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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 there was no future in the Graniteville Company,” he recalled. “All the good jobs were taken, or people were in line for the good jobs, so you had to look elsewhere for opportunity.” Bryant put in an application at the Savannah River Plant (srp) and was hired in the 400 area, where heavy water was produced, a job he landed because he had taken high school chemistry. It was a smart economic decision, as his starting take-home pay was almost 50 percent higher than what he would have made at the mill. Bryant remained at the plant for the rest of his career, a move that placed him firmly within the region’s emerging middle class. Bryant remained a resident of Graniteville, but in 1965 he built a brick ranch home on Laurel Drive, a newly constructed residential area that offered suburban features, a first for the valley. For six long suburban blocks, Laurel Drive parallels old Trolley Line Road, which connected Graniteville and the city of Aiken. Laurel Drive was an anomaly. It was not oriented to the mills, like all of Graniteville’s other residential sections. Symbolically, Laurel Drive points out of the valley itself. In the 1960s, it became home to a new and expanding middle class, a transitional landscape between the old money of Aiken and the working class of the valley. A home on Laurel Drive probably would have been possible had Bryant stayed in textiles, but it certainly would have taken him longer to acC H A P T E R S I X “Better Living” Life in a Cold War Company Town 124 · C H A P T E R S I X quire. Ronnie and Sylvia’s two children attended college and graduate school; their son, Ron Jr., is employed as an engineer at the plant. The srp not only remade the map of the region, erasing towns and roadways , but it also reoriented how the remaining communities interacted and, for that matter, defined themselves. It was a paradigm shift of sometimes abrupt, sometimes subtle characteristics. The altered trajectory of the Bryant family was by no means unique, as families throughout the region reconsidered their long-held assumptions about their place in the world. Modernization of society and culture accompanied the militarization of the southern economy. The srp employed thousands of highly skilled and educated scientists and engineers from across the nation who almost overnight created a vibrant middle class in a part of South Carolina where almost none had before existed. By the 1960s, the plant made the greatest single contribution to the economic base of Aiken, Barnwell, and Allendale Counties. As historian Margaret Pugh O’Mara argues, “Policy choices made in the earliest years of the Cold War vested scientific institutions and industries with the power to transform regional economies.” Such was the case in South Carolina. Scores of suburban subdivisions and national retail outlets served the housing and lifestyle needs of these new white-collar residents and offered new opportunities to Ronnie Bryant and other longtime residents, thus helping to break down the intense localism that had characterized the surrounding area. For residents of the mill villages in Horse Creek Valley, the srp was an economic godsend, enabling many of them to enter the middle class and giving them new opportunities to participate in the region’s expanding mass consumer culture. Most native South Carolinians as well as newcomers proudly embraced their new roles in the nation’s Cold War weapons program. Together, this burgeoning middle class, the influx of national retail establishments and a flourishing consumer culture, and mass suburbanization introduced a larger culture heralding efficiency, rationality, consumption, technological innovation, and progress—all components of a vaguely defined notion of modernization—that threatened to displace the region’s older rural culture. Much of this impact drew from the particular influence of the Du Pont Corporation. Du...

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