Big Dam Backlash Rising in the Sun Belt - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 99

property.” Thurmond worked his magic by contacting the Corps' real estate managers in
an effort to ameliorate his constituents. Eventually, the Corps offered to acquire Timms's
property earlier so he might better plan his relocation while also allowing him to remain
on the property during the project's construction phase. 77 Not all situations had such happy
endings.
Land condemnation cases blossomed during the Hartwell land acquisition process as
other landowners fought to establish fair prices for their land. According to U.S. District
Court case file transcripts, many property owners primarily struggled to establish fair per-
acre values for land through condemnation proceedings, not unlike those who challenged
federal real estate agents at Clarks Hill and other reservoir locations. 78 Based on selected
transcripts, some of these farms were profitable for pulpwood, cattle, corn, and hay, and
these property owners wanted to make sure they got fair value for what they considered
good river bottomland. Condemnation proceedings favored white landowners who had the
resources to fight in court, and people with good land had little incentive to sell. But prop-
erty owners with poor land, or minority landowners with no resources to fight, took the
money when offered. 79 Others held out until the bitter end, including seventy-eight-year-
old Eliza Brock and her daughter, who leveled a shotgun at the workers who arrived to
clear her land. Brock eventually settled out of court and accepted the Corps' original offer
for her property before moving. 80 As Clarks Hill and Hartwell land condemnation issues
worked their way to resolution, constituent uproar did encourage Senators Olin Johnston
and Strom Thurmond to repeatedly attempt to introduce legislation to reconvey to former
owners the surplus lands the Corps no longer needed for project operations. 81
But real estate issues alone would not hold up the dam's construction, which the Corps
had begun in 1955 and completed by 1962, when the reservoir filled and power genera-
tion commenced. The initial estimated cost of $68.4 million (in 1948 dollars, or more than
$653 million in 2012 when adjusted for inflation) jumped to a final $89,240,000. 82 But the
Corps claimed in 1989 a return of more than $118.4 million from power sales to electrical
cooperatives and other customers. While the development incited a conservative backlash
and was not popular with all area residents, the Corps reported that nearly 750,000 people
visited Hartwell in 1962. And in 2005, Hartwell Lake was among the top five most popular
Corps projects in the nation, drawing in more than 10 million visitors. The boosters' dream
to build a recreational and leisure paradise while solving the Sun Belt's water insecurity in
the Savannah River valley appeared to have come true. The recent 2006-9 and 2011-12
droughts, however, combined with the Great Recession and volatile fuel prices, reduced the
lake's volume and communities' ability to recover once-humming recreational, real estate,
and associated roaring service economies of the past. 83 The valley's hydraulic waterscape
was clearly expansive, functional, and successful by some metrics.