Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
transportation hub before the Civil War. Henry Shultz, a white German immigrant, founded
the small town in the 1820s, named it after his German birthplace, and invested signific-
ant personal capital to promote its economic development. He secured exclusive rights to
operate the Savannah River's only riverboat between his town and Savannah, Georgia, and
the town briefly served as the terminus for the Charleston and Hamburg (S.C.) Railroad
demographics shifted, and the town soon lost its economic luster in the shadow of Augusta.
Hamburg became known as a center for African American political activity and was the site
of a dramatic riot instigated by armed white men who “attacked a legally constituted black
of the end for Reconstruction and how whites would redeem the South from what many
called northern aggression; it foreshadowed the violent rise of white supremacy. With no
political power, Hamburg remained an unleveed town in the Jim Crow South until 1929.
The Great Flood's second crest, which topped out at nearly forty-five feet, settled any
lingering antagonism between the two river communities once and for all and completely
swept the unleveed “negro [
sic
] settlement” away after the residents had already fled. Mul-
tiple facilities associated with brick manufacturing, a store, two churches, three filling sta-
tions, a railroad yard, and “many of the houses of Hamburg … were carried away” or
ic floods and droughts of the 1920s illustrated dramatic weather, human sacrifice, the in-
equity of the regional political economy, and water insecurity in one place. The response
revealed persistent racial friction as well as new solutions. Hamburg's story also revealed
how race, liberal politics, and the hydraulic waterscape were historically bound on the eve
of the Great Depression and would remain linked in the Savannah River valley's near fu-
ture. Hamburg was an example of how white New South citizens, like their national neigh-
bors, had haphazardly managed river systems to meet private needs while serving self-iden-
tified public goods.
During the interwar years (1918-41) an alternative emerged. Massive federally backed
multiple-purpose dams evolved into the ideal technological tools for organizing river basin
resources equitably and managing risk. Above all, these structures delivered to the devoted
a trio of benefits—hydroelectric production, flood control, and improved navigation—that
New South capitalists had conveyed inefficiently at best. Progressives and New Dealers in
Georgia and South Carolina leaned on structural solutions first developed by New South
free enterprise to generate energy, but they now coveted designs that managed a variety
of needs. From this new policy ecosystem emerged a national New Deal big dam con-
sensus—buttressed by Muscle Shoals (completed in 1924 on the Tennessee River), Hoover
Dam (1936, Colorado), and Bonneville Dam (1938, Columbia)—that championed mam-
