Deserted Village

Ellenton, S.C. (pop. 700) was one of those backwater Southern villages where nothing much ever happened and the people liked it that way. Old families--the Ashleys, the Dunbars and the Foremans--made a living from their fields of peanuts and cotton. Aging Mike Cassels ran his rambling general store--"de long stoah," the Negroes called it. Sharecropper kids scampered and chickens pecked in the dust among the shacks and privies and chinaberry trees of the colored section.

On Nov. 28, 1950, the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington made an announcement: 200,000 acres in the Savannah River valley had been chosen for the site of a $1,180,000,000 plant to manufacture tritium and other materials of atomic war. The 6,000 residents of the area would have to leave. The deadline for Ellenton: midnight, Feb. 29, 1952.

Atomic Motor Sales. Even before the Government had settled property claims battalions of snorting earthmovers plunged into the fields. They ripped through swamp gum thickets that had sheltered some of the finest turkey and partridge coverts in the East, churned the rich red clay into a lifeless desert. Huge huts sprang up, weird cylindrical towers rose against the horizon. The first horde of an eventual 47,000 workers poured in. Ellenton began to pull itself up by the roots. A town called New Ellenton was started from scratch twelve miles away. Most of Ellenton's Negroes moved there, loading their old shacks on giant gooseneck trailer trucks. But the village's white residents scattered--"the D.P.s of World War III," they call themselves. New Ellenton was too much of a boom town for their taste; its population reached 4,000 within a few months. Some of its business enterprises: Atomic Motor Sales, Oak Ridge Grocery, Atomic Drive-In.

A Rag Doll. Last week in the old Ellenton, narcissuses and camellias still bloomed around the angry scars where once there were homes. A hound dog snoozed in the sun on worn brick steps that led to a void. A rag doll lay in the dust. On the blackboard of the village school a childish hand had written in big round letters: "Goodbye, dear school. Goodbye." Galphin Dunbar, 73, a descendant of the family originally granted the land around Ellenton by King George II two centuries ago, sat brooding on a baggage dolly in the railroad shed. "I'm gonna leave," he said, "but I don't know where I'm going. I ain't got much money. But it was a Dunbar that started this town, and it's fittin' that a Dunbar be the last to leave."

On Friday, the deadline date, Postmaster B. T. Brinkley and his two daughters spent the day stamping 4,000 letters from stamp collectors with a special cachet. At 5 p.m., just as he had for years, Brinkley pulled down the sliding door of the stamp wicket, locked the windows and latched the door for the last time. Ellenton was given up to the bulldozers and to progress.

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