Ferguson, South Carolina:
Drowned by the New Deal

In 1934, the South Carolina legislature authorized the South Carolina Public Service Authority — known as Santee Cooper — to construct a hydroelectric and navigation project on the Santee and Cooper rivers. The project would dam the Santee River, create two large reservoirs (Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie), and connect them by a canal to generate electricity and improve navigation to the port of Charleston.

The project received federal Public Works Administration funding — New Deal money, designed to put Americans back to work and electrify rural America. Construction began in 1939. By the time it was complete in 1942, Santee Cooper was one of the largest earth-moving projects ever undertaken in the Western Hemisphere at that time: 110,000 acres of lowcountry South Carolina swamp, farmland, and community had been flooded to create what would become the largest lake system in South Carolina.

The political framing was unambiguously progressive: rural electrification, economic development, jobs. What it required was the displacement of approximately 900 families from the land that would be flooded. In 1939–1941 South Carolina, the distribution of who those families were — and what recourse they had — was determined entirely by race.

Ferguson, South Carolina was a Black community in the lowcountry — the flat, river-threaded terrain of the South Carolina interior where Black families had farmed since emancipation. The communities in the Santee Cooper flood zone included Ferguson and dozens of other Black settlements, churches, and family farms spread across what are now Clarendon, Orangeburg, Calhoun, and Berkeley counties.

These were not marginal communities. Black families in the lowcountry had accumulated land since Reconstruction — sometimes through the federal land distribution programs of the 1860s and 1870s, sometimes through decades of sharecropping savings, sometimes through purchase from white landowners after the failure of Reconstruction-era tenancy arrangements. By 1939, Black landowners in the Santee Cooper flood zone held farms that had been in their families for two and three generations.

Ferguson specifically sat in the zone that would become the northern arm of Lake Marion. Its church, its school, its family plots, its community infrastructure — all were within the flood line. When the waters rose in 1941 and 1942, Ferguson went under.

The Santee Cooper authority acquired land for the flood zone through eminent domain condemnation. In theory, condemnation required fair market compensation. In practice, "fair market value" in Jim Crow South Carolina was whatever a white appraiser said it was, appealed before an all-white judge, in a state where Black landowners could not safely challenge the process.

Documented disparities in condemnation appraisals for the Santee Cooper project — and for comparable federal infrastructure projects of the same era — show that Black-owned land was consistently appraised below comparable white-owned land. The mechanisms were multiple: appraisers used comparison sales from a racially segmented market where Black-owned land sold for less because Black buyers had less access to credit; structural improvements on Black-owned land (churches, houses, barns) were assigned lower replacement value; and the "market" price reflected a legal system in which Black landowners had less ability to contest valuations.

When the Santee Cooper reservoir filled between 1941 and 1942, it covered 110,000 acres of the South Carolina interior under what would become Lake Marion (approximately 110,000 surface acres) and Lake Moultrie (approximately 60,000 surface acres). Together they formed — and still form — one of the largest lake systems east of the Mississippi River.

The flooding was total and permanent. Unlike drought-year drawdowns at Lake Lanier, the Santee Cooper system maintains its water levels for power generation, and the original flood zone has never been substantially re-exposed. The community of Ferguson, its church foundations, its cemetery plots, its school, the roads that connected it to neighboring settlements — all remain beneath the surface of Lake Marion's northern reaches.

An estimated 175,000 acres of forest was cleared or left standing in the flood zone. Aerial surveys and underwater exploration have documented the remnants of the pre-flood landscape: road networks, house foundations, millponds, the stone and brick remnants of community structures. The cultural geography of the lowcountry Black communities that were flooded is preserved, inaccessibly, under the lake's surface.

The stated purpose of the Santee Cooper project was rural electrification — bringing electricity to the South Carolina countryside. The project succeeded at this goal. By the late 1940s, Santee Cooper was generating hydroelectric power that reached farms, homes, and industry across South Carolina that had previously been without electricity.

In Jim Crow South Carolina, "rural electrification" meant electrification on terms set by a segregated system. Rural Electric Cooperatives that distributed Santee Cooper power in the 1940s and 1950s served communities where Black and white customers were treated differently — in line connection priority, in service quality, and in the industry recruitment that followed the availability of cheap power. The textile mills, manufacturing facilities, and commercial operations that located in South Carolina specifically because of Santee Cooper's cheap electricity predominantly employed white workers in the years following the project's completion.

The families displaced by the flooding — many of whom had farmed self-sufficient lowcountry land — found themselves relocated to communities without the land base they had built over generations, dependent on a wage economy in which racial discrimination determined their access to the jobs that the electricity they lost their homes to generate was helping to create.

Lake Marion today is one of the premier freshwater fishing destinations in the American South — famous for its striped bass, catfish, and crappie. The lake draws recreational anglers, boaters, and tourists from across the Southeast. The Santee Cooper lakes region generates significant tourism revenue for South Carolina. State parks, marinas, resorts, and fishing guides line the shoreline. Property values for lakefront land have appreciated for decades.

The communities that were displaced to create this recreation economy have no commemorative presence at the lake. Ferguson is not marked on any public map or interpretive sign at Lake Marion's recreation areas. The Santee Cooper authority's public history materials describe the project's engineering achievements and economic benefits; the displacement of approximately 900 families, and the racially differentiated terms of that displacement, are not prominently featured.

Descendants of Ferguson's displaced community live scattered across South Carolina and beyond — in Columbia, in Charleston, in northern cities reached via the Great Migration. Some have organized to document and preserve their history. The South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina holds an oral history collection that includes testimony from Santee Cooper flood zone descendants. It is among the most complete records of what was lost.

The Santee Cooper project was not exceptional within the New Deal's infrastructure program — it was typical. Across the American South, the federal government's Depression-era public works programs built dams, reservoirs, highways, and hydroelectric projects that displaced Black communities on racially unequal terms. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, and state-level Public Works Administration projects all operated within the racial structure of Jim Crow, which meant that the costs of infrastructure development were disproportionately borne by Black communities while the benefits — electricity, flood control, navigation, recreation — were disproportionately captured by white ones.

The New Deal has a justified reputation as an era of federal investment in the common good. That reputation is incomplete without this record. The "common good" that New Deal infrastructure served was a racially bounded common — one in which Black communities were treated as an acceptable cost of projects whose benefits flowed elsewhere. The political coalition that made the New Deal possible required Southern Democratic votes, which required that federal programs not disturb Jim Crow. The result was public investment structured along the same racial lines as the private economy it was meant to correct.

Ferguson, South Carolina and Lake Marion stand in a direct line with Oscarville, Georgia and Lake Lanier — and with the dozens of other Black communities submerged, bulldozed, or bisected by federal infrastructure from the 1930s through the 1960s. The mechanism in each case was the same: public authority, racially differentiated application, permanent dispossession, and a beneficiary economy that has compounded ever since.