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South Carolina Canal & Rail Road Company

South Carolina Canal & Rail Road Company: Map and History

Last revised: September 15, 2026

The South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company was Charleston’s bid for the cotton. The General Assembly chartered it on December 19, 1827, ten months after Maryland chartered the Baltimore & Ohio. William Aiken was the first president. Horatio Allen, who had already run the Stourbridge Lion on the Delaware & Hudson, took the engineering in 1829. The object was inland South Carolina—Hamburg on the Savannah across from Augusta, and, on the same charter, Columbia and Camden. A canal between the Savannah and the Ashley was in the name. It was never dug. What they built was iron. The Best Friend of Charleston took 141 paying passengers out of Camden Depot on Christmas Day, 1830. The 136 miles to Hamburg opened October 3, 1833, the longest railroad in the world under one management. An act of December 19, 1843 folded the company into the South Carolina Railroad Company. Southern Railway took the property in 1899.

It was a cotton road, not a canal. Strap iron on wooden sills, miles of pile trestle through the pine barrens, an inclined plane into Horse Creek Valley that created the town of Aiken, and a gauge of five feet. The 1820s and 1830s as a founding era are the beginning. The national encyclopedia is railroad history. This page is the South Carolina Canal & Rail Road: the charter, the Friend as equipment, the 136 miles, the plane, and the iron Norfolk Southern still runs from Charleston through Branchville.

Best Friend of Charleston replica at the Engine House of the Best Friend of Charleston Museum in Charleston South Carolina

A Best Friend of Charleston replica at the Engine House of the Best Friend of Charleston Museum in Charleston.

On this page: At a glance · Charter, 1827 · Allen, piles, and strap iron · Christmas Day, 1830 · Branchville to Hamburg · The Aiken plane · The 1833 map · Fill, T-rail, and more engines · Columbia, Camden, and the 1844 company · What remains

At a glance

Item	Detail
Legal name	South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company. Informal Charleston & Hamburg, never the legal title
Charter	South Carolina, December 19, 1827, amended January 1828. Authorized railways to Hamburg, Columbia, and Camden
First president	William Aiken. Elias Horry from 1831
Chief engineer	Horatio Allen, hired 1829
Headquarters	Charleston, South Carolina
First public steam	Camden Depot, Charleston, December 25, 1830, behind the Best Friend of Charleston. About six miles
Hamburg	Through line opened October 3, 1833. 136 miles. Longest railroad in the world at the time
Gauge	5 feet as built. Later 4 feet 9 inches, then 4 feet 8½ inches in the Southern 1886 change
Cost as opened	About $951,000. Another several hundred thousand in the 1830s to replace piles with fill and T-rail
Inclined plane	Aiken, into Horse Creek Valley. Abandoned 1852 for the Aiken Cut
Columbia branch	Branchville–Columbia, 66 miles, opened 1842
South Carolina Railroad Company	Act of December 19, 1843, merging the Canal & Rail Road with the Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston. In operation 1844
Successor	South Carolina Railroad; South Carolina & Georgia 1894; Southern Railway 1899 / Carolina Division 1902; today Norfolk Southern

Main-line dates follow Derrick and the South Carolina acts. Gauge is the five-foot Southern construction standard. Information compiled September 15, 2026.

Charter, 1827

Charleston watched cotton slide down the Savannah to a rival port. Augusta was the inland prize. Hamburg, a South Carolina landing directly across the river, was as close as a Charleston company could get without asking Georgia for a bridge. Alexander Black of Charleston put a bill in the House on December 4, 1827, for a railway between the city and the towns of Hamburg, Columbia, and Camden. The act of December 19 created the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company. An extra session in January 1828 rewrote it: capital $700,000, 3,500 shares at $100. Books filled in Charleston by March 21. Hamburg, Columbia, and Camden took none of the first issue.

The canal in the title was a hedge. The legislature was still a canal legislature. No ditch was ever cut between the Savannah and the Ashley for this company. The Santee Canal already existed as a separate waterway. What the 1827 paper bought was the right to lay a railroad across the middle of the state, and a promise that Columbia and Camden would not be left off the map forever.

William Aiken, a Charleston merchant, was elected president. His house still stands. The town later planted at the inclined plane took his name. He died in 1831. Elias Horry finished the long railroad. The B&O, chartered February 28, 1827, was the first American common carrier and Charleston’s example, not its twin. Baltimore was fighting the Erie Canal. Charleston was fighting the Savannah River.

Allen, piles, and strap iron

Horatio Allen came south in 1829. He had been a resident engineer on the Delaware & Hudson, had gone to England for locomotives, and had been at the throttle of the Stourbridge Lion at Honesdale on August 8, 1829—the first steam locomotive to run in the United States. The D&H put the English engines away. Allen did not. Charleston hired him as chief engineer and bought the idea that the Hamburg road would be a steam road.

Spades and pile drivers started at Line Street, on the edge of Charleston, on January 9, 1830. Allen’s cheap method was lightwood piles, eight inches square, driven in pairs, caps mortised on, wooden rails notched to the ties, strap iron spiked on top. Through the pine barrens he preferred a low wooden trestle to an earthen fill. It was fast. It was also a structure sitting in South Carolina heat and humidity. George Hilton later called the theory a disaster. The wood went to pieces. Derailments followed. Between 1833 and 1839 the company spent on the order of $463,000 more to put the road on earth and to lay T-rail. That bill was almost another railroad.

Planters along the line granted right-of-way and hired out enslaved labor. Contractors also brought white workers from the North and from Europe. Charleston, nervous about sparks and noise, at first kept steam south of Line Street. Horses worked the first miles. Steam won the argument once the Friend had run.

Christmas Day, 1830

The locomotive came from the West Point Foundry at Cold Spring, New York, the same shop that would build the DeWitt Clinton. It arrived at Charleston aboard the Niagara in October 1830, was put together, and was under trial by November 2. They named it for the city. On December 25, 1830 it left Camden Depot with about 141 paying passengers over the first six miles. It was the first American-built locomotive in regular revenue passenger service, and the first steam passenger schedule in the United States. The locomotive encyclopedia is the Best Friend of Charleston. This page is the railroad that ran it.

The Friend worked daily into the next summer. On June 17, 1831 the boiler exploded. The fireman had tied down the safety valve. It was the first locomotive boiler explosion in the United States. The company salvaged what it could as the Phoenix, which stayed on the roster into the Civil War. West Point Foundry sent another 0-4-0 named West Point. In 1832 Allen’s swiveling leading truck appeared on an eight-wheeled engine called South Carolina—the first American locomotive on eight wheels. Those machines are dates here. How a foundry 0-4-0 became a legend is the Friend’s own story.

Branchville to Hamburg

Six miles in 1830 was a demonstration. The rest of the 136 miles was a construction camp. Nearly the whole road went under contract in 1831. More than a thousand contractors had pieces of it. Regular service reached Branchville, 62 miles, on November 7, 1832; Midway, ten miles farther, on February 7, 1833. Nine passing tracks and a dozen water stations were in by then. Elias Horry spoke at the finish on October 2. On October 3, 1833 he and Governor Robert Y. Hayne left Charleston at 5:45 a.m. and were at Aikenville, 120 miles, by 5 p.m. The Hamburg end closed that season. The measured distance was 136 miles. No other railroad on earth, under one company, was that long. The B&O in the same year was still a short road out of Baltimore.

Cost as opened ran about $951,000, a little over $5,600 a mile with the first engines and cars counted in. Derrick’s centennial history printed $951,148.39. Phillips, working from company figures, came in a little under that. Either number was a bargain next to what the piles later cost to replace. By late 1833 the company was running steam engines, passenger cars, lumber cars, tenders, and freight cars on a published schedule. It took a mail contract once the through line was open—among the first American railroads to carry the mail by steam.

The Aiken plane

From Charleston west the grade was almost nothing: on the order of 500 feet in 120 miles. Then the land fell off. Into Horse Creek Valley, toward Hamburg and the Savannah, the drop was about 180 feet in a little over half a mile. Locomotives of 1833 could not climb it. Allen built an inclined plane: two parallel tracks, a stationary engine in a house at the top, a rope (later a cable) that raised one cut while the other descended. Cars from Charleston staged at the summit. Cars from Hamburg staged at the foot. The wait created a town. Aiken was laid out in 1834 and chartered in 1835, named for the first president. Summerville, back toward Charleston, was the company’s other railroad town.

The plane was a bottleneck from the day it opened. A locomotive used as a counterweight later replaced the first stationary engine. Directors recommended a cut around it. The Aiken Cut opened in May 1852 and the plane was abandoned. Wooden strap-rail from those tracks still lies in Hitchcock Woods, documented in 2017 and listed on the National Register in 2021. It is among the oldest railroad fabric left in the United States. The replica plane in town is a marker, not the original.

The 1833 map

Tanner 1833 map of South Carolina with the Charleston to Hamburg railroad highlighted in blue

The South Carolina Canal & Rail Road, highlighted in blue, on H. S. Tanner’s 1833 map of South Carolina. The line is Charleston to Hamburg; Columbia and Camden are still a charter promise. American-Rails.com collection.

Tanner caught the company in the year it reached the Savannah: one blue stroke across the coastal plain, Charleston inset at lower left, no Columbia branch, no bridge to Augusta. Steamboat tables still own the river. That is the railroad the Friend had opened and that Horry had just finished. Savannah noticed. The Central Rail Road and Canal Company of Georgia was chartered December 20, 1833, so the cotton would have a Savannah road as well as a Charleston one. That company is the Central of Georgia.

Fill, T-rail, and more engines

Allen went north in 1831 to order more locomotives. By 1835 the roster is given as 23 engines—an astonishing number for a road that had been six miles of horse track five years earlier. Strap iron threw snake heads. The pile trestles sagged. The 1830s rebuild put the Hamburg main on an embankment and replaced the bar iron with T-rail, the section the Camden & Amboy had already put down in New Jersey. That story is the Camden & Amboy. The South Carolina job was to keep 136 miles from rotting out from under the trains.

Gauge stayed five feet, the Southern construction standard, not the English 4 feet 8½ inches of the B&O and the Mohawk & Hudson. When the South changed gauge in 1886, this iron changed with it. That conversion is an 1880s date. The Canal & Rail Road itself never ran to standard gauge.

Columbia, Camden, and the 1844 company

South Carolina Railroad timetable from the American Railway Guide 1851 Charleston Augusta Columbia Camden

South Carolina Railroad timetable, 1851, from the American Railway Guide. Charleston, Augusta, Columbia, and the Camden branch—the charter map, seven years after the 1844 company. American-Rails.com collection.

The original act had named three inland towns. Hamburg was the cotton. Columbia was the capital. Camden was the Wateree. A Columbia company was authorized in 1833; the Canal & Rail Road kept the exclusive right. The Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston, Robert Y. Hayne’s mountain scheme toward the Ohio, bought the stock of the Canal & Rail Road in the late 1830s and built no Cincinnati line of its own. What it did build was the 66-mile Branchville–Columbia branch, opened 1842. Branchville became a junction—two railroads, one company, the first of that kind in the United States that lasted. The Camden branch opened in 1848. A bridge over the Savannah to Augusta followed in 1853. Hamburg had been a ferry landing. Augusta had wanted the trains on its own bank.

An act of December 19, 1843—sixteen years to the day after the first charter—united the Canal & Rail Road and the Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston as the South Carolina Railroad Company. The new name was in use in 1844. Henry W. Conner’s 1851 timetable already reads as a system: Charleston to Augusta with a mail train and an express, Branchville to Columbia, the Camden branch off at Camden Junction, connections with the Georgia Railroad and the Charlotte & South Carolina. That is the company the Civil War wrecked. Sherman’s march left it with a handful of engines. Columbia and Charleston were tied back together in January 1866. The war as a railroad event is the Civil War.

Debt did the rest. A New York committee bought the road in 1881. Receivership came again in 1889. Sale in 1894 produced the South Carolina & Georgia. Southern Railway took control in 1899 and, by a South Carolina act of February 19, 1902, consolidated the property into the Southern Railway–Carolina Division on July 1, 1902, on a 999-year lease. The Southern as a company is the Southern. The Canal & Rail Road’s story ends when the 1844 name is on the timetable. The 136 miles did not end.

What remains

This is not a vanished grade. Norfolk Southern still runs Charleston to Columbia by way of Branchville, and still runs the Branchville–Augusta corridor that is the Hamburg main in successor form. The trains are not on Allen’s piles. Charleston’s terminal has moved. The Aiken plane has been a woods trace since 1852. The 1852 cut is the later railroad. But the towns the 1833 line created—Summerville, Branchville, Blackville, Aiken—are still railroad towns, and the cotton road is still a freight railroad.

Camden Depot in Charleston is a National Historic Landmark. The William Aiken House is on the same early-railroad district. The Best Friend replica sits at the Engine House museum. In Hitchcock Woods the inclined-plane tracks are an archaeological site. Aiken Railway works some of the old Southern iron around Aiken as a short line.

South Carolina as a state is South Carolina. The founding decade is the 1820s and 1830s. The South Carolina Canal & Rail Road is the 136 miles, a canal that was never dug, and a Christmas train that proved an American shop could build a locomotive that earned fares.

Sources

Derrick, Samuel Melanchthon. Centennial History of South Carolina Railroad. Columbia, S.C., 1930. Charter, construction, costs, Horry, 1843–44 merger
South Carolina Encyclopedia, “South Carolina Railroad.” December 19, 1827–1902; pile construction; Columbia 1842; Camden 1848; 1881 sale; Southern lease
Acts of the South Carolina General Assembly: charter of December 19, 1827; January 1828 amendment; merger act of December 19, 1843
Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. A History of Transportation in the Ante-Bellum South. Construction cost, Branchville November 7, 1832, Midway February 7, 1833, Hamburg October 1833
Hilton, George W. American Narrow Gauge Railroads. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Allen’s wooden trestle-work and the 1830s rebuild
American Society of Civil Engineers, Charleston–Hamburg Railroad Historic Landmark. 136 miles; steam passenger service; mail contract
Wayt, Howard. “Railroad Tracks belonging to the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company, c. 1839–1852.” IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 42, no. 1 (2016). Aiken inclined plane; Hitchcock Woods fabric
Tanner, H. S. A New Map of South Carolina, 1833 (Tanner’s Universal Atlas). Line highlighted on this page
American Railway Guide, 1851. South Carolina Railroad timetable reproduced on this page
National Register of Historic Places: South Carolina Railroad / Aiken Inclined Plane (listed September 23, 2021); Camden Depot, Charleston