Something to Celebrate Aiken!
Celebrate Aiken! commemorates our city’s rich past, its vibrant present and bright future, and most of all, its people, who have made it what it is today. It all began with the coming of the railroad.
The Railroad: The longest railroad in the world at the time of its construction was responsible for Aiken’s founding. By the late 1820s, many upcountry cotton growers were taking their crop to Augusta and shipping it by barge to Savannah.
William Aiken, Sr. of Charleston, president of the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Co., instituted a bold plan to build a 136-mile river of rails from Charleston to Hamburg, S.C. (now North Augusta) and take back the precious cotton trade. Surveyors Andrew Dexter and Cyril Pascalis were assigned to lay out the section nearest to Hamburg. As fate would have it, they stayed at Chinaberry Plantation, the home of William W. Williams and his beautiful daughter Sarah. Chinaberry still stands off South Boundary between Whiskey Road and York Street. For the approach into Hamburg, the surveyors were assessing the land closer to Beech Island, which offered a level area for construction. However, Dexter, having fallen in love with Sarah, asked Mr. Williams for her hand in marriage. Plantation owner Williams agreed, so long as the railroad came through his plantation.
Williams and other property owners donated land for a depot and village, and in 1834 Dexter and Pascalis laid out our beautiful system of parkways. The original town lay between Edgefield and Railroad Avenues (later renamed Park Avenue by the New York residents of Aiken’s Winter Colony) and between Newberry and Williamsburg Streets.
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