Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Augusta's resources to build a war machine because the city was far from the front lines,
was a major stop for east-west railroads, and possessed a canal capable of providing ample
renewable waterpower for industrial applications. The Confederacy's Ordnance Bureau
built and managed the Confederate Powder Works along the Augusta. Savannah River wa-
terpower helped fabricate and stitch the Confederate Army, supporting the manufacture of
pistols, uniforms, locomotives, rolling stock, wheelbarrows, and knapsacks, as well as gun-
powder. Men's and women's hands—more than 700 women worked in Augusta's factories
during the war—assembled these products with help from the river throughout the war ex-
cept for one short period. In February 1862, nature temporarily derailed the Confederacy's
war industries after heavy rains produced rising waters that breeched the Augusta Canal,
thus compromising factory production until workers completed repairs in March.
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Augusta was not alone in harnessing the water of southern rivers to drive hydraulic sys-
tems and industrial machines before or after the American Civil War. Similar facilities
emerged along riverbanks across the southern fall line from Prattville, Alabama, to Rich-
ded on the hands of black slaves. But these factories likewise relied on a material envir-
onment; they could never move far from the flow of southern rivers and their renewable
energy source. While these industrial communities and cities suffered decline immediately
after the Civil War, they would become examples for a New South built on antebellum vis-
ions of diversified agriculture, manufacturing, railroads, and urban growth powered by or-
ganic energy sources such as water.
The preceding examples illustrate some of the American South's deep interconnected
histories of people, land, water, and power. Water problems—such as drought or flood-
ing—occurred and affected discrete communities. And human activity in the Savannah
River basin demonstrated how energy choices resulted in new environmental realities, af-
fected social relationships, and produced a new waterscape. Southern rivers remained pre-
dominantly free-flowing rivers with occasional pools formed behind mill dams, but the re-
gion lacked the major lakes or reservoirs that mark the twenty-first-century's landscape.
Cultural choices and environmental change in the Savannah River basin followed a path
generally paralleling that of other American regions such as New England. The southern
region remained primarily agricultural with proto-industrial mills along small creeks, but
cities and towns across the Southeast increasingly attracted greater concentrations of capit-
al and people in industrial environments fueled by water. By the late nineteenth century, the
American South continued a slow process of agricultural and industrial economic diversi-
fication. King Cotton still reigned, but cotton factories increasingly processed the fibers re-
gionally and did not export all raw materials to distant mills. Additionally, investors looked
into forests for additional products such as timber and pulp that encouraged formation of
new industries, technologies, and products like synthetic textiles in the early twentieth cen-
