Post # 4 ~ Hamburg Rising

Hamburg's Day in the Sun

This post looks at Hamburg itself, a place we might describe today as a boom town, built to ship cotton on the Savannah River.

Shipping cotton, from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1862. LOC.

In my last, I introduced Henry Schultz, the colorful, self-promoting merchant who vowed revenge on his enemies in Augusta, Georgia, and set out to build a rival market-town that would pull in all the trade of back-country SC, GA, TN, and NC. Shultz named his new place after his hometown of Hamburg, Germany. His town grew rapidly for about three decades. An 1891 article in The Atlanta Journal recorded the memories of elderly Augusta merchant William C. Sibley, a contemporary of Henry L. Jeffers. 

Mr. Sibley drew a picture of the wheeling, dealing, and eccentric Schulz, who “in a fit of pique...vowed he would kill Augusta’s trade and build up Hamburg’s.” Schulz petitioned the South Carolina Legislature for $50,000 to build a hub of commerce on the Savannah River, diverting Georgia’s lucrative trade to South Carolina coffers. The Carolina politicians liked the sound of that. From The Atlanta Journal article:

[In] one night, where the night before there was a howling wilderness, Schulz had up the fronts of a row of houses. It was the terminus of the South Carolina Railroad, the first railroad of a hundred miles in length that the world ever saw, and was on the side of the Savannah river where the channel was the deepest.

Mr. Sibley compressed his timeline a bit, but he captured the essence of the story.  I love to read old accounts by people who were there. 

Hamburg grew to be the most important trading town in interior South Carolina, and its business continually increased till 1848. ‘When I first went there,’ said Mr. Sibley, "Hamburg received 70,000 bales of cotton, the remarkable part of which was that 60,000 of them were brought in on wagons. 

"Hundreds of thousands of barrels of flour from upper South Carolina were hauled there and millions of pounds of bacon from Knoxville and all over East Tennessee came to this little Carolina trading town on wagons."

Before the completion of the Charleston-Hamburg Rail Road in 1833, Hamburg conducted its market business with the most basic technology: mules, wagons, and boats. For 10 years that had worked out pretty well. Planters from SC and NC, hauling cotton to market, would naturally rather deliver to the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. Likewise, Tennessee hog farmers preferred to land their boats at Hamburg, rather than Augusta, GA. During those early years, the big advantage for Hamburg was the deeper and more navigable water on the SC side of the waterway.  River-access to Augusta was tricky because of shoals that could only be navigated when the water was high. 

That deep-water physical feature gave Hamburg the edge it needed to get started, to actually compete with the much more well-established Georgia market. But it was not easy for Schultz and his Edgefield District supporters to build a resilient community on a river-bank which only last night had been “howling wilderness.” 

Born and reared in the District, young Henry Langford Jeffers watched Hamburg’s progress. During his years as a blacksmith apprentice (1822-1829), no doubt he had some hand in aiding the builders at work on the new town. We know that Hamburg is where Henry launched out for himself at 21 years old, but I still have to ask myself why. He was young and single; why not seek his fortune in a larger town, one with more trade, more capital to harness, more job openings - more young people for that matter? I have speculated that he would rather be in a place where his own brains and energy would outweigh the advantages of old-family connections. But even that reason is not enough if said place is little more than a howling wilderness. I think he had faith that Hamburg would grow; he knew what was coming to Hamburg’s doorstep: steam engines.

 The locomotive “South Carolina,” LOC.

Before its completion, even the prospect of a railroad would have been a strong inducement for any entrepreneur to remain in Hamburg and rise with the coming commercial tide. Henry Jeffers would have paid close attention to the newspaper reports on the progress of the tracks as they advanced ever closer to Hamburg. From The Fayetteville (NC) Weekly Observer, 1831-05-18:

The state of Tennessee and the upper part of Georgia are anxiously looking forward to this event and anticipate the advantages which they may derive from an extension of our line of road to their part of the country. Their best informed and most respectable citizens are already calculating the probable increase in value of their lands and products, from the increased facilities of transportation and intercourse resulting from the establishment of a line of Rail Road Westwardly.

As work progressed on the rails, newspapers in the adjoining states kept a fascinated watch, speculating on the ramifications of the coming railroad, marveling at the lightning-fast new mode of travel, catching a vision of the future. From The Charlotte (NC) Journal, 1832-01-25:

The Charleston and Hamburg Rail-Road has been completed to the ten mile branch, and parties of pleasure travel upon it, in a Steam Car, at the rate of 33 miles an hour. The object of this road is to divert the trade of Augusta and upper Georgia, from Savannah, to Charleston. The effect of the certain completion of this road, has excited the upper and interior part of Georgia, so as to put in agitation many rival Rail-roads. The country must be benefited by such public spirit. It is in contemplation to unite, by a Rail-road, the waters of the Tennessee and Savannah.

The Charleston-Hamburg Rail Road laid its final rail in 1833 at the Hamburg depot, then the longest track in the world. Its construction was an astounding feat, built over 136 miles of swamps, rivers, woodland, and mosquito-infested terrain. Suddenly, freight haulage did not depend only on rivers and mules. Rail could handle much more cotton than ships or wagons - and much faster. 

From 1833 until 1848, Hamburg became the most important trading town in the interior of South Carolina. Contemporary descriptions of the throngs of wagons, farmers, overseers, and merchants in the streets of Hamburg remind me of the traffic jams in big cities. From the 1891 account in The Atlanta Journal by Mr. William Sibley:

"To show you what a town Hamburg was at that time," Mr. Sibley continued, "the city built a plank road from Hamburg to Edgefield, a distance of twenty-six miles. Along about November and December the streets would be so crowded with the wagons of the country people from four States that frequently people would have to walk four or five blocks before finding a place to cross. 

"On the outskirts of the city the wagoners would strike their tents, and frequently there would be as many as five or six hundred of them in compact at a time. The road going and coming for a distance of five or six miles would be literally jammed up with wagons, rendering it almost impossible to make more than a mile an hour."

Reports of Hamburg’s importance as a cotton market spread quickly. Even as early as 1836, no explanation was needed in big-city newspapers for references about little Hamburg. From an 1836 edition of New York's The Spirit of the Times: 

The cuteness of this fellow [a wise-cracker] reminds us of the Georgia wagoner, who didn’t like much to let out a secret: 

"What’s cotton?" asked a wagoner with a load, of one returning empty.

"Why, it’s cotton," was the reply.

"But does it fotch anything?"

"No, - my team fotched it."

"I mean - what does it come to?"

"Why, to the loom, to-be-sure."

"Zounds! - how high is it?"

"Three tiers at Hamburg."

"I say, stranger - you’re a little too cute for me."

"The same to you and all your family."

Hamburg’s success, however, was short-lived. From 1833-1848 is not long, as these things go; and after 1848 Hamburg’s dominance of the region’s cotton trade began to slip. Augusta prevailed: she fixed her river navigation problems by digging a canal; she dropped the toll charges over her bridge; and she got her own railroad.

The tipping point was the routeing of the railroad through other towns, leaving Hamburg outside of the technical advances in transportation. Its prized spot as the western terminus for the route between Charleston and the upstate districts was gone. Most sources give the reason as special deals drawn up between the SCRR, the South Carolina legislature, and Georgia business interests. Oddly, Mr. William C. Sibley, the Augusta businessman quoted in the 1891 Atlanta Journal, also put the blame on Hamburg-area merchants who staked everything on their wagon-hauling business. He claimed they pulled strings to stop railroad expansions, hoping to save their wagon trade. (That seems incorrect to me. Jeffers & Cothran dominated the wagon-transport business, and they were railroad-believers.)

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During Henry L. Jeffers’ growing career, his early partnerships seemed to have ended amicably; the newspapers showed his continued success and that he often worked together with former partners on other civic and mercantile affairs. But by 1847 Henry found the partner who could (almost) match his own energy and ambitions. From 1847, he and Col. Wade S. Cothran worked together for nearly twenty years as merchants. 

In its early years,  Jeffers & Cothran incorporated as a Hamburg business. By the time of the Civil War, Hamburg had declined in economic importance, and the partners considered it time to expand to bigger markets. But until he bid farewell and moved the business to Charleston, Henry L. Jeffers always kept his office and warehouse there in the center of town, near Hamburg's docks and train depot. 

Photos of the old Hamburg SCRR Depot by Larry Gleason, Flickr.

The Hamburg Railroad Depot was the town’s center of activity. Almost unbelievably, the old Hamburg Depot still stands. Long, long abandoned and in disrepair, it still displays a plaque designating its status as a National Historic Engineering Landmark.   

Larry Gleason, Flickr

Which leads me to one last thing to tell in this post. When I contacted Larry Gleason to ask permission to use his photos, an amazing coincidence emerged. Larry’s wife, Lynn Cothran Gleason, is a direct descendant of Wade S. Cothran, Henry Jeffers’ long-time partner. What are the chances? I am amazed to find a living link to the long-ago partnership, so surprisingly tied to these haunting photos that reflect the ghost-town at the heart of the venture.