Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
nologies and ideas to do so. The Anderson Water, Light & Power Company commissioned
Whitner, a civil engineer and graduate of the University of South Carolina, to design and
build a coal-fired steam power plant for the municipal waterworks in Anderson, South
Carolina. As Whitner completed this project, he considered the late-nineteenth-century de-
bate over the costs and benefits of steam energy versus waterpower. George E. Ladshaw,
an unabashed waterpower booster and one of Whitner's contemporaries, encouraged en-
gineers to forgo coal-fired and steam-generated energy altogether in the Carolinas, where
Whitner toiled. Ladshaw argued that since southern river systems received greater annual
rainfall than northeastern river systems, “southern rivers yield a greater amount of power
per square mile.” Based on this logic, he assumed individual southeastern mills and factor-
ies could always produce their own energy by conserving water behind mill dams, thus
freeing independent mill owners from “water power companies” such as Whitner's em-
ployer. And with water under sound management, mill mangers could then turn to exploit-
ing what Ladshaw saw as the New South's other well-advertised advantage and energy
to monopolize human and river energy locally via waterpower at single mills, but Whitner
ultimately chose a private waterpower company's deep pockets and credit connections over
an individual mill's limited scale and scope.
After completing the waterworks project, Whitner determined the Anderson Water, Light
& Power Company could eliminate its dependence on imported coal and the mineral fuel's
associated railroad freight costs. He convinced his fellow company executives to invest in
two pioneering Savannah River valley hydropower and organic fuel projects. Successfully
incorporating new generating technology with alternating-current transmission lines, Whit-
ner's High Shoals Hydro Station on the Rocky River (operational, 1895) and the Portman
Shoals Hydro Station (1897) on the Seneca River were the first projects in the American
Rocky River gristmill with a turbine, and he designed the new Portman Shoals low dam to
generate hydroelectricity that was transmitted over ten miles of lines to Anderson to fuel
textile mills, drive municipal water supply pumps, and brighten city lights. At Portman
Shoals, which is now buried under Lake Hartwell, Whitner's laborers built a run-of-river
dam more than twenty feet tall to create a small reservoir and divert water into turbines
to generate electricity; during high-water periods, water also flowed over the rubble-ma-
sonry dam's crest and spillway before continuing downstream. Whitner completed the two
Anderson hydropower projects, and then he applied his experience across the New South.
Traveling throughout Georgia and as far north as Richmond, Virginia, he manipulated wa-
terways, spurred economic growth, and constructed critical infrastructure for an evolving
number of powerful southern energy companies after 1900.
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