Lowell of the South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 19

ing and power-generating equipment. 69 He worked for the company until 1901 when he
assumed the general manager position for the Canadian-owned São Paulo Tramway, Light,
and Power Company, where he worked until 1906. 70 After about sixteen years in Brazil,
Mitchell moved to London, where he worked with longtime friends and the principals of
the Sperling & Company investment house. The firm soon sent Mitchell to Japan, where
he spent four months surveying potential dam sites. 71 When he returned to the United
States, Mitchell took a southeastern waterpower tour through South Carolina before he en-
countered former riverboat Captain William Patrick Lay (1853-1940), who had founded
the Alabama Power Company in 1906, and Thomas Wesley Martin (1881-1964), a riparian
legal expert and, like Lay, a native of Alabama. With Martin's help, Mitchell reorganized
Lay's fledging company in 1911 and used his transnational experience and credit connec-
tions to turn the financially deprived energy firm into a regional and national force. William
Church Whitner, James Mitchell, and others represent a range of transnational experiences
that cemented the bond between southeastern rivers and the energy sector. 72 Many of the
New South engineers who worked for the region's most successful energy companies dur-
ing the first half of the twentieth century made the companies distinctive, not necessarily
because the companies were southern or for cultural reasons, but because the companies
employed individuals informed by global experiences.
William Bartram, John Muir, Henry Grady, and William Church Whitner recognized the
value human and water power added to community growth. The Lowell of the South, the
New South's men of capital, and transnational engineers learned about the world's diverse
organic energy projects and built new North American systems with improved waterwheels
and turbines, more efficient generators and motors, taller dams that increased “head” (the
height that water falls through a penstock before striking a turbine), longer transmission
lines, and an increasingly complex numbers of dams, diversion tunnels, pipeline conduits,
and reservoirs necessary to generate and deliver energy to agricultural and industrial con-
sumers. Corporate executives and engineers consciously replaced free-flowing rivers with
artificial reservoirs throughout the Southeast. They consolidated economic power in a de-
cidedly unexceptional process and built a modern hydraulic waterscape, as their coun-
terparts did in locales across the globe. 73 The nineteenth-century mill dams and water-
powered facilities served as economic and technical foundations for New South boost-
ers whose capital-intensive hydroelectric generation projects grew in scale and scope. The
New South's power brokers ultimately combined human and animal muscle power with
agricultural production and waterpower to build a versatile organic energy regime. But the
utilities' dedication to energy supplies fueled by boundless reserves of “white coal” blinded
them to environmental realities. The boosters, executives, and engineers soon learned new
lessons about the benefits and risks of an organic energy system that depended on renew-
able energies and human labor.