Английская Википедия:Hamburg, Aiken County, South Carolina

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Файл:Mills1825SE 250.gif

Hamburg, SC as shown in Mills' Atlas, 1825

Hamburg, South Carolina is a ghost town in Aiken County, in the U.S. state of South Carolina. It was once a thriving upriver market located across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia in the Edgefield District. It was founded by Henry Shultz in 1821 who named it after his home town in Germany of the same name. The town was one of the state's primary interior markets by the 1830s, due largely to the fact that the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company chose Hamburg as the western terminus of its line to Charleston.

The enervation of the town, which relied on its in-land port being the destination of cotton headed toward the ports of Charleston or Savannah for business, began in 1848 after Augusta siphoned much of the town's river traffic with the completion of the Augusta Canal. The town's decline was finalized in the 1850s when the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company extended its line into Augusta.

After the American Civil War, Hamburg was repopulated mostly by freedmen and was within newly organized Aiken County. The town became notorious in 1876 as the site of a massacre of blacks by whites in what was one of a number of violent incidents by Democratic paramilitary groups to suppress black voting in that year's elections. The Democrats regained control of the state government and federal troops were withdrawn the next year from South Carolina and other states, ending the Reconstruction era.

History

Файл:Digital Library of Georgia dlg sanb augusta-1884.jpg

Sanborn insurance map of Augusta, Georgia, created April 1884, showing Hamburg, S.C. and the Savannah River (Digital Library of Georgia)

Early years

The founder of Hamburg, Henry Shultz, was a parvenu until his origin was discovered in 2016 by Jürgen Möller. Born in Germany in 1776 as Klaus Hinrich Klahn, Shultz arrived in Augusta in 1806 as a simple day worker. But, by 1813, the business dealings of Shultz had elevated him to a position capable of building a long-lasting bridge across the Savannah River, a feat which one of the wealthiest South Carolinian of the 1790s, Wade Hampton I, had failed to accomplish on two previous occasions.

Shultz would go on to become a leading citizen in the city of Augusta, owning part of the Steamboat Company of Georgia as well as a wharf in Augusta. But, like many bank owners (Shultz used his bridge to back a bank which he called the Bridge Bank) in the 1810s, Shultz issued paper currency which led to his bankruptcy during the Panic of 1819. After being sued by his creditors, the Georgia state officials seized the Augusta Bridge from Shultz.Шаблон:Rp

Shultz felt slighted by the city of Augusta and purchased a swath of land opposite the Savannah River which had previously been owned by Chickasaw indians in order to compete with the city.Шаблон:Rp The following year, Shultz sought and procured loans from the South Carolina General Assembly to improve inland navigation between the town and Charleston. On top of this, the General Assembly exempted all taxable property within the town from taxation for five years.Шаблон:Rp

Shultz established a second bank, the Bank of Hamburg, in 1823, backed by his Hamburg property which "faded into oblivion" within two years. Ten years later, a decade bank was founded with support from the General Assembly. This second iteration became one of the best-known banks in the country, reliable enough to be used by many families to pay colleges in the North.Шаблон:Rp The establishment of the second bank coincided with the decline of the South Carolina wagon trade. From 1819 to 1823, the trade shrunk to one-fourth its former size as steamboats became the cheaper form of transportation for upcountry harvests.Шаблон:Rp The emergence of steamboats led Hamburg and other towns strategically located at the fall lines of major rivers such as Camden and Columbia to become economically important for the first time.Шаблон:Rp

During his American tour as 'Guest of the Nation', the Marquis de Lafayette visited Hamburg on March 24, 1825. In a book recounting their trip, Lafayette's secretary wrote that Lafayette was invited to visit "a sort of prodigy", a "village called Hamburg", which was "not yet two years old and its port was already filled with vessels."

Slave market

According to the Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1848, Hamburg was successful in part because it was a slave market located just outside Georgia, which had a state law banning interstate slave trading, "Hamburg, South Carolina was built up just opposite Augusta, for the purpose of furnishing slaves to the planters of Georgia. Augusta is the market to which the planters of Upper and Middle Georgia bring their cotton; and if they want to purchase negroes, they step over into Hamburg and do so. There are two large houses there, with piazzas in front to expose the 'chattels' to the public during the day, and yards in rear of them where they are penned up at night like sheep, so close that they can hardly breathe, with bull-dogs on the outside as sentinels. They sometimes have thousands here for sale, who in consequence of their number suffer most horribly." In the early years, traders who had come down the "upper route" pitched tents beside the bridge to await buyers.Шаблон:Rp Resident Georgians could import at will from across the river so long as they retained ownership for at least a year past the initial purchase date.Шаблон:Rp The Georgia law prohibiting the importation of slaves across state lines was repealed in 1856.

Traders

The main trading cluster was likely on Center Street. Some of the slave traders working in Hamburg:

• Atkins & Spires
• Mr. Boyce
• Benjamin Davis
• W. C. Ferrell
• T. Goldsmith (agent)
• Thomas J. Jennings & Co., also Jennings & Robertson
• John Lane
• R.M. Owings & Co.
• James Patterson
• Oliver Simpson
• the Slatter brothers (Hope H. Slatter and Shadrack F. Slatter)
• Spires & Wilson
• N. C. Trowbridge
• John WoolfolkШаблон:Rp

Competition with Augusta

Файл:Augusta Bridge drawing from 1836.png

A poster drawing of the Augusta Bridge from 1836.

At the completion of the South Carolina Railroad in 1833 (at the time the largest railroad under single management in the world) Hamburg became the railroad's western terminus.

In its heyday, 60,000 bales of cotton worth $2,000,000 were brought by wagon to Hamburg each year. With the completion of the Augusta Canal (1848) and general expansion of railroads in the 1850s, strenuous overland hauls to Hamburg became unnecessary and the famous wagon traffic declined.Шаблон:Rp Hamburg became a ghost town by the time of the Civil War.Шаблон:Rp

Файл:HamburgTopo1921.jpg

Remnants of Hamburg, SC in 1921 (on the river above "B M 122")

After the Civil War

Following the war, Hamburg was repopulated and governed by freedmen, starting with Prince Rivers; Samuel J. Lee, a free man before the war, who was elected as the speaker of the House and was the first black man admitted to the South Carolina Bar; and Charles D. Hayne, a freeman from an elite Charleston family. These three men were founders of Aiken County. They began to redevelop Hamburg, attracting freedmen. To celebrate Aiken County's 125th anniversary, a stone-and-bronze marker was installed at the county courthouse. Rivers, Hayne and Leeld are listed as founders but their race is not indicated.

After the deaths and damage in the Hamburg Massacre of July 8, 1876, the town declined for good.Шаблон:Rp Augusta began construction of a river levee after a 1911 flood, but Hamburg remained unprotected.Шаблон:Rp Particularly disastrous floods finally forced out the last residents in 1929.

Файл:HamburgFromAugusta.jpg

Site of Hamburg, SC viewed from Augusta, GA. The road bridge is at the same location as Henry Shultz's 1814 bridge. The broken piers remain from the South Carolina Rail Road, which operated from 1854 to 1908

Geography

Occasionally styled as Hamburgh (especially after the American Civil War), the town was named after Shultz's home town in Germany. It was located at 33.4799°N, 81.9579°W directly across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Population at its peak in the 1840s reached 2,500 (Haskel 1843:257), and exceeded 1,000 in the 1870s. For the most part the town was on the Savannah River floodplain. The town was originally accessible by a stagecoach road starting at the Edgefield County Courthouse, and later by the Edgefield and Hamburg Plank Road.

Under protection of the Clarks Hill Dam and Lake, adjacent North Augusta has begun to develop on the grounds of old Hamburg.

Notable people

• James E. Broome, governor of Florida from 1853 to 1857.
• A. Viola Neblett (1842–1897), activist, suffragist, women's rights pioneer
• Marcus Junius Parrott, delegate to the U.S. Congress from Kansas Territory from 1857 to 1861.

Further reading

• Шаблон:Cite book
• Шаблон:Cite book pp. 20 and 236-243
• Шаблон:Cite book
• Шаблон:Cite book pp. 79–93 and 257-263
• Шаблон:Cite book
• Шаблон:Cite book
• Шаблон:Cite book

External links

• Henry Shultz and his Town of Hamburg, SC Accessed March 2015
• City of Dust: Honky Tonk Hell
• 1835 Hamburg Town PlatШаблон:Usurped
• Streets of Hamburg shown on 1884 Sanborn Map of Augusta, Georgia. Hamburg is located just right of center of the Augusta index map
• Hiram Hutchison an Antebellum S.C. Banker / Entrepreneur