The Oconee Waterwheel

Oconee State Park was developed in the 1930's as one of South Carolina's earliest state parks by members of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program created under President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression to address unemployment and land damaged by generations of harmful farming practices. The CCC camp at Oconee was established in July 1935, and over the next two years the men of CCC Camp F-1 created the park on heavily farmed, badly eroded land, using native materials and traditional local resources in many of the structures that still stand there. Among the ways water and power were managed in the early park were hydraulic ram pumps, which used the force of flowing water to raise some water uphill and were once common in mountainous areas before electric pumps became widespread after World War II, and an overshot waterwheel used by the CCC to power a pump that transported drinking water to the camp. The wheel now displayed is the original CCC wheel, while its building is a replica of the original wheelhouse; in operation, water was carried by pipe to a stone well, directed by a wooden trough to the top of the wheel, and the turning shaft powered a pump that moved water uphill, in the original system for nearly a mile. Waterwheels of this kind, used for generations in the Carolina upcountry and dating to more than a century before the time of Christ, could also drive machines such as saws and pumps by belts and gears. The arrival of the steam engine around the turn of the twentieth century and electricity in the Oconee area in the fall of 1941 made waterwheels largely obsolete except for limited tasks such as powering grist mills.

South Carolina · United States