The Displaced

Barnwell District, Aiken Town,

O Lord, in mercy do look down,

The land is poor, the people too,

If they don't steal, what will they do?

--Sharecropper's lament

Poverty is an old story among the sandhills and pine barrens in South Carolina's Barnwell County. For more than a hundred years, small farmers have scratched a poor living out of sandy soil, have watched spring droughts brown their corn and boll weevils eat their cotton. But never before had people felt as beset and unwanted as they did last week.

In all of the Savannah River Valley, there was not a pine bark fish stew or a fat porker barbecue. Work had come to a standstill and people gathered in small hushed groups to discuss the stunning news: their homes, farms and small towns would be wiped out to make way for the Government's $260 million hydrogen-bomb project.

About 8,000 people, most of whose lives were deeply rooted in the region, including the entire towns of Ellenton (pop. 900), Dunbarton (pop. 250), Snelling (pop. 800), and Jackson (pop. 100) learned that they had to move from a 375-square-mile area in which the plant would be located. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. planned to have an 8,000-man construction crew in the area early next year; some families would have to move within 60 days, all had to be gone in 18 months.

On the outskirts of the project, towns and cities like Aiken, S.C. and Augusta, Ga. set to counting the blessings that would flow when upwards of 25,000 employees went, to work at the giant H-bomb plant. Aiken, which has a population of 7,000 and has been a resort for the wealthy since the 1880s, expected to zoom to a bustling town of 12,000, and already last week, real-estate prices had started to spiral. At Augusta, Ga. (pop. 70,000), the chamber of commerce predicted that the general influx of population and prosperity would be equivalent to moving 100 large industries into the region.

Inside the area, however, sharecroppers and small farmers expressed only bewilderment and sadness. Most hoped to get jobs in the new plant, but even if they did, they knew that things would never be quite the same.

In Ellenton, soft-spoken Mike Cassels, whose general store is the hub of social life in the community, closed his store one night last week, walked across the railroad tracks to the house he has lived in for 58 years. There he mused, "Makes you kind of jittery. It's kind of hard to think . . . We've got to decide where to go ... It's like having a death in the family, going to the funeral, then returning home and realizing the emptiness of the house."

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