A Keystone Dam and Georgia’s New Ocean - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 79

In perhaps the most forceful and clear language, Governor J. Strom Thurmond declared
in 1947, “We know the government always completes its projects.” In directly calling out
Georgia Power Company executives who were then restarting the almost twenty-year-old
Furman Shoals (Lake Sinclair) project on the Oconee River, Thurmond reminded South
Carolina citizens that they could not always be sure about a private energy company's in-
terest in finishing projects. 82 Thurmond also noted that “opposition to the nation's water
development system stemmed from 'bulwarks of wealth and private interest,'” not from
those who purportedly held public and community values. 83 Furthermore, the private en-
ergy company was apparently selective in calling federal projects socialistic. Thurmond
claimed that Georgia Power had not branded the Corps' Allatoona dam in northwest Ge-
orgia as “Socialistic.” 84 The company may have behaved this way because it was planning
new coal-fired plants downstream of Allatoona on the Etowah River, such as Plant Ham-
mond (operational in 1954), and it was keen to have a federal dam regulate the river's flow.
Thurmond—more well known for his future leadership in the Dixiecrat revolt, his racial
politics, and his eventual jump to the Republican Party in 1964—was a complex character
who contributed to the breaking apart of the Democratic Party over the issue of civil rights.
This advocacy for Clarks Hill undoubtedly played into Congress's decision to change the
name of Clarks Hill Dam and Lake to the J. Strom Thurmond Dam and Lake at Clarks Hill
in 1988.
To say that dry and high river years, drought and flood legacies in the Savannah River val-
ley, did not equally shape the Savannah River valley's history as did politics or labor his-
tory would be an understatement. Water and its shifting behavior contributed to the reasons
why people chose to move into and throughout the valley for centuries. New South boost-
ers had consistently trumpeted the region's stock in plentiful, high-quality water as a reason
to call the American South home from the 1890s to the 1950s. As such, devastating flood-
ing in river communities and droughts that compromised electrical production and indus-
trial development did not always strike innocent Georgians and South Carolinians. Water
was a top-tier factor in the region's economic growth, and water in the wrong quantities
at the wrong times also compromised that growth. Natural disasters—the droughts and the
floods in the Savannah River valley—were thus nature's and people's making. Many oth-
er manufactured problems—racial inequality, eroded land, the need for bridge relocations,
and public health problems—also influenced conversations about the valley's shape, where
people lived, and the ability for communities to thrive along the riverbanks and reservoir
shorelines.
After completing the Clarks Hill dam and reservoir project, Corps and federal engineers
continued to build hundreds of large and small reservoirs throughout the American South
for a variety of purposes in places southerners had lived in, farmed, hunted, and appreciated
for centuries. In the post-1945 period, the Corps' work in southern valleys tied the region's