The October floods, which wreaked havoc on the Midlands, damaged one historical site and uncovered a fresh one at the McCrady Training Center on Fort Jackson.
The flooding washed out numerous bridges and roads making them impassable. However, erosion unearthed historical treasure in the soil here.
Workers were recently surveying the damaged Colonel Creek Road Bridge, when they noticed something in a pool of water. The high water had washed out part of the road, but uncovered a historical wooden structure buried two to three feet beneath the road.
Bryan Hall, McCrady's conservation manager, said it was difficult at first to see what it was until the water receded -- every time they thought they had the water out more would come bubbling up.
They found wood beams crisscrossing each other and fixed with iron spikes aligned in the direction of the road forming either a roadway or a bridge.
Jason Moser, the South Carolina Army National Guard's cultural resource manager, said it appeared as if it was part of more than a century-old road system.
It appeared to him to be more likely a plank road or part of a bridge and not a corduroy road. A plank road is created by placing flat planks across the road that were fixed to larger beams on either side of the road. A corduroy road is created by placing round logs or beams across the road.
Corduroying roads allowed the Union Army under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to move rapidly across the Carolinas and Georgia during the Civil War.
The site, which Moser said appears to be from the 1890s, is interesting because it can help archeologists understand how the structures were engineered based on the nail patterns in the wood.
Just finding anything at all was lucky.
"It's an industrial site, or tends to be, so we are not expecting to find more than the timbers themselves. Which is sort of unusual because typically the things you find in the ground rot away really quickly," Moser said.
"The wet conditions, and anaerobic conditions underneath the road and the clay have probably preserved the timber."
"It looks like part of a transportation system," Moser said. "I think it has been here quite a while, I think it traveled all the way to Winnsboro."
The group lead by Moser is "recording what we have found and we are exposing a little bit more of it. We will map it and carefully cover it back over with soil" so it can be smoothed over as soon as possible, he said.
An early nineteenth century mill located a few hundred feet from the new site wasn't treated as kindly by the floods.
"What has been here before has been washed away and up into the tree line," said James Spirek, the Palmetto State's Underwater Archeologist. "The water has been very forceful here."
The site, originally discovered in 1992, was found so mangled by the force of water the South Carolina National Guard asked for Spirek and his team to help assess the damage.
Spirek and members of his team waded through waist deep water to measure the length of timbers along both sides of a creek, all while balancing on slippery wet logs beneath the water.
All that is left of the site are some logs running underwater across the stream and along the water's edge. Other logs with holes used to hold the structure together were in the tree line creekside.
To fashion the mill together, trunnels (wooden dowels) driven into the wood, Spirek said. "Nails would rust in the water, but the wood would expand in the water making a tight seal."
He said they were going to compare their measurements to those taken over 20 years ago to determine the extent of the mill's damage.
The mill site ground corn or perhaps flour, he said, maybe even timber.
'But what type of community that was around it is a mystery."
Fort Jackson and McCrady Training Center leaders continue to survey the damage caused by the flooding. The full extent of the damage to firebreaks and trails won't be known for some time.
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