The Seneca Light & Power Company of Seneca, SC owned a steam power plant, powering the towns street light system. Around the Turn-of-the-Century, Seneca's first cotton mill, the Seneca Cotton Mills opened a new mill and village named Utica. In 1912, the Seneca Lt. & Pwr. Co. bought Fitzgerald Shoals on Coneross Creek, about 4 miles South of town. Soon construction of a dam and hydroelectric plant began to provide electricity for the Seneca Cotton Mills, Utica, and the town of Seneca. The old steam plant in town was to be used as an auxiliary station in case of low waters or the event of a flood.

Coneross had a set of two generators and turbines in the powerhouse downstream of the dam. Because the history of this dam is gone, its unknown what types of generators these were and how many volts they produced. The history of this whole plant was wiped out other than what's in a few articles from 1912 and what's left of the dam and powerhouse. Lines from the powerhouse ran uphill to a transformer house. From the transformer house, the transmission line ran to the old steam station used to power the mill before the hydroelectric dam, beside the Seneca Cotton Mill. Although no pictures or detailed articles are really of Coneross, its hard to gather what the transmission line looked like. Remains of Victor M-3060 were scattered around the original transformer house site, its safe to say the insulators are original so the transmission line might have used M-3060.

Like nearly all of the cotton mills in South Carolina, the mill was abandoned when the textile company moved out in the 1980s. The outdated hydroelectric plant went abandoned until 1991, when ENEL America stepped in and rerenovated the dam for use once more. It must have been in bad shape because the original 1912 powerhouse was demolished and replaced by an ugly cheap sheetmetal building right over the original foundation. The dam is original, the penstock is old, the was powerhouse replaced, maybe the generators were replaced?, the transmission line was removed, and the transformer house was replaced. The original brick transformer house was replaced by a modern substation, where ENEL America sells the power to Duke Energy that now sits on the old foundation.

The above image is of the Coneross Hydroelectric Plant in 2012. No early images of the plant exist that I know of.

The Hydroelectric Power Plants of South Carolina Collection:

High Shoals 1894 [id=332186800]

Pelzer Lower Dam 1895 [id=360186922]

Portman Shoals 1897 [id=340212432]

Berry Shoals 1903 [id=330110326]

Holiday Shoals 1905 [id=332438399]

Ware Shoals 1906 [id=347219612]

Saluda Dam 1907 [id=268330246]

Gaston Shoals 1908 [id=346266588]

Rocky Creek 1908 [id=429285050]

Boyd's Mill Pond 1909 [id=429197935]

Ninety-Nine Islands 1909 [id=358895213]

Fork Shoals -1910 [id=366408583]

Tumblin' Shoals 1912 [id=366398406]

Coneross 1912 [you are here]