Riparian Rights and Manufacturing in Antebellum South Carolina: William Gregg and the Origins of the "Industrial Mind"

Abstract

AT ITS 1853 SESSION, THE SOUTH CAROLINA GENERAL ASSEMBLY PASSED An Act to Declare a Certain Description of Streams Navigable, and for Purposes. This apparently innocuous statute clarified the legal definition of a navigable waterway in the state. Furthermore, it defined the obligations of mill owners on such a stream, requiring them to permit free passage of lumber or timber through their dams. Owners of dams erected prior to a declaration of navigability were required to provide access but were permitted to collect compensation from persons using the passage, at an amount agreed to by the parties involved. However, one of the Other Purposes of the act was a notable exemption: Provided, That nothing herein contained shall be construed to extend to the navigation of Horse Creek, above a point known as Richardson's Shoals, on said Creek. This concession directly benefited only a pair of mills on Horse Creek: the cotton factories at Graniteville and Vaucluse in Edgefield District. In fact, Graniteville Manufacturing Company's president and founder, the southern industrialist William Gregg, was in the forefront of the effort to pass the act and its concomitant exemption. But Gregg's victory was by no means a foregone conclusion. Not only did he have to fend off several counter-petitions from upstream sawmill owners, but Gregg also had to convince the General Assembly to overturn more than a half century of legal precedent and riparian custom regarding the use of Horse Creek as a public highway and common resource. His success marked a subtle but significant transformation of the state's political economy, provoking a fundamental shift in favor of large-scale manufacturing at