Lowell of the South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 18

At the beginning of the twentieth century, William Church Whitner bridged two com-
munities, one regional and one transnational. Whitner and his contemporaries in the energy
industry were powerful New South actors who pushed the region's economic development
“beyond planters and industrialists.” 64 Whitner was a founding member of the New South's
emerging middle class, whom one scholar called “town people.” Whitner's hydroelectric
projects ultimately contributed to building a “new world” of Piedmont mill towns, and he
laid the groundwork for an “embryonic urban civilization” that would support cities like
Atlanta and Charlotte. Finally, Whitner helped introduce a new industrial-social order to a
region formerly dominated by agricultural production. The core owners and labor pool in
South Carolina's industries at the turn of the century were “southern,” but an eclectic mix of
individuals in the energy industry influenced the future of Piedmont rivers, the New South
textile boom, and an electrical utility industry long before the advent of the well-known
Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933. Whitner was an influential member of a powerful re-
gional South Carolina community responsible for the new hydroelectric-energy-dependent
industrial-social order that emerged in manufacturing towns. 65
Whitner was a member of a transnational engineering and energy community as much as
he was a regional member of the South Carolina town-building community of industrial-
ists. The southern manufacturing industry's financial investment arrived mostly from out-
side the region, and the energy sector's executives and engineers derived experience and
knowledge from all over the globe; the technology that Whitner relied on to build the New
South knew no regional boundaries. International engineering trade journals, blossoming
in number in the late nineteenth century, demonstrate that projects like Whitner's emerged
in other parts of the world. 66 Before building his generation projects in Anderson and else-
where, Whitner studied these journals and apparently traveled to New York to meet Nikola
Tesla, a Croatian immigrant who is credited with devising in 1888 the alternating-current
transmission technology that remains an industry standard today. 67 Engineers like Whitner
who did not go abroad could travel through the journals and gain indirect exposure to the
work of a transnational energy and engineering community.
Many of the men responsible for shaping the American South's energy infrastructure and
hydraulic waterscape before 1930 read such journals, and these professionals circulated
throughout the United States and overseas to inspect, engineer, and manage energy pro-
jects. For example, the Alabama Power Company emerged in 1906, and after 1911 the
company looked less like a “southern” and more like an American company influenced
by transnational ideas. Canadian-born James Mitchell (1866-1920), one of the company's
three core founding executives, got his start in the energy industry with the Massachusetts-
based Thomson Houston Company in the railway motor division, traveling around the Un-
ited States troubleshooting railway motors and new street railway projects. 68 In the early
1890s, Thomson Houston assigned Mitchell to South America to spur sales in street-light-