Community Resistance and Persistence in the Santee-Cooper Project” (paper presented at “Wood Basket of the World” conference, April 22, 2023); Kelsey A. Moore, “Grave Claims: Unearthing the Meaning(s) of Ownership through Cemeteries in the Santee-Cooper Basin, 1890s–1942” (paper presented at “Wood Basket of the World” conference, April 22, 2023); Doug Bostick, Sunken Plantations: The Santee Cooper Project (The History Press, 2008); Jonathan Leader, “Drought Triggers Archaeology at Santee Cooper’s Dry Lake Beds,” Legacy 11, no. 3 (December 2007): 1, 4–5, https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1138&context=sciaa_staffpub; Thomas T. Waterman, A Survey of the Early Buildings in the Region of the Proposed Santee and Pinopolis Reservoirs in South Carolina (Historic American Building Survey and National Park Service, 1939); “Hanover House and Clemson University: 1941 and Beyond,” Clemson University, https://www.clemson.edu/. For a recent historic preservation study exploring the issues of the area’s structures and the processes of surveying them, see Kristina Poston, “It’s Not All Water Under the Bridge: Reevaluating Early Methods of Survey with a Case Study in St. John’s Parish” (master’s thesis, Clemson University, May 2018), https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/.
12. 12. For a US Department of the Interior geological study from the era in which Santee Cooper was developed, see C. Wythe Cooke, Geology of the Coastal Plain of South Carolina (US Government Printing Office, 1936).
13. 13. Native Land Digital, “Interactive Map,” https://native-land.ca; “About Us,” https://native-land.ca/about/our-team/.
14. 14. Palmetto Conservation Foundation (PCF), “The Palmetto Trail: Fast Facts,” https://palmettoconservation.org/palmetto-trail/; PCF, “Palmetto Trail Statewide Master Plan,” April 16, 2014, http://www.finishthepalmettotrail.org.
15. 15. Page 240 →Lawrence S. Earley, Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
16. 16. Richland County Conservation Commission, “Richland County SC Cultural Resources Inventory Listing, Goodwill Plantation, US Highway 378 Eastover SC 29044,” https://historicrichlandcountysc.com/.
17. 17. South Carolina State Park Service, Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, “Remembering and Acknowledging the History of Segregation in South Carolina State Parks,” online exhibit, https://scsps-rmi.maps.arcgis.com/.
18. 18. For an introduction to road ecology, the growth of research in the field, the profound impact of roadkill, and several efforts to make crossing busy roads less dangerous, see Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023).
19. 19. Logan Watts, “The Palmetto Trail: Southern Ditch Divide!,” Bikepacking.com, March 8, 2017, https://bikepacking.com/routes/palmetto-trail.
20. 20. Santee Cooper informed the South Carolina legislature that lake counties in 2016 “realized $415 million in tourism revenues” and 3,750 tourism-linked jobs that paid total of $69.6 million. South Carolina Public Service Authority, “Presentation to: Public Service Authority Evaluation and Recommendation Committee,” September 5, 2018, 37, https://www.scstatehouse.gov/.
21. 21. On fishing from motorized boats and from the bank, see Hart, “The Santee Cooper Landscape,” 6, 141–75.
22. 22. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Scribner, [1925] 2004), 180.
23. 23. See John Lane, My Paddle to the Sea: Eleven Days on the River of the Carolinas (University of Georgia Press, 2011). For the classic work on the Santee, see Henry Savage Jr., River of the Carolinas: The Santee (Rinehart, 1956), reprinted by the University of North Carolina Press in 2012 (paperback) and 2018 (e-book).
24. 24. Lockhart, “From Rice Fields to Duck Marshes,” 205–7.
25. 25. For histories of efforts to turn the Santee and Cooper rivers into a transportation route, including the Santee Canal Company which was chartered in 1786 and began operation in 1801, see Hart, “The Santee-Cooper Landscape,” 21–26, 20 for quote; Robert Kapsch, Historic Canals and Waterways of South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2010), pp. 1–53; Robert B. Bennett, “The Santee Canal, 1785–1939” (master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 1988). For the history of duck hunters and wealthy hunting clubs in managing the Santee, see Lockhart, “From Rice Fields to Duck Marshes.”
26. 26. Hart, “The Santee-Cooper Landscape,” 62–64, 72; Bostick, “North Hampton Plantation” and “Pond Bluff Plantation” in Sunken Plantations.
27. 27. Santee Cooper, “FERC Relicensing,” https://www.santeecooper.com/.
28. 28. US Army Corps of Engineers, Charleston District, “Santee River Basin Report No. 5: Navigability Study, 1977” (Stanley Consultants), 4–5, https://www.sac.usace.army.mil/.
29. 29. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Message to the Conference on Economic Conditions of the South,” July 4, 1938, Public Papers of the Presidency, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/.
30. 30. See “U.S. 301: Most Popular North South Route; Official Map of U.S. 301 Highway Assn., Inc.” 1960, South Caroliniana Library Map Collection, University of South Page 241 →Carolina, https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/; Lloyd Johnson, “Highway 301,” South Carolina Encyclopedia, https://www.scencyclopedia.org/.
31. 31. Mark T. Evans, “Main Street, America: Histories of I-95” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2010), 160–91.
32. 32. US Federal Highway Administration, “Moving 12-Month Total Vehicle Miles Traveled [M12MTVUSM227NFWA],” retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/.
33. 33. SCDOT, “Bridge Replacements Project: Interstate 95 Over Lake Marion Clarendon and Orangeburg Counties,” https://i-95-over-lake-marion-scdot.hub.arcgis.com; Tyler Fedor, “I-95 Bridge Construction Over Lake Marion Could Begin in 2025 With Grant Funding,” Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), August 15, 2023. https://www.postandcourier.com.
34. 34. “Progress/June 2022: Old U.S. 301 Span to Open to Pedestrians,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), January 29, 2023, https://thetandd.com.
35. 35. US Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration, South Carolina Department of Transportation et al., “James E. Clyburn Connecter, Calhoun, Clarendon and Sumter Counties: Final Environmental Impact Statement and Section 400 Evaluation,” December 5, 2002; “Crossing a Great Divide,” The State (Columbia, SC), May 20, 2007 (a 19-chapter special section of the Sunday edition); Adam Nossiter, “Race, Politics and a Bridge in South Carolina,” New York Times, February 25, 2007; “DOT approves Clyburn’s request to redirect $21.5M to 4 roads,” Associated Press, August 18, 2016, https://apnews.com.
36. 36. US Army Corps of Engineers, “U.S. Geological Survey, Eutawville Quadrangle, 1921,” Government Information and Maps Department, University of South Carolina, https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/topo/id/245/rec/2.
37. 37. “Town of Santee Comprehensive Plan, 2018–2028”; Dionne Gleaton, “Santee to Celebrate 70th Birthday Saturday,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), April 24, 2019, https://thetandd.com; “Santee Bridge Open?” The State (Columbia, SC), October 15, 1927.
38. 38. South Carolina Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office, “South Carolina Municipality Total Resident Population by Race and Ethnicity, Decennial Census 2010–2020 Comparison,” https://rfa.sc.gov/media/7057.
39. 39. I first heard the term “behind the pine curtain” from my brother-in-law a couple of years ago as a reference to the specific pine lands of Arkansas, eastern Texas, and northern Louisiana. Bikepacking Roots, the biking advocacy non-profit, has a route named with the phrase. Patrick Farnsworth, “The Pine Curtain of Texas,” BikePacking Roots, March 19, 2024, https://bikepackingroots.org.
40. 40. “CSX System Map,” https://www.csx.com; SCDOT, “South Carolina Statewide Rail Plan,” August 2014, https://www.scdot.org.
41. 41. Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose (Doubleday, 1971).
42. 42. South Carolina Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office, “South Carolina Municipality Total Resident Population by Race and Ethnicity, Decennial Census 2010–2020 Comparison,” https://rfa.sc.gov/media/7057.
43. 43. Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Patrick Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, Hollowing Out the Page 242 →Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America (Beacon Press, 2009); Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Small-Town America (Princeton University Press, 2019).
44. 44. US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, “School Directory Information (2023–2024 School Year), Vance-Providence Elementary,” https://nces.ed.gov.
45. 45. South Carolina Revenue and fiscal Affairs Office, South Carolina Census State Data Center, “Estimated Number of Mobile Homes in South Carolina: 2015–2019, 2017–2021,” https://rfa.sc.gov; J. Terrence Farris, “Manufactured Housing,” South Carolina Encyclopedia, https://www.scencyclopedia.org.
46. 46. “Official Obituary for Jamar Antwan Ashby October 31, 2020,” Eutawville Community Funeral Home, https://www.eutawvillefuneralhome.com; “Official Obituary for Erick Omar Rogers October 31, 2020,” Eutawville Community Funeral Home, https://www.eutawvillefuneralhome.com.
47. 47. Town of Eutawville, SC, “A Little Eutawville History,” https://www.eutawvillesc.org; Hart, “The Santee-Cooper Landscape,” 31.
48. 48. Two public health scholars found that the flooding from Santee Cooper project initially worsened malaria, but by 1950 it was “gone from its last endemic focus” in the US. They identified serious ethical breaches in not treating known malaria patients and referring to children as “parasitemia reservoirs.” Leo Barney Slater and Margaret Humphreys, “Parasites and Progress: Ethical Decision-Making and the Santee-Cooper Malaria Study, 1944–1949,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 51 (Winter 2008): 103–20, quotes from 113–14, https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2008.0011.
49. 49. Hart, “The Santee-Cooper Landscape,” 8–38, 38 for quote.
50. 50. For an education scholar’s description of attending this school in 1978, see Michele Evonne Gillens Myers, “A Study of the Intersections of Race, Schooling, and Family Life in a Rural Black Community” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2013), 1–4.
51. 51. South Carolina Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office, “South Carolina Municipality Total Resident Population by Race and Ethnicity, Decennial Census 2010–2020 Comparison,” https://rfa.sc.gov.
52. 52. On the vanishing South Carolina small town cultures, see Vennie Deas Moore, “The Fishing Village of McClellanville, South Carolina,” Southern Cultures 24 (Spring 2018): 83–99.
53. 53. “SCL (ACL) STA, Eutawville, S.C. 1972–02,” February 1972, Railroads Photograph Collection, Folder 10926 41–80, Accession number 10926–54, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/rrc/id/1538/rec/1.
54. 54. On the culture and politics of nuclear waste and nuclear energy in the South, see Caroline Rose Peyton, “Radioactive Dixie: A History of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Waste in the American South, 1950–1990” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2016).
55. 55. “Notice: Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Company,” The State (Columbia, SC), November 27, 1941; Jessica Elfenbein, “Extractive Industries—Lumbering Congaree,”Historic Resource Survey, Congaree National Park (2019): 178.
56. 56. Page 243 →US Army Corps of Engineers, “U.S. Geological Survey, Eutawville Quadrangle, 1921”; US Army Corps of Engineers, “U.S. Geological Survey, Eutawville Quadrangle, 1942,” https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/topo/id/246/rec/3; US Army Corps of Engineers, “U.S. Geological Survey, Eutawville Quadrangle, 1944,” https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/topo/id/247/rec/1; Palmetto Conservation Foundation, “Report To Members 2016,” October 24, 2016, 4, https://palmettoconservation.org.
57. 57. US Department of Agriculture, Production and Marketing Administration, “Aerial Photograph Index, Orangeburg County (S.C.), 1937: Sheet 19 of 20,” South Carolina USDA Historic Aerial Photographic Collection, South Carolina Aerial Photograph Indexes, 1937–1989, University of South Carolina, https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/scai/id/1908/rec/7; “Aerial Photograph Index, Orangeburg County (S.C.), 1948: Sheet 4 of 7”; “Aerial Photograph Index, Orangeburg County (S.C.), 1948: Sheet 4 of 7,” https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/scai/id/1641/rec/11; “Aerial Photograph Index, Orangeburg County (S.C.), 1973: Sheet 1 of 7,” https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/scai/id/1972/rec/7.
58. 58. Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Knopf, 2021).
59. 59. Anne Winston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (Yale University Press, 1998), 18–20.
60. 60. The Liberty Trail, “An Unforgettable Journey Through Place and Time,” https://www.scbattlegroundtrust.org; American Battlefield Trust, “Eutaw Springs Witness Tree,” https://www.battlefields.org.
61. 61. Mike Townsend, “Silent Sentinels of Storied Landscapes: Witness Tree Protection Program,” October 24, 2017, (originally published in National Mall Times, 2012), https://www.nps.gov.
62. 62. Elfenbein, “Extractive Industries—Lumbering Congaree”; see chapter 1 above.
63. 63. Leader, “Drought Triggers Archaeology at Santee Cooper’s Dry Lake Beds,” 1, 4–5.
64. 64. D. F. Ramalho and L.M.S. Aguiar, “Bats on the Road—A Review of the Impacts of Roads and Highways on Bats,” Acta Chiropterologica 22, no. 2: 425, https://doi.org/10.3161/15081109ACC2020.22.2.015.
65. 65. Hart, “The Santee-Cooper Landscape,” 149–50.
66. 66. For an exploration of the roadside “necrobiome” and ways that vultures and other scavengers are thriving, see Goldfarb, Crossings, 178–92.
67. 67. “‘I’ll Miss His Smile’: Teen Killed in Crash Brought Joy to Others,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), March 28, 2018, https://thetandd.com.
68. 68. National Transportation Safety Board, “Bicyclist Safety on US Roadways: Crash Risks and Countermeasures. Safety Research Report NTSB/SS-19/01” (NTSB, November 5, 2019), 29, https://www.ntsb.gov.
69. 69. “Where New Bridge Is Being Constructed Over Congaree,” The State (Columbia, SC), June 25, 1941; Thomas Chadwick, “Richland, Calhoun Bound by New Fort Motte Bridge,” The State (Columbia, SC), February 28, 1949.