Dam Crazy for White Coal in the New South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 31

Tallulah and Tugaloo Project, 1921. In Benjamin Mortimer Hall and Max R. Hall, Third Report on the Water
Powers of Georgia , Geological Survey of Georgia, Bulletin No. 38 (Atlanta: Byrd Printing Company, 1921).
When Henry Grady's New South was hitched to white coal, falling water nearly 100
miles from Atlanta benefited urban dwellers and workers increasingly dependent on electri-
city and the corporate transmission system that delivered that energy. For instance, electric
elevators served metropolitan low-rises and “large office buildings” as early as the 1890s,
when more than 65,000 people lived in Atlanta. 40 Atlanta's streetcar companies had begun
to shift from mule-drawn streetcars to electric streetcars and trolleys after 1890, hasten-
ing the development of the Georgia Power Company and new streetcar suburbs like Inman
Park. 41 Like most major urban areas in the late nineteenth century, Atlanta also increasingly
turned away from gas-powered to electric lighting. By the early 1900s, the generation and
transmission of electricity made commercial and residential consumption possible while
powering ice-making, electric sewing machines, bakeries, and printing offices. 42 These ap-
plications enabled entrepreneurs and boosters to enthusiastically partner electricity and in-
dustrialization with a modern New South in the pages of the Manufacturers' Record, Elec-
trical World , and Engineer News Record . One such cheery writer could boast that Atlanta's
approximately 235,000 residents enjoyed the “third lowest average power rate” of any city
in the nation in 1924. Furthermore, Georgia Power's interconnection with other regional