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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 figured that the men were prospecting for oil or kaolin. Jack Harden, son of the town depot agent, told a friend, “My daddy is getting some strange type of telegrams he doesn’t understand. . . . They are gonna make tanks or some kind of bullets or some kind of ammunition, he thinks from what these telegrams say.” Young Harden did not know where this new plant was going to be located, perhaps “in the Pineywoods, back behind the Blue Goose [café] somewhere.” John Shaw Billings noted that “nobody knows anything [about the plant]—but everybody has loud ideas.” The official announcement of the creation of the plant on November 28, 1950, settled some of these questions but posed a much more provocative and unsettling one: How would this new plant affect the residents? Theories abounded. For more than a week, rumors raged. Even as well-connected an individual as Billings remained in the dark regarding the plant’s exact location and geographical boundaries. “Nobody knows for sure,” he wrote in his diary in early December. Reporter William D. Workman echoed this uncertainty. Noting that the residents of the region “have been passed by for the most part in the state’s industrial progress . . . they are now to be up-rooted from their own soil and transplanted to some other place, and all they can see right now is the dark cloud of the atomic age.” C H A P T E R T H R E E “A Land Doomed and Damned” The Costs of Militarization “ A L A N D D O O M E D A N D D A M N E D ” · 49 Just over a week later, on December 6, 1950, some five hundred individuals and families whose homes fell inside the sprawling boundaries of the country’s latest Cold War project crowded into the Ellenton school auditorium—whites seated in the middle, blacks lining the room’s periphery—to learn their fate. The auditorium could not hold them all, and the crowd spilled outside, leaving anxious landowners straining to hear the news. An inhospitable winter drizzle and a squalling baby only compounded their discomfort. Workman, covering the story for several South Carolina newspapers, noted that the crowd was not in the mood for bad news from federal officials, and he overheard “mumbling about another Ellenton riot.” Men in double-breasted suits, officials from Du Pont and the Atomic Energy Commission (aec), told the residents that they were going to have to evacuate—not just temporarily, but forever. “We came here,” Curtis A. Nelson, manager of the new operations office, stated, “not just to build a war plant but to make things that can be used for peace. We plan to be with you a long time. And to be good citizens of South Carolina.” To make way for these new citizens and their Cold War mission, some fifteen hundred families—approximately eight thousand individuals—many of whom had lived on their land for generations, were going to have to move. What they had hoped would bring economic opportunity had instead brought devastation . “We wanted an industry,” Judge P. H. Buckingham, Ellenton’s magistrate, told a reporter from the New Yorker, “but instead we all got drafted—men, women and children.” Slated for removal were six small towns and villages: Ellenton, Dunbarton, Hawthorne, Leigh, Meyers Mill, and Robbins. Lester C. Moody, secretary of the Augusta, Georgia, Chamber of Commerce and a key regional development booster, speculated that the arrival of the Savannah River Plant would “mean empire-building to us. Augusta is going to grow and grow and be prosperous. Of course the folks around Ellenton are being inconvenienced , but you can’t have progress with sentiment.” Pausing, Moody concluded, “The hand that shuns the thorn can’t have the rose.” He did not make clear whose hands got flowers and whose got thorns. Billings called...

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