Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
twenty to thirty inches in diameter, with leaves ten to fifteen inches long, in dense radiant
masses at the ends of the naked branches.” The cotton fields, African American laborers,
plantations, and timber all pointed to a real, antebellum past powered by human and animal
muscles sustained by soil. Muir described these social and economic realities and perpetu-
ated a historical narrative of life and labor in the American South that overlooked critical
components of the region's environmental, industrial, and organic energy history.
4
Before the Civil War, Piedmont southerners had already begun to move beyond agricul-
tural production and muscle power, and they relied on southern rivers and renewable en-
ergy to do so. When Muir reached Augusta and the fall line—the point where the Coastal
Plain and Piedmont merge and easy upstream navigation ends—he did not say anything
about the Old South's antebellum textile mills or industrial artifacts. Nor did he describe
the 1,000-foot-long rock dam that diverted the Savannah River's current from a series of
rocky shoals into a maze of linear waterpower canals. Augusta's industrialists had re-cre-
ated a version of the New England Waltham-Lowell system that Henry D. Thoreau de-
scribed in
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
(1849). Augusta's system never
reached the scale Thoreau found during his New England paddling trip, and the New Eng-
land factory system and mill towns were, of course, rare. Scattered grist- and sawmills in
the Savannah River's creeks and tributaries—such as William Gregg's Horse Creek valley
mills—were more common throughout early America, including the Southeast. Regard-
less of scale and technological diffusion, Augusta's system captured an organic and renew-
able energy source, reorganized modes of production, required external collaboration, and
altered the river's environment. And from this perspective, Augusta looked a lot like a New
England mill village in an agricultural nation.
5
The upper Chattahoochee and Savannah Rivers did flow freely through Blue Ridge
and Piedmont agricultural landscapes with “intoxicating banks” in the nineteenth century.
Downstream at the fall line, however, Old South entrepreneurs in towns and cities such as
Columbus and Augusta had already erected diversion dams, created small artificial ponds,
and laid the foundations for an industrial New South upon the banks of southern rivers dur-
ing the 1840s. By focusing on the natural history and agricultural dimensions of the south-
ern landscape, Muir obscured the early industrial legacy of the energy-water nexus in the
American South.
6
Throughout the nineteenth century—and in the centuries before—Savannah River valley
inhabitants depended on the river to survive. As John Muir traveled leisurely through mul-
tiple southern river valleys, he passed through a peopled and working landscape that had
been shaped as much by Indian, African, and European hands as it had been shaped by
droughts and floods. All of these human and natural influences crafted a Savannah River
valley that was an agricultural and industrious place before the American Civil War.
