The next season of Carolina Ghost Towns is about to drop!  This season begins on January 6, with new episodes coming out every other Tuesday.  Be sure to subscribe and recommend the show to your friends!

I had really hoped to be back on track with ghost towns, but things just haven't worked out.  We're still in temporary housing after Hurricane Helene over a year ago.  It's been frustrating.  I put the podcast on hold because I thought we would be busy moving back in, but it's been one delay after another.

I have done lots of research and I've got a long list of potential episodes, so there's lots more content and places to explore.

Jewish workers in the Socialist Commune of Happyville, Aiken, SC

Happyville was a short-lived agricultural commune near Montmorceni in Aiken County, South Carolina.  The community was based on socialist concepts, and was sponsored by the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, which wanted to bring in Eastern European Jewish immigrants to work the farmland.  The project was purely racist, with the intent of replacing "less desirable" black farmworkers with Jewish workers.

The Happyville residents didn't succeed.  Unusually harsh weather, inexperience, and racial troubles of their own eventually doomed the colony.  

Here are some of the resources used in this podcast:

Kingdom of the Happy Land by Gary Carden. Acrylic on canvas, 36”x24”. Source

The Kingdom of Happy Land was a settlement of freed slaves on the North Carolina/South Carolina border near Tuxedo, North Carolina.  The Kingdom had a King and Queen, and was operated as a socialistic society with all sharing equally. 

Resources:

Mitchelville on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, was the first town in the United States governed by freed slaves.  It was part of the Port Royal Experiment.

Partial list of links:

Instead of towns that disappeared, today we look at towns that never existed. Through my research I’ve found four categories of these so-called Paper Towns

Links to more information:

The colonial town of Dorchester is located on the Ashley River, just north of Charleston.  Settled by Congregetionalists, it was once the third largest town in South Carolina.

Now only the old bell tower of the St. George's Church and the tabby fortifications remain.  Old Dorchester is now a historic site and part of the South Carolina Parks System.

Here are some of the resources used in this episode:

Merrittsville was a community in norther Greenville County in what has become known as The Dark Corner.  Once a stopover for travelers, the region was notorious for moonshining and other illegal activities.  Now.  The town lies under the Greenville Watershed Reservois.

Resources:

This week we look at three ghost towns.  These towns featured academies that played a large part of the town.  When the academies closed down, the towns went into decline.  This episode looks at the towns of Minervaville in Richland County, South Carolina, which had the Minerva Academy, Slabtown in Anderson County, which had the Thalian Academy, then the Slabtown Academy, and Sievern in Aiken County, which had the Edisto Academy.

Some of the resources I used in podcast are listed below:

Ellenton, Dunbarton, Meyers Mills, and Leigh were small towns in Aiken and Barnwell Counties that were uprooted to make way for the Savannah River Plant to make atomic and hydrogen bombs.

I used lots of references and audio clips in this episode.  Here are the clips that I used in putting together this story.