Hamburg (S.C.)

Hamburg is a ghost town in Aiken County, South Carolina, United States. It was once a thriving upriver market located across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia in the Edgefield District. It was founded by Henry Shultz in 1821 who named it after his home town in Germany of the same name. The town was one of the state's primary interior markets by the 1830s, due largely to the fact that the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company chose Hamburg as the western terminus of its line to Charleston. The enervation of the town, which relied on its in-land port being the destination of cotton headed toward the ports of Charleston or Savannah for business, began in 1848 after Augusta siphoned much of the town's river traffic with the completion of the Augusta Canal. The town's decline was finalized in the 1850s when the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company extended its line into Augusta. After the American Civil War, Hamburg was repopulated mostly by freedmen and was within newly organized Aiken County. The town became notorious in 1876 as the site of a massacre of blacks by whites in what was one of a number of violent incidents by Democratic paramilitary groups to suppress black voting in that year's elections. The Democrats regained control of the state government and federal troops were withdrawn the next year from South Carolina and other states, ending the Reconstruction era.