Reviewed by: Historic Canals and Waterways of South Carolina Richard Saunders (bio) Historic Canals and Waterways of South Carolina. By Robert J. Kapsch. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. xxi+238. $44.95. Charleston’s two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, do not go very far inland. Charleston did not have easy access to a backcountry. Corduroy roads rotted in the fetid climate. Stone for roads was not easily obtainable. Shallow-draft boats that could navigate the larger inland rivers, such as the San-tee, could not venture into the open ocean for the last lap to Charleston. [End Page 824] Still-water canals were the apparent answer, and the most obvious of these was the Santee Canal to connect the river system that drains much of the central part of the state to the Cooper River and Charleston. The endeavor was chartered in 1787 as a joint stock company. Capital was scarce after the Revolutionary War. Engineering talent was hard to find as well, until finally John Christian Senf, a Hessian prisoner of war who stayed in the United States, took the job. Construction began in 1793 and was completed in 1800. Labor was at first provided by the levy that required every able-bodied man to perform six days of work a year. Very unpopular, this was soon replaced by renting slaves. The canal was 21 miles long, rising 19½ feet from the Santee River to its summit and dropping 25 feet to the Cooper River. It was an engineering achievement, but not a heroic one. It did not earn the company the profits it envisioned except in the years 1812–14. Conceived before the cotton boom, it was nevertheless able to transport the 500-lb. bales of cotton that would make South Carolina rich. In 1819 the state embarked on another round of canal construction. The plan was for a comprehensive system of waterways to serve the entire state. This was not a network of still-water canals. It would make use of running rivers supplemented with sluices through shallow areas and real canals only around rapids or waterfalls. The great architect Robert Mills argued for still-water canals as technically superior but it was decided that the state could not afford them. By the end of the decade the system was mostly built. Steamboats regularly ran aground, however, for though South Carolina is a coastal state with lush vegetation, it does have a dry season in the fall when the cotton needed to be moved, and it does suffer periodic droughts. The droughts of 1816 and 1818–19, for example, dried up the Santee Canal. In building a system on the cheap, the builders had failed to provide adequate reservoirs. For a time in the 1820s and early 1830s one could board steamboats as far upstate as Ware Shoals on the Saluda River or Lockhart on the Catawba River and make one’s way to Charleston. One boat made it in four days from Columbia to Charleston, but generally boats could only make two trips a month. As cotton took off as a staple that made South Carolina rich, the canals carried it and delivered it. But they were not fast, they were not dependable, and they were nothing like the success the Erie Canal had been for New York State. So, when the first railroad was chartered in 1827 and the first train chugged out of Charleston in December of 1831, growers looked forward eagerly to the faster service the railroad promised. It was more expensive but that cost was offset by the shorter time they had to pay interest on their crop loans. As a result, most of the canal system was out of business by 1840, with the Santee Canal closing in 1853. Some of the old brickwork of the Santee Canal locks remains; most has been inundated by the system of hydroelectric reservoirs begun by the New Deal. Robert Kapsch is a researcher for the Center for Historic Engineering [End Page 825] and Architecture and has previously written on the Potomac Canal. This is the first extensive writing on the South Carolina canals since the 1930s. He has done...
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Mar 28, 2023
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