G22 TRANSPORTATIOX IX SOUTH CAROLINA. 



Tho vehicles used upon these roads for heavy traffic were of three 

 kinds. In the low country, they were mostly ox carts, made with large 

 wheels, four to six inches tix ad, drawn by three or four yoke of oxen, and 

 capable of carrying three to four barrels rice — about two thousand pounds. 

 In the middle and upper country, sleds were used for short distances on 

 the farms and cross roads, while for long distances, four and six horse 

 wagons were employed, capable of carrying two to three tons. These 

 wagons had narrow wheels, and cut up the roads in winter, especially 

 where the ground was claye3\ Besides these ordinary conveyances, 

 several novel methods were employed of moving produce to market. It 

 is said that cotton was sent to Hamburg from the country near the 

 upper Savannah by throwing the bales into the stream and letting them 

 float with the current. When produce had to be hauled to market from a 

 locality requiring no return in goods, it was sometimes the practice to 

 put it on a sled drawn by oxen, so that, at the end of the journey, not 

 only the produce, but the oxen and even the material of the sl6d could 

 be sold. . Persons now living remember hogsheads of tobacco arriving in 

 Charleston, having been hauled by oxen or horses attached to a shaft run 

 through the axis of the hogshead, from head to head, so that the pack- 

 age might roll freely. Barrels of rosin were sometimes secured together, 

 and floated in rafts to Georgetown from the Cheraw section. 



The efforts wliith after the Revolution had been so earnestly directed 

 towards ilicilitating communication between Charleston and the middle 

 and upper parts of the State reached their climax in the conception and 

 construction of the Santee Canal. By referring to the map it will be 

 seen that the Santee river unites the- waters of the Wateree and the Con- 

 garee, and these, in turn, trace their sources to the head waters of the 

 Catawba, the Broad, and the Saluda, all beyond the northern limit of 

 the State. Had the improvements then contemplated proved j^racticable, 

 those streams, and some of their tributaries, would have been rendered 

 navigable to the State line, and then, by means of the Santee Canal, con- 

 necting the Santee and Cooper rivers, Charleston would have received by 

 water the products of all Clarendon, Sumter, Kershaw, Lancaster, York, 

 Chester, Fairfield, Richland, Lexington, Newberry, Laurens, Union, Spar- 

 tanburg and Greenville, with those of a part of each of the counties of 

 Oconee, Anderson, Abbeville, Edgefield and Orangeburg. So patriotic 

 and magnificent a project deserved the success which, alas, it did not ob- 

 tain. The corporators named in the Act of 1786, chartering the " Com- 

 pany for the inland navigation from Santee to Cooper river," are John 

 Rutledge, John Fauchereuad Grimke, Theodore Gaillard, George Haig, 



James Kennedy, Graham, Thomas Sumter, Benjamin Waring, 



Thomas Walker, John Vanderhorst, James Mitchell, ^Edanus Burke, 



