Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Savannah River valley's largest water and energy scheme.
The Clarks Hill site itself was, from an engineering perspective, not challenging. Situ-
ated in the Piedmont's rolling hill country, the dam's proposed location was about twenty
miles upstream from central Augusta. Clarks Hill was named for John Mulford Clark, who
was born in 1813 in the mid-Atlantic and moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1835. A few
years later, Clark moved to Augusta and then again in 1841 to Edgefield County (S.C.),
where he farmed and opened a general store in a community that eventually bore his name.
Clarks Hill, South Carolina was a short distance from the future waterpower site that would
watershed above the site, and the river bore down some 225 feet below the adjacent uplands
(elev. 400 ft.). Multiple proposed dam sites existed in the vicinity of Clarks Hill; the Geor-
gia Power Company owned a dam site about a half-mile downriver from where the Corps
planned a 200-foot-tall and mile-wide dam. The Corps' geologists had already identified
the presence of sound granite, gneiss, and quartz for the concrete gravity dam's foundation
and good soil for the rolled-earth embankments that would flank the concrete structure on
the South Carolina side of the river. The massive reservoir was to inundate fifty-two square
miles of the valley (78,000 acres) and stretch nearly forty miles upriver to Trotters Shoals;
was cut out for technical engineering at a well-suited site, but Clarks Hill was more than a
technological Sun Belt project.
Southern Democrats and Corps engineers provided many reasons to rally behind and to
justify federal financing for the massive Clarks Hill project. Before a congressional hearing
in 1943, Corps engineer Colonel P. A. Feringa explained that “without Clarks Hill Dam we
will never have year-round navigation in the Savannah River.” While defending the dam,
Feringa sounded as if he was defending a valley authority whereby the Clarks Hill dam
would “fit into any integrated scheme for the full development of the Savannah River.”
And with a touch of misrepresentation or at least naiveté, the colonel noted, “It is a re-
markable dam and reservoir project in that everyone is for it. The reservoir area is com-
posed largely of marginal lands. There is very little real value attached to the lands and a
minimum amount of relocation will be necessary…. There is no competition with private
interests.” Georgia Power Company executives, who had challenged federal overtures to
build at Clarks Hill in 1936, supported the project in 1943 and continued to claim they were
ready to take delivery on the excess power generated by the dam. The Georgia and South
Carolina congressional delegations supported the Clarks Hill project.
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So, too, did South Carolina's Democratic governor. James Strom Thurmond
(1902-2003) was born in Edgefield, South Carolina, which was less than thirty miles from
the Clarks Hill dam site. He began his political career as the Edgefield County superin-
