Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
provides a new interpretation of southern modernization. First, regionalists such as Vance
influenced the shape of the TVA and liberal New Deal river development in the 1930s. Se-
cond, the TVA project inspired subsequent federal waterway and energy programs in the
Southeast and across the nation after 1945. But more important, Vance opens a window
into an early period of regional modernization that has been overshadowed by the TVA's
high-modernist experience, by repeated assertions that the South was the nation's top eco-
nomic problem, and by the federal largesse that built the Sun Belt after 1945.
This chapter examines who hitched the New South to white coal in the Savannah and
other river basins during a crucial period in the region's history between 1890 and 1933. We
should seek out the origins of Vance's hydroelectric “complex” and “the Piedmont crescent
of industry” because waterway manipulation and energy generation were critical compon-
ents of southern modernization after the American Civil War. For millennia, human beings
have produced energy from a variety of sources—primarily by burning biomass (peat moss
or trees) and fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). During the nineteenth-century indus-
trial revolution, people around the world began producing energy by burning fossil fuels
with the express intent to transform boiling water into steam for locomotion and generation
of electricity. By that time, regardless of the fossil fuel source, water was the critical com-
ponent for generating energy in steam engine boilers on riverboats, in locomotives, and on
factory floors. The Blue Ridge and Piedmont South, however, lacked economical access to
coal, oil, and gas reserves necessary to fuel this watery transformation. Between 1890 and
1925, water, not burning fossil fuels, was the most important energy fuel source in the New
South. Eager investors and glassy-eyed boosters like Henry Grady had generally assumed
the Southeast—a humid place with many rivers—had all the water they could dream of.
Rupert Vance provides a launching point into the New South phase of southern water
and power. Vance's second great complex—hydroelectric technology driven by New South
capitalists' thirst for a privatized, indigenous, and cheap energy source—made energy cor-
porations and southeastern rivers integral players in the region's history. The New South
was hardly exceptional, but the scale and degree by which the energy sector sustained in-
dustry with water-generated energy made the region uniquely powerful and vulnerable.
James B. Duke, the tobacco king and private university benefactor and Vance's most de-
tailed example, started one of the most prolific energy companies that continues to operate
more than 100 years later. Duke Power Company's founding goal in 1904, according to
the company's namesake himself, was to harness “white coal” from rivers that previously
scape reveal much about the legacy of southern water and southern power in the decades
before the advent of the TVA in 1933.
After 1900, New South energy companies invigorated the process of mill and town build-
ing that William Church Whitner contributed to in the 1890s in the upper reaches of
