Day of High Happening, 4th of Fall, 525 M.E. (Atlas):  In chocolate town all the trains are painted brown (Elvis Costello).

Cashua Ferry Road (South Carolina Route 34) starts near the intersection of Cashua Street and Society Hill Road near Darlington and extends east past Murphy Farm, New Providence Church, and Mechanicsville Baptist Church. It crosses Fountain Branch and continues west past Montrose Cemetery to the Great Pee Dee River at Cashua Ferry Landing. Thereafter, South Carolina Route 34 is simply called "Route 34." From the cemetery to the river, the pancake-flat road runs in a straight line for two and a half miles over the old oxbows and braided alluvial valley of the Great Pee Dee.  

In Folk Etymology in South Carolina Place Names, published in the journal American Speech by Duke University (1966), Claude Henry Neuffer claims that the first owners of the ferry on the Great Pee Dee called it "Cash-way," meaning that all persons who crossed had to pay a cash fare. The name became "Cashua" in the local pronunciation, and although the ferry has since been replaced by a (non-toll) bridge, the name remains. 

Captain Thomas Edward Hart Sr. began acquiring property in the area starting in 1817 and continuing through the late 1830s.  He built a schoolhouse and then a general store, and in 1838 he established a Post Office inside his store for the aptly named town of Hartsville. In August 1815, Capt. Hart married Hannah Lide; her father, Major Robert Lide, was a hero of the Revolutionary War.

Capt. Hart owned slaves to work his lands.  When one says he built a school and he built a store, one really means he used slave labor to build a schoolhouse and a store.  Years later, the Captain lost most of what he had acquired in the financial Panic of 1837, caused in part by a crash in cotton prices.  His spirit crushed, he died in 1842. His widow, Hannah, and their eldest son, Dr. Robert Lide Hart, continued to develop the area and ran several prosperous plantations, including the Cashua Creek Plantation.

Following the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, the Darlington Field Office of the Freedmen’s Bureau documents contracts for 35 former slaves at the Cashua Creek Plantation. Some were as young as Furman, a 9-year-old field laborer. Another field laborer on the plantation was named Eli, born into slavery in 1835. The contracts don't list last names of any of the laborers, but it was a common practice for freed slaves to be given the last name of the owners of the plantations on which they worked. Eli "Hart," the field laborer and former slave, was my grandfather's father's father, my great-great-granddad. 

Hannah Hart died on October 2, 1875. Dr. Hart, her son, continued to operate the family plantations until his death on January 24, 1879. Eli outlived them both, passing away at the age of 59 on June 13, 1894. As far as anyone knows, I'm still alive.