Lowell of the South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 8

much larger scale than Calhoun alone could have ever achieved. Augusta's prominent city
boosters secured the local political will, the necessary financial resources, and the appro-
priate technological advice to begin construction on the Augusta Canal in the 1840s less
than 100 miles downriver from Calhoun's Millwood Plantation. 22 Georgia and South Caro-
lina generally lagged behind other states during the canal-building era when compared with
New York (Erie Canal, 360 miles long) or Maryland (Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, 185
miles long). Georgians and South Carolinians only constructed a handful of transportation
canals: the 22-mile-long Santee and Cooper canal (constructed between 1793 and 1800);
the 15-mile coastal Savannah-Ogeechee-Altamaha canal (1825-30); and a 12-mile canal
connecting the Altamaha River with the port at Brunswick, Georgia (1834-54). All of these
canals suffered for financial reasons and as a result of railroad competition. 23 However,
the Lowell of the South was motivated by this canal-building era and the original Lowell's
emergence as the epicenter of North American textile manufacturing.
Augustan Henry Harford Cumming merged the political, financial, and technological
powers necessary to move the Augusta Canal from an idea in the 1830s to a reality in
1845. 24 More than anything, Cumming wanted to anchor Augusta's mercurial economy
and to reverse the city's dependence on northeastern cities and the southern ports of Sa-
vannah and Charleston. Cumming sensed that Augusta could compete with Lowell, where
investors built twenty-eight water-powered mills and massed 8,000 workers to operate
150,000 spindles and 5,000 looms by 1839. 25 Cumming and other regional entrepreneurs
like South Carolinian William Gregg reasoned, Why send raw cotton to New England when
it could be processed closer to the fields where it was harvested? Gregg had toured Low-
ell in 1844 and decided to mimic the system in the Horse Creek valley ten miles east of
Augusta on a Savannah River tributary in South Carolina. Operations at the Graniteville
Manufacturing Company and mill village where Gregg employed over 300 white workers
to operate 9,000 spindles and 300 looms eventually began in 1849. 26 In the years leading up
to Gregg's decision to build his first mill, people like Cumming understood that the region's
large pool of restless and landless labor—a perceived problem in its own right—could be
redirected from farms to the factories fueled by water.
In the wake of the 1830s national financial panic and regional soil erosion, many Georgia
and South Carolina farmers began to flee the state for the “black belt” soils of Alabama
and points west. This exodus threatened the region's political economy. 27 To stop the hem-
orrhaging, local leaders advocated for investment in additional projects and a shift to a
nationalized and diversified commercial economy. Augusta's Henry H. Cumming advoc-
ated on these lines of reasoning and believed new railroads would ultimately favor cities
like Augusta. All of these factors—access to raw materials, local labor, and transportation
links to international markets—led Cumming, Gregg, and other men of capital to employ
the Savannah River valley's water to drive a diversified commercial economy during the