Lowell of the South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 5

Bartram called on one diversified South Carolina plantation, located near the present-
day town of Bordeaux but now partially under Clarks Hill's reservoir, which was “situated
on the top of a very high hill near the banks of the river Savanna.” From Frenchman Mons.
St. Pierre's house, Bartram looked down and across fields of corn, rice, wheat, oats, indigo,
and sweet potatoes on “rich low lands, lying very level betwixt these natural heights and the
river.” Other reports suggest Bordeaux—located about 3.5 miles from the Savannah River
in McCormick County, South Carolina—was primarily inhabited by up to 700 Huguenot
transplants who attempted silk cultivation and wine production. But after the American Re-
volution, the region turned to cotton as a staple crop. Bartram provided no sense of the size
of this or other plantations, but these settlements required more than the river valley's soil
and free-flowing water to survive. 12 On another stop, Bartram called on one slave owner
downstream from Augusta who deployed African labor into the “ancient sublime” longleaf
pine and cypress forests. There they cut and prepared timber for export downriver to Sa-
vannah and beyond to the “West-Indian market.” Euro-Americans and African slaves con-
sistently cultivated the valley's rich soil and water resources for international markets, and
those basic resources became significantly more valuable after the American Revolution. 13
Once European colonists arrived in the Savannah River valley, developments designed
to reap southern rivers' currents began to follow patterns familiar in other regions, such as
New England. In the colonial and early national periods, private investors improved wa-
ter resources at specific sites, constructing single mills or small factories alongside natural
waterfalls or shoals. Millwrights undertook similar projects in watersheds adjacent to the
Savannah. Like Native American anglers who congregated around rocky shoals to capture
fish and like farmers who planted the valley's mineral-rich bottoms and floodplains, Euro-
American mill builders utilized specific sites and the river's energy to serve limited geo-
graphical markets. 14
Well into the antebellum era, private individuals and investors continued to harness the
Savannah River's water energy to power gristmills, lumber mills, and cotton gins. Planters
such as James Edward Calhoun, who owned and operated the Millwood Plantation, erected
low dams to drive mills and machinery. James, the cousin of South Carolina's John C. Cal-
houn, who is remembered for steering the nullification and state's rights crisis of 1833 prior
to the American Civil War, owned property that stretched for seven miles and covered more
than 10,000 acres on both sides of the Savannah River in Abbeville (S.C.) and Elbert (Ga.)
Counties. This property included small dams and diversion structures that channeled water
to small mills that sat on riverbanks. Unlike some of the plantations Bartram visited high
on bluffs above the river, Millwood sat in the Savannah River's floodplain below the mouth
of the Rocky River and about sixty miles upstream from Augusta. Calhoun's many small
diversion dams, which did not run from bank to bank, simply redirected a portion of river