Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Antebellum Georgians, South Carolinians, and their industrial allies began a process
that fundamentally transformed the region's free-flowing rivers into a collection of pools
and reservoirs encumbered by dams or channeled in new directions to generate industrial
energy and remap social power. The Southeast was rich in organic energy—soil, timber,
and wildlife—but lacked abundant and easily transferable mineral fuels—coal and
oil—required to generate energy. Participants in America's famed market revolution,
however, brought organized capital and mainstream dams south in the 1840s. Entrepren-
eurs amassed private investors' capital or entered into public-private partnerships to build
diversion dams along the region's fall-line urban centers, including Columbia (S.C.) on
the Congaree River and Augusta on the Savannah River, to fill canals and supply muscle-
powered factory laborers with water and renewable industrial energy.
Water and power have been linked for a long time in the American South. 7 Muir may
have observed Augusta's emerging hydraulic waterscape, and had he decided to float the
Chattahoochee River from the Georgia mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, he would have
discovered similar infrastructure in Columbus. Aside from this speculation, Muir did de-
scribe an agricultural landscape, and in so doing, he missed key physical industrial artifacts
that were the building blocks of the American South's modern waterscape and political eco-
nomy. As he descended the Savannah River valley, Muir would eventually encounter the
spirit responsible for transforming antebellum waterpower into “New South” hydroelectric
power, a process that built a water and power nexus with alacrity.
The Savannah River Basin
The Savannah River watershed encompasses approximately 10,500 square miles in Geor-
gia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Like a funnel, the watershed consolidates water
seeping from underground springs and rain that falls on the ground and drains from northw-
est to southeast. Water flows quickly to the Atlantic Ocean, since this watershed travels the
shortest distance from mountains to sea of any mountain-to-sea river basin in the southeast-
ern United States. Blue Ridge Province streams and creeks descend from Western North
Carolina's ancient mountains (5,500 feet above sea level) to the Piedmont Province (elev.
1,000 ft.). Gathering speed, the rugged Southern Appalachian headwater streams give rise
to Georgia's Tugaloo River and South Carolina's Seneca River before these two form the
300-mile-long Savannah River. Serving as the dividing line between Georgia and South
Carolina, the Savannah River then pushes through the Piedmont and over rocky shoals be-
fore cascading over the fall line at Augusta, Georgia (elev. 200 ft.). Below this city, the
rocky Blue Ridge and Piedmont clays give way to the Coastal Plain's softer alluvial soils.
The gradient change causes the rushing Savannah River to decelerate and slowly twist back
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