Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Like DuBose and Evans, individuals and family estate agents, plus other Clarks Hill
corporate landowners, including electrical utilities (the Savannah River Electric Company,
a Georgia Power Company subsidiary, held title to nearly 40,000 acres) and local banks,
eventually sold their property to the federal government. Many individual and corporate
sellers willingly worked with the Corps, eagerly sold eroded farms battered about for dec-
ades in a volatile agricultural economy, and moved out of the valley. In a procedure famil-
iar in the past and encountered in the future, not all transactions were so smooth. Some
individual and corporate landowners reluctantly sold property only under condemnation
proceedings or vacated property only as the reservoir's rising waters began to cover their
property; they protested the right of the federal government to condemn land as well as the
land's assessed economic value, which often did not account for the property's historic or
emotional value.
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So was everyone “for it”? In 1943, when Colonel P. A. Feringa made this remark about the
federally financed Clarks Hill project, he was technically more correct than wrong. Flood-
ing that nearly caused a catastrophic levee failure in Augusta in 1929 and a 1941 urban
drought that resulted in a major energy crisis made the multiple-purpose navigation, flood
control, and hydroelectric dam development at Clarks Hill more appealing to the Savan-
nah River valley's residents in 1945 than the Georgia Power Company's water and energy
scheme. Within a few years, this assumption was briefly challenged, but the Corps' pro-
ject moved forward and workers poured the first batches of concrete for Clarks Hill dam
in 1948. The topography of the Savannah River valley did not call for a tall western dam
best exemplified by the iconic Hoover Dam (1936). That Colorado River dam, which stood
taller than 500 feet and measured just over 1,000 feet in width, was far different from the
Clarks Hill dam. After increasing from an estimated 1944 cost of $35.3 million to a 1954
cost of $78.5 million, the concrete dam and earthen embankment stood just shy of 200 feet
tall and nearly one mile (5,280 feet) wide across the Savannah River when completed.
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When Clarks Hill dam's floodgates closed and the reservoir began to fill in 1951, the
project remained incomplete. In late 1952, an Atlanta journalist declared that the Savan-
nah River was “imprisoned” behind the dam and had turned into “Georgia's new ocean”
covering 71,000 acres with more than 1,200 miles of shoreline. At the time, Clarks Hill
Lake was the “biggest man-made lake southeast of TVA.” Many held out hope that the
dam would “tame the river in floodtime, preventing more than a million dollar's worth of
damage every decade” and store water for “periods of drought” last experienced in 1941.
Others hoped that Clarks Hill would become the Sun Belt's “biggest vacationland between
Hill would serve many interests well into the future, thought this was not readily apparent
to everyone.
