Santee River

Yeah, and a lot of times there's not a tree.

I've got one in our Santee River swamp right now that's a big gut that goes out to the Santee River.

And, man, there's a bank they come down to go around, and it's the only spot around this gut they can get up and down, and it is dynamite.

And I've gotten very few pictures in there so far, a few.

Ferguson, South Carolina, which is now known as Lake Marion.

Ferguson, South Carolina was once a prosperous black lumber town built around the thriving Santee River sawmill industry.

Black families lived in modest but well-built homes and their community was self-sufficient.

When the government announced plans to flood the area to create Lake Marion in 1941, black land owners were forced to sell at insultingly low prices or have their land taken outright.

The lizard man gets the headlines, but the state is two-thirds timber, and a lot of that timber sits in big, unbroken blocks that most people only ever see from the interstate.

The Francis Marion National Forest covers a quarter million acres between Charleston and the Santee River, Longleaf and Loblolly and Blackwater Creeks.

Up the middle of the state, where the Congaree and the Wateree come together, there's a floodplain forest with some of the tallest trees east of the Mississippi, bald cypress and loblolly pine standing in water half the year, and it's been protected ground since the '70s.

Stay tuned for more backwoods Bigfoot stories.

She was the daughter of Captain John Nelson, a native of Ireland, who married Miss Brownson of South Carolina.

The ferry over the Santee River, established and kept for several years by them, is still called Nelson's Ferry, and many of their descendants continue to live on both sides of the river.

It is said that Lord Cornwallis, on his march into the interior after the fall of Charleston, established his headquarters at this ferry at the house of the widow Nelson.

She received from him an assurance that her property should be protected.