Lowell of the South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 15

of the antebellum men of capital and emerging New South capitalists hungry for regional
independence at the end of the nineteenth century. Neither Muir nor Cameron could foresee
what an electrified and modern New South might look like, nor could the two men have
conceived of the consequences for southern water and southern power. Those changes in
southern history took place under the watch of none other than the New South's preeminent
spokesman and journalist-orator.
Henry Woodfin Grady consistently functions as one of the New South's symbolic an-
chors. Beginning in the 1880s, Grady promoted more than industrial and agricultural di-
versification, racial compromise, and regional reconciliation. Grady, not unlike his antebel-
lum predecessors or those who followed him, recognized the full array of environmental
resources—soils, forests, minerals, and human labor—that stood ready to fuel the New
South's economic move out of dependency. Grady also understood in 1881 that the region's
abundant “water-powers” were necessary for industrial growth and functioned as reliable
instruments, since the Southeast's water “was never locked a day by ice or lowered by
drought.” 52 Grady's half-truth was based on the assumption that private investors could
quickly modernize the New South because ample waterpower would provide cheap energy
for new or relocating mills and factories. When Grady looked at the region's waterways, he
saw rivers as tools for private investors dedicated to the New South revolution.
To grasp whom Grady was talking to and for what purpose, one must revisit basic in-
dustrial geography and energy history. Before 1890, American mills and small factories re-
mained physically connected to the rivers from which they derived energy—or waterpower,
in the language of the day. Early-nineteenth-century textile and other manufacturers from
Lowell, Massachusetts, to the Lowell of the South had derived waterpower from rivers
and canals to drive factory machinery. And in cities where mills, factories, and other com-
mercial enterprises could not access large quantities of water or build on riverbanks, fact-
ory managers generated energy, and eventually electricity, on-site in isolated steam plants
dependent on imported coal, railroads, and groundwater. Waterwheels and isolated steam
plants may have laid the foundations for the New South's initial industrial boom, but they
were soon surpassed by growing systems and modern technologies requiring substantial
financial backing, multiple generation stations, transmission networks, and larger artificial
reservoirs that could conserve extensive reserve supplies of water. 53
By the late 1880s and 1890s, privately financed energy companies throughout the United
States began incorporating water storage and hydroelectric production with long-distance
transmission lines to move electricity from rivers to distant mining, agricultural, and urban
areas. The nation's first long-distance transmission line (fourteen miles) went into service
when the Willamette Falls Electric Company completed its diversion dam and powerhouse
in 1889 to power electric lights in Portland, Oregon. 54 Some writers have suggested that
southern California led the way in privately financed electricity transmission systems be-