By Laura Lance

This three-part series places Aiken’s railroad cut and wooden bridges in historic context — the development and building of the Charleston-Hamburg line; issues of deterioration and upkeep; the human stories; the environmental elements; the costs.

Part Two of Three:
The Charleston-Hamburg Line
Romantic Notions
Learning Curves
The Railroad Cut

The Charleston-Hamburg Line

The South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company built the original Charleston to Hamburg line, which was completed in 1833. At that time, it was the longest railroad line in the world.

Cut of “A new map of South Carolina with its canals, roads & distances from place to place along the stage & steam boat routes.” by Henry Schenck Tanner (1786-1858) in 1833. The  earliest general map to show the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company’s line. Altered.

Within 10 years, other new companies were started and new lines laid throughout the state. By the start of the Civil War, South Carolina could boast 13 railroads with over 985 miles of track. By the turn of the twentieth century, the 136-mile Charleston-Hamburg line would be part of an elaborate network spanning the entire country, encompassing nearly 200,000 miles of railways.⁷

The ownership of the Charleston to Hamburg Railroad was reorganized and/or changed hands several times during the 19th century and beyond. Each of these changes represented periods of growth and/or financial struggle. 

• South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company: 1828 (bought by the Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston Railroad Company in 1937)
• South Carolina Rail Road Company, 1843
• South Carolina Railway Company 1881
• South Carolina and Georgia Railroad Company 1894
• Southern Railway Company 1899
• Norfolk Southern Railway 1982 [Aiken Railway 2012, a short line railroad, leases local track from Norfolk Southern]⁶

During lean times, the line did well to survive. During periods of prosperity, improvements were made. The construction of Aiken’s six railroad bridges was roughly aligned with two periods of prosperity. The first occurred during the decade after the railroad cut was created, (1852-1862), and the second occurred during the final decade of the 19th century. 

These two periods bookended the Civil War and its aftermath, which had left the state economy threadbare and the railroad in shambles. The company was fairly quickly able to recover the tracks and other infrastructure destroyed by Sherman’s troops in 1865, but numerous other factors drove the company deeper into debt. In 1878, the South Carolina Rail Road Company was forced into receivership and sold at auction in 1881 to northern capitalists, who took control from the Charleston capitalists who had managed and directed it for over 50 years.⁷

Five years later, the newly-formed South Carolina Railway Company would take two major hits. In the first, the company was forced to change the gauge of the tracks — and, accordingly, acquire a new fleet of cars and engines — to match the standard across the Eastern Seaboard. The second was the Charleston earthquake of 1886, whose estimated magnitude of 6.9-7.3 rocked the entire state, the shock and damages extending into every region, including Aiken County.

“Wrecked at Langley.” One of two train derailments caused by water from the dam breaks at Langley and Bath during the Charleston earthquake of August 31st, 1886. Photographed by James A. Palmer, Aiken, S.C. In the public domain.

In Horse Creek Valley, the Langley dam broke, followed by the Bath dam. In the wake, two different trains derailed, their engines washed off the tracks. The lives of two engine firemen were lost in the two wrecks.The railroad was to fall back into receivership and changed hands twice more before the turn of the century.⁷

Prosperity began to take root, however, with the rise in passenger service during the 1880s-1890s . In the mid-1890s, the Chesterfield Street bridge was built. In 1897, following years of tension over issues with the railroad bridges, an agreement was reached between the South Carolina and Georgia Railroad Co. and Aiken officials. The company was to replace the York, Newberry and Laurens Street bridges within two years, with designs to match the newly-built Chesterfield Street bridge.⁸ In 1899, the company erected a new bridge at Fairfield Street and built Aiken’s Southern Railway passenger station at Union Street.

Postcard: The Southern Railroad station. Hugh C. Leighton Co., Portland, Maine (publisher) 1905. This work is in the public domain.

For the next 50 years, the railroad’s financial health ebbed and flowed with US wars,  booms, busts, and the Great Depression. By 1950, the railroad industry had made the switch from steam to diesel, which marked the swan song of the steam locomotive.

ABOVE: From the publication, “The First Quarter-Century of Steam Locomotives in North America.” Smithsonian Institution. Smith Hempstone Oliver, Curator of Land Transportation. United States National Museum. Bulletin 210, page 4. Click to view full size.

Southern Railway discontinued Aiken’s passenger service in 1950, citing declining demand and lack of profitability. This decision had been fought for two years prior by city leaders, merchants, the Aiken mayor, and also representatives from Branchville, Augusta and other towns along the line that would be affected by the closure.⁹ In 1954, Southern Railway demolished Aiken’s passenger station — again, over the protests of local leaders and merchants, who had requested the railroad donate or allow the city to buy the passenger station to be repurposed as a bus station or be used for other municipal functions. 

The loss of the passenger station and of passenger service — a fixture in Aiken since the first passengers arrived to town on the Charleston-Hamburg line in 1833 — changed forever a way of life in Aiken.

Romantic Notions

Aiken’s railroad history is marked by romantic notions, one being the idea that the train was built for the purpose of transporting wealthy travelers from the Low Country to Aiken to escape the heat and enjoy Aiken’s renowned healthful environment . This happened, of course, but it was freight service — specifically cotton trade — that brought the railroad to Aiken.⁷

Also, contrary to popular belief, no one ever rode the original “Best Friend of Charleston” to Aiken. That locomotive exploded in 1831 and never made the trip to Aiken. More on this in a moment.

Another romantic notion that reads like a page from the Scarlett O’Hara playbook is the story of the dashing civil engineer winning the hand of the beguiling plantation owner’s daughter in exchange for bringing the railroad to daddy’s doorstep. Left on the cutting room floor of that tale are the roles of the cotton trade, topography, and a man named Abram Blanding.

The establishment of the railroad was a long-contemplated effort, whose impetus grew during a series of economic blows to the state. First were slashed cotton prices in 1818-1819. This was followed by a general collapse of the US economy with the Panic of 1819. On the heels of this, a succession of tariff laws was passed in the 1820s that disadvantaged cotton growers and led to the nullification crisis. South Carolina was on the frontlines of this battle. The need to get upstate cotton to the port at Charleston was urgent.⁷

Wagon transport over South Carolina’s notoriously bad and often impassable roads had proven no competition for the efficiency of the river barge. Before the Charleston to Hamburg railroad was built, upcountry growers in traveling distance to Augusta hauled their cotton by wagon to Hamburg for transport down the river to Charleston’s rival port in Savannah.

The 1821 chartering of the town of Hamburg on the Savannah River  was one of the state’s first efforts to link trade from the South Carolina upcountry to Charleston. Another was the construction of numerous canals throughout the state in the 1820s to float the cotton to Charleston. Another was the chartering of the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company in 1827 to explore the possibilities of digging canals and/or building rail roads to bring the cotton from Hamburg to Charleston.⁷

Toward this end, in 1827, the superintendent of the state’s public works, Abram Blanding, was directed by the SC legislature in to survey the lands between Charleston to Hamburg for a possible canal and/or railroad. He and his crew of engineers quickly deemed a canal too difficult and expensive, however they found the rail road idea “perfectly practicable.”¹⁰

In 1828, several years before Pascalis and Dexter mapped out the route, Blanding’s report presented four possible means for the route. Only two involved completion of the rail line to Hamburg. The first route took a circuitous path that would add an additional six miles to the route, “the price which must be paid to avoid a stationary engine,” Blanding wrote.¹⁰

In the second route, he described the potential ascent from Hamburgh:

“The Valley of Horse Creek may be followed up to Wise Creek, [an early name for Sand River, a tributary of Big Horse Creek] which on the map is represented as heading near the Horse Pen Pond, [near the present day Levels Baptist Church] and up the valley of the latter creek to one of its head branches, one of which is found to be 160 feet lower than the summit, and 215 higher than Hamburgh — the road from Hamburgh into this branch may be graduated on a rise of less than 20 feet to the mile, and the remainder of the ascent must then be gained by a stationary engine working on an inclined plane, of any angle or rise which may be deemed advisable.”¹⁰

ABOVE: Cut of 1827 map, “North and South Carolina” by H.S. Tanner. Locations cited in Blanding’s 1828 description are visible. Click to view full size.

Learning Curves

Peripheral but important to the history of the Charleston-Hamburg line were the multiple learning curves inherent to developing and constructing — through trial, error, sometimes failure, and with very limited funding — a new mode of travel.  An early failure was the Charleston-Hamburg railroad track, which had to be laid not once, but twice during the 1830s.

For another, there was much to be learned about building the iron horse. How to power this locomotive — with wind, horse, steam or slave? The decision went to steam. While the 136 miles of tracks were being laid, numerous steam engines were built, tried, and improved upon. Among them were the West Point, the South Carolina, the Charleston, the Barnwell, and the Edisto. Each engine provided the trial-and-error lessons (e.g. weak wheels, broken axles, boiler failures) necessary to improve the engine for final success.⁷

ABOVE: Three illustrations of 1830s era Charleston-Hamburg line steam engines from the article, “The Growth of the Steam Engine” by Professor R. H. Thurston The Popular Science Monthly, January 1878. In the pubic domain. 

The Best Friend of Charleston was the first engine to be built and subsequently improved upon. It was also the first to carry passengers and mail. The Best Friend’s run was limited to a short line service that ran a 6-mile length of track from Charleston to Summerville for six months during 1830-1831, before the infamous boiler explosion that destroyed the engine. Lesson learned through trial and error: engine workers needed to be trained for the job.

Another engine, the Phoenix, was built from the remains of the Best Friend. The Phoenix may or may not have been the first engine to make the maiden 1833 trip from Charleston to Aiken to Hamburg. There were three engines in good service that year — the Phoenix, the Barnwell, and the Edisto — that could have made the trip; however, the name of the first engine to make the historic 136-mile to Hamburg on October 3, 1833 seems lost to history, entirely eclipsed by the name of the little engine that exploded two years earlier and, therefore, couldn’t.

In addition to the engine, there were freight cars, passenger cars, tender cars and lumber cars, whose construction and designs also had to be worked out through trial and error. 

The railroad track provided an even steeper learning curve. How to build a track capable of carrying a heavy locomotive (whose design was still in its infancy) over 136 miles of variable terrain? Economic considerations led to a heavy dependence on wood, which was largely free and available along the route. Without an extravagance of free wood (according to one estimate, 12 acres of trees per mile for the crossties, alone), the railroad could not have been built. 

The first of the two Charleston-Hamburg rail beds, built in the early 1830s,  didn’t resemble the earthen embankments of today. The tracks were elevated on wooden pilings.Think of a 136-mile-long bridge or trestle that ran over marshes, swamps, creeks, and long stretches of gently rolling landscape. Depending on the elevation in any given area, the height of this trestle could be 6 to 12 inches above ground, or it could rise 25 or more feet in height. ¹¹

The wooden piling system proved a fast failure. Despite being made of hard, resinous longleaf pine — one tree per piling — they began rotting at soil level within the first two years, causing a number of train derailments. Between 1834-1839, the old tracks were rebuilt using a system of primarily earthen embankments and trestles. 

The inclined plane — an elaborate device employed to raise and lower the locomotive up and down the steep grade into Horse Creek Valley — also proved impractical. While the inclined plane drew curiosity and awe, it was widely panned in its day because it was dangerous, time-consuming and difficult. The inclined plane was dispensed with during its second decade. In 1852, and at great expense, the line through town was rerouted through the railroad cut that was dug through the center of Aiken.

There have been several discoveries of the original tracks over the years. In 1944, excavators working for the Graniteville Company uncovered a buried section of the wooden structure in Warrenville. In 1985, more remnants, bared by erosion, were found along Cathedral Aisle in Hitchcock Woods by Dr. W.P. Bebbington. In 2016, more remnants of the original track and parts of the inclined plane were discovered up near the Aiken plateau, washed into Sand River near the Devils’ Backbone trail, part of the original railbed, in Hitchcock Woods^.11

The Devil’s Backbone trail in Hitchcock Woods, part of the original South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company railway bed.

There were several incarnations of the inclined plane used in Aiken, the first of which was powered by slave labor. In fact, nearly every aspect of the railroad’s construction and operation — indeed, the very existence of the railroad and the cotton industry that gave birth to its Aiken destination — was only made possible through land grants, cheap land, free wood and slave labor.¹²

Slaves — both men and women — did the hard labor of building the railroads. Slaves felled the trees, hauled the timber and cut the wood to make the rails, crossties, pilings, bridges and trestles. They drove the pilings deep into the earth every 6-1/2 feet for 136 miles. They battled quicksand, hard clay, marshes, swamps, malaria and yellow fever to build the line to Hamburg. Once the railroad was completed, slaves performed the frequent inspections, upkeep and repairs over every mile of track. Slaves operated the locomotives, working as brakemen, firemen and enginemen.  When the tracks disintegrated, and the trains derailed, slaves cleared, repaired and rebuilt the mess. Slaves cooked the food to serve the passengers, hauled the baggage and trunks, and polished the boots that stepped off that train. Slaves planted, hoed, picked and baled that upcountry cotton — including Mr. Williams cotton — all bound for the port at Charleston and onward to England. Slaves turned the cranks to operate the inclined plane in Aiken, and when the inclined plane proved too impractical, slaves were put to work digging the deep railroad cut through Aiken. Slaves all but certainly built the first bridges across that red clay gash.

And when slavery ended, those former slaves — the strong and able-bodied among them — were arrested on spurious charges and forced back into labor with the convict leasing system,¹³ which farmed these prisoners out to railroad companies to dig more ditches, clear more forests, and to lay and repair thousands more miles of track.

“We punish a man who steals a loaf; if he steals an entire railroad, we say a financier; let us ask him to dinner.” — Rev. Dr. Wayland

Throughout the 19th century, railroad companies, including the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company and its successors, were among the largest owners of slaves and lessees of enslaved humans and convict labor. These workers suffered the most grueling jobs under the cruelest of conditions. The death rate was high and rarely recorded.

“The convict labor is contracted for, and is of great value in the building of the railways and the clearing of forests. As a rule, the men are worked from dawn to dark, and then conveyed to some near point, to be locked up in cars or barracks constructed especially for them. They are constantly watched, working or sleeping ; and the records of the Penitentiary show many a name against which is written, ‘Killed while trying to escape.’” (From the 1875 publication, “The Southern states of North America: a record of journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland.” By King, Edward. Page 120. In the public domain.

“After the railroad cut was completed in 1852, 130 slaves, 85 mules, 3 horses, 90 carts and harnesses, 25 wheelbarrows, shovels, and other equipment used for the excavation were advertised for sale to the highest bidder. The cut, which cost $125,963.94, is a significant physical feature of Aiken. It is of interest because of its association with the railroad that caused the town to be planned and with the institution of slavery. Consequently, although it is not a beautiful feature, it is one that should not be hidden or disguised.” — from page 30 of the Aiken Design Review Board Manual

The Railroad Cut 

The Southern Railway Company abandoned Aiken’s railroad cut in the early 1960s. The 6.2-mile line from Aiken to Warrenville remained unused for nearly 15 years, except as storage for a long string of boxcars unceremoniously parked on the line and left to the whims of vandals and rust. In 1967 — and in the wake of several calls for the Aiken Fire Department to put out fires in the boxcars — the City threatened to sue Norfolk Southern. The boxcars were rearranged into a satisfactory compromise. The abandonment of the Aiken to Warrenville line was, perhaps, the public face of an industry in steep decline.

Against this backdrop, Aiken was hit on the night of April 15, 1969 with 9.68” of rain over a period of 7 hours, provoking severe flooding throughout the city from Crosland Park, to the downtown, to the southside and the westside.The Rollingwood Road area in Kalmia Hills was catastrophically deluged, with water said to be rising one foot per minute at one point, as the railroad embankment (which was constructed at the same time as the railroad cut in 1852) essentially acted as a dam. The waters rapidly rose to roof level in a period of less than 30 minutes. Neighbors and firemen with boats quickly responded to provide emergency rescues, some from second-story windows.¹⁴

Questions over the railroad’s role in helping address the causes of the flooding in the Rollingwood Road area are reflected in City Council minutes, which convey the frustration among citizens and City officials over the railroad’s response to calls for the company to take a role in addressing stormwater and drainage issues involving railroad property.

ABOVE: Screenshots with excerpts of discussion from April 25, 1969 Aiken City Council meeting minutes. Click to view full size.

The discussions surrounding the April 1969 flood bled into existing concerns over the effects of the City’s stormwater on the ecology of Hitchcock Woods. This was a longstanding issue that began during the Winter Colony building boom that peaked in the 1920s, and exponentially worsened with the population explosion brought by the construction of the Savannah River Plant in the early 1950s.

In 1956, a study was undertaken by the City and an emergency plan enacted to address the stormwater, which had dug a “gully” fifty feet deep and 100 feet across Sand River. This followed a failed effort years earlier to direct the water down into the woods via a concrete flume. The gully that had since formed in the ruins of the concrete flume was now caving in beneath South Boundary Extension/Hitchcock Lane dirt road, posing danger to passing cars. A plan was devised to correct the situation in two ways — by filling in the gully and by piping the water further down into the woods before allowing it to “run free.”¹⁵

By 1974, the remnants of the numerous efforts to contain the water were “littering” the floor at the mouth of Sand River, which was now being termed a canyon.¹⁶

Decades of dumping increasingly huge volumes of stormwater into the Woods had inflicted flooding, erosion, landslides and tree-smothering sediment that were damaging the ecology of the woods with force violent enough to topple trees, carve towering canyons over Sand River, and dislodge concrete slabs from former (failed) retaining walls. The historic Horse Show Grounds in the woods had to be relocated twice due to siltation.

The cause was taken up by Friends of the Woods, Inc., an environmental conservation group formed to protect and advocate for the Woods. They claimed that the difficulty of resolving the City’s stormwater issues was aggravated by the railroad cut and embankment. The group urged the City to take control of the then-abandoned railroad cut and use it to pipe the City’s stormwater away from the Hitchcock Woods and down the cut into a series of retention ponds and/or discharge it into Horse Creek.¹⁷

Meanwhile, the abandoned railroad cut was gathering weeds, garbage and trash. Stormwater was left to erode away the railroad cut, threatening to undermine the bridges. The railroad company disavowed responsibility for the bridges and turned a deaf ear to the steady stream of complaints by city officials and citizens. At some point, the railroad company tore up and/or partially demolished some stretches of track in the railroad cut. Teenage drivers were known to take joyrides in the ravine during those days.

In June 1972, the City hinted that it might go forward with action to condemn the railroad cut and seize the land by eminent domain. The city hoped, in part, to use access to the cut to address the stormwater issues. The railroad threatened to fight such a move and, in December 1972, announced plans to reopen the railroad cut.

In response, a group protest was mounted by Friends of the [Hitchcock] Woods, affected Kalmia Hills property owners, and the Aiken City Council. The group requested that the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) provide an Environmental Impact Statement. Southern Railway was asked to provide financial and economic data to justify reopening the line. 

Suits were waged¹⁸; the results of the Environmental Impact Statement were contested, with the results deemed “grossly inadequate,” and “at great environmental cost.”¹⁹ Somewhere along the way, in January 1974, the Laurens Street bridge collapsed. More lawsuits were waged.

“Ironically, the bridge fell in as a result of work being done to expedite the flow of still greater quantities of water into the main branch of Sand River.”¹⁶ — W.P. Bebbington

In November 1975, the Laurens Street bridge was rebuilt and reopened. At the same time, an agreement was reached to relieve the railroad company of responsibility for the maintenance and future replacements of that bridge.

In March 1976, City Council passed a Resolution stating the City, Friends of Hitchcock Woods and affected Kalmia Hills residents “vigorously protested”²⁰ the reopening of the railroad cut. According to a timeline prepared and presented to City Council that same month by Friends of the Woods member, Dr. W.P. Bebbington, the Southern Railroad Company had stopped using the cut in the early 1960s and then applied to the ICC in 1969 for permission to abandon the 6.2-mile line from Aiken to Warrenville. Permission was granted in 1970 and took effect in 1971. 

According to Southern president W. Grahm Claytor, the ICC application was “merely to formalize the termination of operations over this line, with the right at any time to request restoration of services when and if this appears justified.”²¹

In November 1976 (by which time dust from the bridge collapse and the lawsuits had mostly settled), the railroad began the work of cleaning up the ditch and reopening the line.

“Sand River. Aiken, South Carolina” By James A. Palmer. 1870s. In the public domain.
A view of Sand River in the 1870s, likely similar to the landscape that met Abram Blanding’s engineers when they surveyed this area in 1827-1828.

Over the next forty years, millions of dollars would be spent on studies and stormwater remediation efforts. In 2022, the Hitchcock Woods/Sand River stormwater issue was finally addressed through a $16 million project to install massive underground detention vaults near the head of Sand River to both contain and slow down the velocity of the water entering Hitchcock Woods.²²

______________________

Next

Part Three of Three: The Railroad Bridges

For Reference

FEATURE PHOTO: Bridge Deck Detail. Fairfield Street bridge Photographer: carlfbagge. Flickr album: Aiken, 2008. https://www.flickr.com/photos/12535240@N05/2539409343/in/album-72157623125207498

6. Timeline compiled from “Southern Railway History” at the website Southern Railfan.
7. Primary information on this history compiled from the pages Charleston & Hamburgh Railroad, and South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company, and South Carolina Railroad/Railway, and Southern Railway at the website carolana.com
8. Aiken Journal and Review, December 15, 1897.
9. ”Aiken Representatives Fight Removal of Trains at Hearing in Columbia.” Aiken Standard and Review. November 24, 1948.
10. Law, Donald M., Associate Editor. “Blanding was Genius Behind Aiken’s Railroad” and “Blanding Deserves the Credit for Aiken’s Existence.” Aiken Standard. March 15, 1987.
11. Wayt, Howard. “Railroad Tracks Belonging to the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company, c.1839–1852.” IA. The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 42, no. 1 (2016): 19–36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26606651.
12. Witcher, T.R. The Birth of Steam Engines: The Charleston-Hamburg Railroad. Civil Engineering, September 2017.
13. Washington, Clara Olds Keeler. Crime of Crimes; or The Convict System Unmasked. Also: pdf.: 1908. African American Pamphlet Collection, Libarary of Congress. In the public domain.
14. Hindman, Emily. “Aiken Area Mops Up After Costly Flood.” Aiken Standard and Review. April 17, 1969.
15. ”Sand River Erosion Under Study by City.’ Aiken Standard and Review .July 14, 1956.
16. Bebbington, W.P. “Hitchcock problems increase as developments close in.” Aiken Standard. February 28, 1974.
17. Bebbington, W.P. “A Program Toward Solution of Hitchcock WoodS Problems.” Aiken Standard. March 1, 1974.
18. Wendel, Debby. “Council to consider bridge suit.” Aiken Standard. May 8, 1974.
19. Wendel, Debby. “Environmental Study Labeled Inadequate.” Aiken Standard. July 5, 1974.
20. Aiken City Council meeting minutes. March 8, 1976.
21. Hindman, Emily. “Railroad Cut Bridges are Major Problem for City.” Aiken Standard. September 9, 1971.
22. Staff Reports. “Innovative Stormwater Project Protects Hitchcock Woods.” Aiken Standard. December 26, 2022.

For More Reading

• Front page of The Abbeville Banner and Press. September 8, 1886. Statewide coverage of the Charleston earthquake.
• Case Study: Langley Dam (South Carolina, 1886) damfailures.org
• Girardeau, Elizabeth L. “ Early Settler Moseley Founded a Large Family. Small Farms Occupied the Pine Barrens” General and genealogical information on Aiken’s founding. Aiken Standard. April 30, 1985.
• Abandoned Rails: The South Carolina Rail Road and Canal Company
• The National Park Service: African Americans and the Railroad
• When it Rains, it Pours into Hitchcock Woods Hitchcock Woods Foundation.
• McCormick Taylor Sand River Stormwater Implementation Plan.
• “Cohesive Channel Response to Watershed Urbanization: Insights from the Sand River, Aiken SC” December 2020.
• “Transportation Drives Deforestation.” 19th-century railroads and deforestation. From the website MovingNorthCarolina.net