Hamburg, South Carolina

The town was one of the state's primary interior markets by the 1830s, due largely to the fact that the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company chose Hamburg as the western terminus of its line to Charleston.

The town's decline was finalized in the 1850s when the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company extended its line into Augusta.

But, by 1813, the business dealings of Shultz had elevated him to a position capable of building a long-lasting bridge across the Savannah River, a feat which one of the wealthiest South Carolinian of the 1790s, Wade Hampton I, had failed to accomplish on two previous occasions.

[3]: 21  The following year, Shultz sought and procured loans from the South Carolina General Assembly to improve inland navigation between the town and Charleston.

[5]: 39  The emergence of steamboats led Hamburg and other towns strategically located at the fall lines of major rivers such as Camden and Columbia to become economically important for the first time.

"[7] Slave trading was banned in Georgia so planters crossed the Savannah River to purchase in Hamburg until the repeal of the anti-trading law in 1856.

[10] With the completion of the Augusta Canal (1848) and general expansion of railroads in the 1850s, strenuous overland hauls to Hamburg became unnecessary and the famous wagon traffic declined.

[11]: 20 Following the war, Hamburg was repopulated and governed by freedmen, starting with Prince Rivers; Samuel J. Lee, a free man before the war, who was elected as the speaker of the House and was the first black man admitted to the South Carolina Bar; and Charles D. Hayne, a freeman from an elite Charleston family.

[18] Under protection of the Clarks Hill Dam and Lake, adjacent North Augusta has begun to develop on the grounds of old Hamburg.