A Keystone Dam and Georgia’s New Ocean - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 69

If the desired troika of benefits insulated humans from seemingly uncontrollable environ-
mental conditions and raging rivers, then recreation—as a means to reconnect people with
predictable environmental circumstances and benign lakes—also emerged on an alternate
level. The Corps and other agencies discovered that providing recreational opportunities at
artificial reservoirs for local, regional, and the highly coveted out-of-state visitors at Clarks
Hill was a top priority. They also learned that new working reservoirs and hydraulic water-
scapes linked energy, water supplies, recreation, and race.
Public access to outdoor recreation emerged as an important national topic during the
interwar period. After World War I, Americans turned to the open road to explore the great
outdoors in personal automobiles. State governments built roads and parks, and businesses
emerged to cater to and provide roadside services for tourists. Recreation planners gener-
ally agreed that leisure opportunities should provide democratic access and physical stim-
ulation. Democratic access—or outdoor recreation for middle-class and working Americ-
ans—became a key flash point in these discussions that also focused on creating national
outdoor recreation policies for public lands in the American West. This, by default, left
local and state outdoor recreation advocates in urban areas—or in corners, including the
American South, that lacked such lands—to shape their own recreational plans. However,
New Deal programming provided southerners with tools—dollars and labor—to create
some enclaves of public land. The Great Depression and New Deal response enabled Pres-
ident Franklin D. Roosevelt to funnel federal dollars and conservation work programs into
a vast, national outdoor recreation network on state and federal lands. Local political and
economic organizations (such as chambers of commerce) tapped New Deal dollars to fash-
ion interwar outdoor recreation facilities and stimulated local economies while serving vis-
itors of varying means from different geographical regions and with diverse needs. 38
Following this basic national trajectory, Georgia's state and federal natural resource
agencies worked together to acquire, improve, and plan for outdoor recreation areas and
unique sites throughout the state. Between 1931 and 1937, the Department of Forestry and
Geology acquired and managed approximately nine state properties, including one of Geor-
gia's first state parks, a 1926 240-acre gift from Fred and August Vogel of the Pfister Vogel
Leather Company. Between 1937 and 1941, Georgia's state park acreage tripled from less
than 5,000 to more than 17,000 acres through donations and estates that sold or donated
land to the state. 39 Throughout the period, Georgia's state park facilities and communities
benefited from continued Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) labor in ongoing coordina-
tion with the National Park Service (NPS) and the state's Works Progress Administration
office. By the end of 1941, Georgia's Department of Natural Resources claimed that “the
Federal government had spent through the National Park Service and the Civilian Conser-
vation Corps, $6,300,000 on CCC camps working on State Park areas in Georgia.” 40