Open any South Carolina highway map and you will find standard features—blue highways and roads, black railroad lines, dotted lines denoting county boundaries, red flags marking schools and hospitals, green parks and golf courses. Near the state’s western border, though, is a massive blank space labeled “The Savannah River Site—U.S. Department of Energy.” Covering approximately 20 percent of Aiken County, 30 percent of Barnwell County, and 10 percent of Allendale, the Savannah River Site is rendered featureless on most maps, a vast expanse of federal white space that is devoid of traditional cartographic characteristics. Built in the early...

It was routine. On September 3, 1949, a U.S. Air Force wb-29 flying east of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Soviet Union on a secret detection flight picked up radioactivity in its filters. The suspect sample was sent to Tracerlab at the University of California at Berkeley, which confirmed a man-made device. For the following two weeks, American scientists tracked the radioactive air mass as it drifted across the Pacific Ocean and blew across the United States. One Tracerlab physicist recalled that during that tense period, “I didn’t sleep more than four hours a day. Our little group was working...

Geography and environment played a critical role in bringing the new atomic weapons plant to western South Carolina. The temperature and purity of the Savannah River and the superior drainage qualities of the region’s sandy soil had rendered the area closer to ideal than any other location for this new project, securing South Carolina a place on the far reaches of the expanding nuclear frontier. Yet the Cold War plant was not the first venture to meld the region’s particular natural characteristics with the latest applications of science and technology. The history of western South Carolina is in part a...

Everyone knew there were strangers in their midst. In the late summer of 1950, residents of Ellenton, South Carolina, population 739, had spotted men surveying the land, boring into the earth, taking soil samples here and there. “What was their business?” locals asked themselves. Ellenton schoolteacher Louise Cassels later recalled that “speculations flew over the community like migrant birds.” Residents were hopeful in anticipation of new industry that, she remarked, would bring “the progress the people longed for.” Some heard reports that a glue factory was going to be built; others claimed it would be an aluminum plant; still others...

Pondering the vast construction project under way in rural South Carolina, one local reporter speculated breathlessly on its engineering and technological implications as well as its historical meaning. “The Plant is a Clark Hill dam, a Panama Canal, an Egyptian pyramid, and television,” he wrote, “all rolled into one enormous package that means the future of America.”¹ While overblown, the description conveyed a certain truth: the plant was an engineering and technological marvel. Nearly four times the size of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Savannah River Plant (SRP) was the largest construction project to date in American history.² The plant’s...

Between 1950 and 1953, nearly 40,000 temporary and 6,000 permanent employees and their families—almost 180,000 persons in all—poured into the relatively sparsely populated three-county region that played host to the Savannah River Plant (SRP). Many of these new residents chose to live close to the city of Aiken, in South Carolina, some thirteen miles from the plant.¹ State political leaders and industrial boosters heralded the arrival of the plant as just the latest in what they hoped would be an endless succession of federal projects. Local residents likewise anticipated an unprecedented economic boost from the plant and its...

Born in the Horse Creek Valley village of Graniteville in 1936, Ronnie Bryant’s life followed the pattern typical of most valley boys. His family worked in textiles, and he figured he would do the same when he became an adult. When he entered Leavell McCampbell High School in 1950, word came from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) that Du Pont Corporation was going to build a massive facility some ten miles from the valley. Bryant graduated in 1954 and married his high school sweetheart, Sylvia, a few months later. He worked a summer job in textiles, but “it looked like...

From 1941 to 1948, Aiken County was represented in the South Carolina state senate by Fred Brinkley, a physician from the tiny town of Ellenton. In addition to being one of the town’s two doctors, Brinkley was also a part-time farmer and owner of the one of the town’s gristmills. A longtime resident of Ellenton, Brinkley was closely tied to the region’s agricultural rhythms and was active in community affairs. And like every other state senator, Brinkley was a Democrat in a state that reviled Republicans. In the early 1950s, after Ellenton was condemned to make room for the Savannah...

The 1980s brought significant changes for the Savannah River Plant (SRP). The partial meltdown of a reactor core at the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979 created a climate of increased fear and trepidation regarding the nuclear power industry. Although it is considered the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, the events at Three Mile Island did not result in loss of life, nor was there a significant release of radioactive material into the environment. Still, the incident put the federal government and the nuclear industry on the defensive as an energized environmental movement and a nervous...