Lowell of the South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 11

While reports from South Carolina's Piedmont and Blue Ridge region have suggested
the Keowee River was “the most beautiful river” in South Carolina's upstate with “pure and
transparent” waters in 1859, land use and soil management soon complicated river navig-
ation and flows downstream in the Savannah and other rivers. 34 South Carolina and Geor-
gia farmers and planters demanded much from a soil that was not deep enough to continu-
ously perform to human or market expectations. Piedmont tobacco and cotton agricultural-
ists participated in a cycle of land-clearing and cultivation that resulted in high yields fol-
lowed by varying degrees of soil erosion and land abandonment; they tapped the soil of its
energy. A late-nineteenth-century survey of potential waterpower sites in the United States
noted that the rivers in the Santee and Savannah Rivers' headwaters were “in many places
rapidly filling up with detritus—sand and mud—which is washed in from the hill-sides, so
that many shoals [were] being rapidly obliterated, and at many places, where within the
memory of middle-aged men there were shoals with falls of from 5 to 10 feet, at present
scarcely any shoals can be noticed.” The federal surveyor pointed to deforestation and “a
superficial method of cultivation, by which this soil is also rendered less cohesive and more
liable to washing.” 35 Whether agriculturalists were “soil miners,” “land killers,” or victims
in an “erosional tinderbox,” human behavior and labor deployed on land had consequences
for the function of all rivers. 36 Erosion and sediments raised river bottoms, contributed to
new and ever-shifting sandbars, blanketed old or created new wetlands, buried shoals, and
compromised spawning runs for the river's migratory fish such as shad and sturgeon. 37 As
farmers, planters, and slaves continually cleared new Piedmont land, they sent more soil in-
to the Savannah River and its tributaries, which only increased sedimentation, further com-
promised river navigation, and altered the composition of riparian ecology throughout the
basin.
Seasonal water flow and sediment-induced navigational hazards were not the only chal-
lenges to river transportation in the early nineteenth century. Railroad construction in the
1840s posed formidable competition for riverboat traffic. Extensive railroad construction
reconfigured the flow of capital in the Southeast, and a growing network of railroads re-
directed cotton away from Gulf of Mexico ports to eastern Atlantic ports such as Savan-
nah and Charleston. 38 This situation would seem to have benefited the upper Savannah
River basin as cotton and other staple products flowed to the river's metropolitan name-
sake. However, Savannah River waterborne commerce was limited by the same unpredict-
able water flows that affected other southern rivers.
From the town of Petersburg, Georgia—located upstream from Augusta at the conflu-
ence of the Broad and Savannah Rivers—boats navigated tricky shoals to deliver cotton,
corn, grains, and tobacco downriver to the Augusta Canal's entrance. The return trip re-
quired three days of upstream poling through those same difficult shoals. 39 River men and
boat builders combined forces to create a specialized “Petersburg” boat designed to shoot