Beneath the waters of Lakes Marion and Moultrie, just a dozen or so feet below the surface, sit the former sites of farms, timberlands, swamps, mills, and homes. The two reservoirs, together encompassing over 250 square miles, are part of the New Deal Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project. Constructed between 1939 and 1942, the hydroelectric project produced a 42-mile-long system of dams and dikes. Over 12,500 laborers cleared hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, swampland, and timberland in order to make the reservoirs. They dispossessed 901 mostly-Black families, or at least 2500 people, to make the land fit for inundation. One of the largest of the towns was Ferguson, a former lumber town with a population of approximately one thousand workers and some of their family members at its peak.

In researching the Santee-Cooper Project, I wanted to make sense of what thousands of acres of inundated land once looked and felt like, especially in the absence of material traces. What was it like to live in this place, to walk through the landscape? Though 901 families were displaced and as many homes were submerged in the making of the project, rural communities were not well documented prior to the submergence of the land. Rural homes, when represented at all on county maps, merely existed as small dots, indicating human presence but revealing nothing about those who lived therein. Therefore, I turned to Ferguson as a case study, which was still rural but was better documented, both on historic maps and in narrative accounts. The town was also self-sufficient, possessing mill buildings, railway stops, social centers, and residences that could indicate what community life was like for rural residents before the creation of the Santee-Cooper Project.

I designed 3D reproductions of towns submerged in the making of the Santee-Cooper Project to imagine what it might be like to move through the submerged spaces. To produce 3D renderings, I turned to SketchUp — a speculative design software used by architects, designers, civil engineers, and video game developers whose job is to imagine new worlds — to bring historic towns to life through what I call rendering speculative pasts. In rendering such pasts, I asked: What might it look like to move through drowned rural towns? How can we visualize that which no longer exists? Using a case study of Ferguson, South Carolina and the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric Project, I began to investigate if such a rendering of speculative pasts might be possible.

This project was generously supported by the Processing Foundation Fellowship and the Small Grants Program of the Black Studies Collaboratory at UC Berkeley. Thank you to Adrian Jones and Anna Garbier (and the rest of the SOSO Limited team!) for your technical, intellectual, and imaginative support on this project.