Introduction

Page 1 →– Caroline Grego –

In the parking area of the Harry Hampton Visitor Center at Congaree National Park, there is a tree out of place. Amid the asphalt, the cars, and the upland loblolly and longleaf pine forest, a bald cypress log rests on sturdy supports (see fig. I.1). Bald cypress trees do not belong on the bluff at Congaree, but the story of this particular tree in that particular place is revelatory of the history of forestry in South Carolina.

Page 2 →The log is a relic of the millions of acres of bottomland floodplain forests and swamps that once flanked the rivers of the present-day southeastern United States. The Santee Debris Removal Company dredged it up from the bottom of Lake Marion in 2021. The company salvages cypress and other hardwood logs, whether harvested or deadfall, from river and lake beds in South Carolina’s coastal plain. Some of these logs have been submerged for hundreds of years. This log, however, was cut sometime in the early twentieth century. Axe marks at its hollow base suggest that lumbermen chopped the behemoth down and discarded it once they saw that the tree was hollow and, therefore, unable to be milled and transformed into shingles, siding, or furniture. Given the location and the timing, the loggers probably worked for the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company (SRCLC). At their hands, the tree suffered the fate of many bald cypress that were ill-formed for commodification. Many cypress were gravid with sap—these so-called “sinkers” settled into the bed of southern rivers before they could float downstream to lumber mills. Some, their growth twisted by downed crowns and branches, were spared the axe. Still, others, like the one parked at the Harry Hampton Visitor Center, seemed sound, tall, and strong, ready for segmentation into mill-ready pieces, transportation down a river to the mills, and transformation into wood products. But they were not. Their cores were cavities—they were useless to capital—and so loggers left them where they fell.

Cypress trees resist rot. The tree at the Congaree parking lot must have lain on the forest floor for around forty years. Perhaps the other old-growth cypress around it were logged and dragged away. Perhaps the loggers were only targeting select trees, so maybe the old cypress forest continued to grow around the downed tree. In November 1941, though, the Santee Cooper Power and Navigation Project dammed the Santee River and flooded the timber lands where the cypress had fallen. The log was submerged under man-made Lake Marion, 110,000 acres of water that curve like a cow’s horn through southeastern South Carolina. There, the log lay in a lake that swallowed up ancient forests alongside sharecroppers’ cabins, cotton farms, antebellum houses, former dwellings of enslaved people, churches, country stores, and graveyards. Over the decades, the fibrous strands of the cypress’s outer bark sloughed off. The lake waters, tannic from the tens of thousands of acres of drowned cypress, cured the log and dyed its surface mottled blacks, grays, and browns. Then, sixty years after a dam made the Santee River drown its floodplain, the Santee Debris Removal Company recovered the log, pared it down to a fifteen-foot-length, and donated it to Congaree National Park.

Page 3 →Today, the cypress log is a remnant in a remnant place. The forest in which it sprouted does not exist anymore. The bluff forest where it now lies is the result of sustained efforts on the part of the National Park Service to return the habitat to a fire-dependent longleaf pine and grassland forest ecosystem—another kind of forest that once dominated the South and now exists only in small patches—an upland pair to its bottomland kin. The floodplain forest below the bluff, which stretches a couple miles south and many miles east along the north edge of the Congaree River, is the largest fragment of an old-growth bottomland hardwood forest left in the South. And yet even that forest has a long history of human use, modification, and logging—as well as environmentalist efforts to preserve it, first as a national monument in 1976 and then as a national park in 2003. Within South Carolina, remnants of ecosystems, with complex and fraught histories of human interactions, are what we have left for conservation.

This volume grapples with these kinds of histories. South Carolina’s history of forestry, as laid out in these essays, prompts provocative questions about what constitutes authenticity in fragmented, logged southern forests; how the state’s fraught labor and race relations can be seen within the forestry and wood products industries; and how conservationist efforts and sustainable forestry practices proceeded within challenging political and economic contexts. From the vantage of South Carolina’s forests today, the illusion that one is witnessing untouched, primeval ecosystems is impossible to maintain. Instead, cultural landscapes and human histories are evident, and the essays here illuminate and explain the significance of this alternative view of environmental history.

This volume does something that has not been done before: it charts a preliminary history of some key moments in the history of lumber, wood products, and forest conservation in South Carolina. Indeed, collections of this sort are rare regionally. Southern forests have received meaningful attention from historians over the decades, to be sure. Scholars have explored how colonial-era southern forests were spaces of ecological change and negotiation; how swamps and floodplain forests challenged the carefully ordered world of the plantation and an economy based on the forced labor of enslaved people; how mountain forests became sites for “commons environmentalism” and natural resource harvest; how the vast longleaf pine savannas of the South became sites of commercial enterprise.¹ These works have helped to bridge the disjuncture between how dominant these southern forests were hundreds of years ago, and the extent to which agricultural, commercial, and recreational human activity has altered them. And yet this work is just the beginning. The massive Page 4 →ecological transformation of the South’s forestlands deserves more attention, understanding, and analysis—and South Carolina’s history of lumber, wood products, and forest conservation does too.

Environmental history as a field emerged in many ways from environmentalist concerns in the 1960s and 1970s and spent its early decades dwelling mostly in the American West, among its spectacular mountains and canyons.² But the wetlands, coastal plains, and uplands of the South place environmental history in a distinct set of circumstances. For example, in South Carolina, the history of the environment is tied to complex dynamics of race and class; to the trickiness of introducing industry and wage labor to a largely agrarian state with a history of slavery; and to the circuitous routes that conservation efforts often had to travel to find a foothold. Pristine nature was rarely the concern. Southern forests have, after all, long been sites where humans experimented with modification and extraction. Instead, human histories of use predominate—and it is this preoccupation that makes this history in South Carolina so significant and illustrative. The history of forestry and the wood products industry in South Carolina brings environmental history together with the histories of business and labor.³ As this volume reveals, South Carolina’s history of forestry, then, brings us a clearer reflection of our own environmental world in the present and how it might evolve in the future because histories of human use and interaction are so evident.

The collection focuses mostly on South Carolina’s midlands and coastal plain during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are a few reasons for these geographic and temporal limits. Foremost among them is that the aforementioned Santee River Cypress Lumber Company concentrated its energies on the bottomland hardwood forests of the coastal plain. This company, founded in the 1880s by Chicago lumbermen Francis Beidler, Benjamin F. Ferguson, and others, looms large in this history, because the company owned major swaths of the state’s old-growth cypress forests. Indeed, the company plays a large role in six of this book’s eight chapters because the SRCLC provides a convenient entry point into the history of the state’s wood products industry and forest conservation efforts.

Big lumber developed on a commercial level in South Carolina only after the end of Reconstruction. Prior to the Civil War, enslaved workers cleared forests to make way for cotton and rice fields and harvested trees for firewood and carpentry. But the abolition of slavery and the second Industrial Revolution galvanized a segment of southern politicians, boosters, and businessmen to consider new possibilities for South Carolina’s economic future. While labor regimes like sharecropping came to Page 5 →replace slavery, and while agriculture continued to dominate South Carolina’s economy, forestry became a profitable way for white landowners and businessmen to use the state’s lands. Northern capital migrated south to take advantage of the sprawling timberlands in the state, and they brought with them new and pricey technologies, such as railroads and skidders that made commercial lumber viable. At the same time, the state’s forests were yet valuable as hunting, fishing, and foraging grounds, as they had been for thousands of years to the Indigenous peoples of the region and for centuries to both Black and white South Carolinians. While this anthology does have an eye on industry in the state’s forests, key to that history is also how South Carolinians, including workers, businessmen, reformers, foresters, ecologists, recreationists, and politicians across a range of racial, class, and gender identities related to and conceived of the meanings and uses of the forests around them.

In the South, racialized labor has often mediated the relationship between people and their environments. That is visible in forestry as well. Jordan Davis’s essay “‘A Town of Their Own’: African American Labor and Working-Class Life at Ferguson, South Carolina, 1890–1916,” is a remarkable reconstruction of the SRCLC-owned town of Ferguson. There, several hundred Black men, women, and children worked for the company in sawmills, domestic positions, and nearby lumber camps. In the backwoods of South Carolina, Jim Crow made its presence felt. The relative isolation of the town made a regimented hierarchy of race especially important to ensure orderly—and oppressive—social relations. Company managers enforced segregation in the town’s living and work arrangements and Black workers pushed against the SRCLC’s restrictive rules as they forged their own community relations amidst trying labor, environmental, and political conditions. Maggie Kemp’s chapter likewise explains the challenges that Black workers faced in forestry and forest management. In “Poinsett State Park: The Legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Sumter County, South Carolina,” Kemp relays the contributions of three CCC companies in building a state park on donated land in the High Hills of the Santee in South Carolina’s midlands. Poinsett was a pet project of prominent local white landowners who first pushed for a game refuge and later supported the creation of a state park in the mid-1930s with the use of CCC labor. One of the companies brought in to construct the park, number 4475, was comprised of young Black men from around the state. The white community around the proposed park would welcome two other CCC companies, but they met Company 4475 very differently. While Black workers came to be vital to forestry and forest management in South Carolina (some attempts Page 6 →to coax white forest workers from the North to come South notwithstanding), white bosses’ and white South Carolinians’ enforcement of a Jim Crow hierarchy limited the compensation and undermined the dignity of Black South Carolinians’ labor.

This labor, disciplined and controlled, was pivotal for profit. And in South Carolina, racial hierarchies and deep class divides meant that both Black and white labor was cheap. The state’s forests thus also presented opportunities for innovation for South Carolina towns attempting to shift from agriculture to industry. Jessica I. Elfenbein’s contribution “‘A Question of Community Salvation’: How Sumter, South Carolina Cornered the Wood Products Industry” and Mark Kinzer’s essay “An Independent Force for Change: The Holly Hill Lumber Company” trace business histories over several decades in South Carolina towns. Elfenbein charts how civic leaders in Sumter, once a regionally significant cotton trading center, lobbied to bring wood products companies to the town, hoping to reinvigorate the economy after the boll weevil contributed to the crash of cotton in the late 1910s. Wood products companies were both attracted to Sumter by the expansive nearby forests (including some owned by the SRCLC) and actively recruited there by the city’s aggressive and ambitious Board of Trade. By 1930, a range of companies producing furniture, barrels, and caskets had been established. The wood products industry flourished in Sumter for decades. And while the small town of Holly Hill, South Carolina, did not see the same ascendance as Sumter, the Holly Hill Lumber Company brought industrial innovation to the state’s coastal plain. Kinzer tracks the company’s ascent and descent through the mid- to late-twentieth century. In Sumter and in Holly Hill, a massive corporation stepped in to strip the smaller companies of their timberland: Georgia-Pacific purchased both the Williams Furniture Company and the Holly Hill Lumber Company in the late twentieth century.

South Carolina’s forests have undergone both increased corporate consolidation and conservation in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Three essays here explore the challenges that conservationist movements faced in protecting and revitalizing the state’s forests through the twentieth century. As the authors show, conservationist histories are in fact plentiful in South Carolina, but their trajectory has regional inflections that distinguish them from those that animated earlier environmental histories. Al Hester’s chapter “Expert Adviser: Daisy Priscilla Smith Edgerton and Early Forest Conservation in South Carolina” heralds the contributions of Charlestonian reformer Edgerton to the creation of South Carolina’s forestry commission. Edgerton wielded her experience as a “club woman” in Charleston’s elite Page 7 →white circles to advocate for a forest conservation movement in South Carolina. While she eventually moved to Washington, DC, to work for the US Forest Service, she maintained close ties to her home state by taking on a role as an outside adviser to South Carolina governor, Wilson G. Harvey on the formation of the South Carolina Forestry Association. Edgerton even went on a lecture tour across the state and gave forty lectures (all but one to white audiences) on the social, cultural, and health benefits of forests for the state’s families. Edgerton’s efforts reflected the involvement not only of club women in conservation efforts, but also the way in which conservation was a key interest of the wealthy white landowners in the state.

This legacy is reflected in Tom Lekan’s piece “‘Redwoods of the East’: Conservation, Ecology, and the Meanings of History at Congaree, 1930–1976,” which opens with newspaper man Harry Hampton’s sustained activism to protect the Congaree River’s old-growth floodplain forest southeast of Columbia, South Carolina (which was owned in large part by the Beidler family of the SRCLC). Descended from one of the richest and most powerful enslaver families in the state, Hampton was also a dedicated hunter, fisherman, and naturalist who spent a great deal of time in Congaree. He brought ecologists, botanists, birders, activists, garden clubs, journalists, and more to Congaree in the mid-twentieth century to garner interest in protecting not only the massive bald cypresses, but also the unique, biodiverse environments of the Congaree basin. Young environmentalists—students, biologists, and activists—from the nearby state capital of Columbia took up Hampton’s mantle in the 1960s and 1970s and successfully pushed for the creation of Congaree Swamp National Monument in 1976. Finally, T. Robert Hart’s “Saving Cypress, Preserving Habitat: The Beidler Forest Story,” relays the work of wildlife biologist Norm Brunswig in expanding the boundaries of Beidler Forest. Beidler Forest, an old-growth tract of bottomland hardwoods nestled among a sprawling network of floodplain forests on the coastal plain called Four Holes Swamp, was initially protected in 1969 due to a joint effort between The Nature Conservancy, the National Audubon Society, and Charleston newspaperman Peter Manigault, who was, like Hampton, an heir to a wealthy South Carolina family with its own long history of enslaving people. Brunswig was determined to protect the integrity of Beidler Forest and strategized to expand the forest from its original 3,415 acres, once owned by the SRCLC, to over 18,000 today. Pragmatically, Brunswig adapted his environmentalist ethos to the realities of South Carolina political and cultural life: over time, he grasped both the value of the state’s cultural landscapes to its rural inhabitants and the need to engage in cooperative relationships to sustain conservationist efforts.

Page 8 →This collection’s final essay is a meditation by Kent Germany, “Seven Hours of the Santee Cooper Century: Cycling Through the ‘Wood Basket of the World’ on the Palmetto Trail, March 2024,” about bicycling down the Palmetto Trail. He muses on the layered, altered, polluted, watery, and forested landscapes of the coastal plain from Columbia to Eutaw Springs. There, the railroad spur that once led to the first abandoned, then drowned lumber town of Ferguson splits from the Palmetto Trail. Along the way, he encounters trees—including a 250-year-old live oak heralded as a “witness tree,” for its position near the battlefield of the 1781 clash between British and American troops in Eutaw Springs. “Trees,” Germany writes, “tell time. Trees are increments of time.”

Some trees endure as witnesses to human events—remnants of their ancient forests—tellers of time through their cores. Does the bald cypress at Congaree count as a witness tree, despite its demise over one hundred years ago? Surely it must. That tree, far removed from its place of origin, grown to its maturity, chopped down, and brought to a parking lot by the forces of nature, capital, and humanity, is a time capsule. The log is a physical reminder of the history of forestry in South Carolina and, maybe, a herald of the future. As South Carolina’s forests undergo continued logging, strain from the climate crisis, and depletion from development, the cypress possesses dual meanings. It is a relic of forests that no longer exist, a visual depiction to visitors to Congaree of what was razed. But its preservation today, as an emblem of these forests that once were, evokes a sense of possibility, as does this collection. Indeed, Julian Buxton III’s poignant, personal afterword should leave readers with the distinct sense that these histories live on and are seen and felt not only within the pages of this anthology, but also in the landscapes of South Carolina.

The old trees are not all gone, and more are growing. But what kind of a world they will witness, and what the role of South Carolina’s forests in it will be, remains to be seen. This volume, and its attendant exhibits, projects, and collaborations, is a valuable resource in helping scholars, community members, onlookers, and more, to chart South Carolina’s forest history from the past and into the future.