Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
negroes [ sic ] have elected to call new Hamburg was given them through the generosity
of the American Red Cross and the white people of Aiken county [S.C.].” 66 In truth, the
Hamburg relocation was only possible with help from Augusta's well-established Afric-
an American business community. Hamburg's eighty-two families had received food as-
sistance from multiple sources over three weeks, including William “Will” Carpenter, a
prominent African American with an extensive social and business network. Carpenter was
an Augusta grocer, president of the Georgia Mutual Life and Health Insurance Company
(founded in 1908), and president of the Penny Savings and Loan Company. 67 Carpenter did
more than provide groceries and food for Hamburg residents; he eventually received many
of the construction contracts to build new homes with American Red Cross subsidies. 68
Perhaps most important, Carpenter owned the land under the new Hamburg. He served
on the board of directors for the Southern Realty Company, a real estate firm that worked
for the African American community, and O. M. Blount, the company's president, was the
unnamed “local real estate man” who subdivided the new Hamburg property, which was
named Carpentersville. 69 The end of Hamburg's story, however, is complicated.
Haphazard management of the Savannah River valley's water, white supremacy, and the
Augusta levee's technology contributed to the manufactured risk in Hamburg and the com-
munity's ultimate dissolution. The Augusta levee project protected the city's public welfare
but not the South Carolina families—the African American market gardeners and brick
makers—who contributed to feeding and building Augusta. For Augustans intent on man-
aging the Savannah River for drought and flood, the obvious solution was to move Ham-
burg, thereby saving lives and money well into the future. At the time, this move was un-
doubtedly for the public's—and Hamburg's residents'—best interest, or was it? Belching
factories and hazardous landfills have historically shadowed poor and minority communit-
ies due to a variety of structural and demographic factors, some intentional and others that
evolved gradually over time. Many of these spaces had also been marginal environments
to begin with, making them less resilient to natural disasters. 70 The Hamburg postflood
resolution was significant because the Red Cross managed a community relocation pro-
ject that moved an African American community out of harm's way. The solution was not
to build levees or other expensive and marginally successful flood control structures that
many white communities and urban boosters have historically demanded elsewhere (i.e., in
the Mississippi Valley and New Orleans). Instead, the Red Cross successfully engineered
a nonstructural solution to eliminate future flood disasters within one minority community
with material and financial assistance from local white and black businesses.
The dissolution of Hamburg, however, left former residents without easy access to the
same fertile floodplain soil, and the brick factories were gone. It is unclear how the new
Carpentersville residents made a living after the Great Flood of 1929. But what is clear is
that sixty years later the old Hamburg—safe for white resettlement after Clarks Hill's fed-
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