Chapter 4: A Keystone Dam and Georgia’s New Ocean

Dry months and a lack of water left Georgians with a serious problem and grim choices in 1941. Geographic pockets in the American South had rotated from one alleged natural disaster to another like a broken record since the 1920s. And as with previous multiple-year droughts, observers in the 1940s could no longer pass this one off as a drought that only affected farmers. By the spring of 1941, another urban drought threatened water and electrical consumption in homes, businesses, and factories at the very moment that the nation’s industrial machine mobilized to provide its European Allies with additional war material. Conditions were so bad that the Georgia Power Company began rationing electrical service to customers via controlled blackouts in Atlanta and Augusta.¹ A rainfall “deficiency” threatened the Blue Ridge’s and Piedmont South’s rivers. But more important, the drought jeopardized the corporate energy-water nexus by withholding the water supplies necessary for electrical production.²

To save the interconnected production and consumption network, Georgia Power Company spokespeople announced a “SAVE ENERGY Plan” and continued to run nearly full-page announcements in the Atlanta Constitution and other state newspapers. The Georgia Power Company, a powerful New South energy institution in operation since the first decade of the twentieth century, communicated a serious message to urban residents: “This is not a ‘scare.’”³ The Augusta Chronicle editors picked up the company’s energy conservation message and implored city officials, business leaders, and the general public to make “sacrifices” for national defense production, since the “water in Lake Burton”—the largest of the Tallulah-Tugaloo River storage reservoirs in the Savannah River basin “where the Georgia Power Company derives most of its hydro-electric power”—was reduced by 40 percent. The company and the editors clearly linked water conservation and energy production with electrical demand and consumption in urban areas. For example, the company requested that business owners “raise the temperature to 83 degrees” in their air-conditioned shops as a part “of the patriotic power thrift campaign.” One Georgia Power spokesperson explained that citywide controlled blackouts—which required shopkeepers to turn off display window lights, reduced streetlight coverage, and cut elevator usage—were necessary to get through “the present serious situation,” which had slowly “been approaching a crisis for two years.”⁴ As the editors noted, “The electric power situation became critical not only because of the abnormal electric power requirements of defense plants” scattered across the southeast and connected by long-distance electrical transmission lines, “but also because of one of the most prolonged and excessive droughts this section has experienced in many years.”⁵

The “crisis” intensified before it abated. The Georgia Power Company’s executives prepared customers for a draconian plan because conservation had “to work at once,” since water levels in the company’s Tallulah-Tugaloo project’s six artificial reservoirs continued to drop. In Lake Burton alone, the water level had plummeted more than sixty feet below the normal summer level. “Only heavy, widespread, protracted rains” could “correct this condition,” since the periodic “afternoon’s thundershowers won’t raise the level of the great storage lake appreciably.”⁶ The Chattahoochee River’s flows were so diminished that Atlanta’s municipal water managers had to channel the diminished flow directly to the intakes. And Georgia Power Company technicians reduced operations at the coal-fired Plant Atkinson.⁷ Environmental conditions and an urban drought once again compromised the quality of life for Atlanta’s residents (population 302,288).⁸

Eventually, the region pulled out of the crisis for two reasons. First, the Southeast’s and the nation’s interconnected electrical transmission grid pooled power “from all directions” to save southern electric customers—much as it had in 1925. Second, what amounted to a multiyear drought in north Georgia ended in the spring of 1942 when the rain began to fall across the Blue Ridge Mountains. The parched Peach State received an average of 43.10 inches of precipitation in 1941, while 1942 recorded an average total of 52.34 inches. The sought-after rain replenished the dry Chattahoochee and Savannah River watersheds and busted the drought of 1941.⁹

After a half-century of New South boosters’ rhetoric that sold the region to industrial developers predicated on an abundance of water and cheap energy, how could the region still lack adequate water supplies? And given that recent history, how would post–World War II planners approach water management and energy production differently to avoid future resource rationing? The post-1945 hydraulic waterscapes needed retooling to survive the cyclical and dramatic drought and flood events. For New South capitalists, the answer—massive artificial reservoirs—became the Sun Belt’s preferred method of taking federal dollars while maintaining acceptable environmental and social conditions. Southern water problems, both cultural and natural, continued to function as barriers to growth and as pathways to power.

The New Deal big dam consensus resurfaced after 1945. Proponents—namely, prominent southern Democrats—lobbied for multiple-purpose dams and an enhanced hydraulic system. But the rules of the game had changed. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) experiment had run its course and would never be repeated again. As the United States and its Allies anticipated victory over fascism in Europe, Congress replaced New Deal liberalism—and the social and employment programs that defined it—with a more conservative and commercial model of economic development to sustain postwar industry and promote leisure. Something else changed: The New South capitalists and the New Deal regional planners were no longer the primary dam builders. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ participation in transforming the Cotton Belt into the Sun Belt after 1945 should not be underestimated. The Corps had experience with wartime military-industrial development and altering river valleys at the behest of local navigational or flood control lobbies. But the Corps was not necessarily prepared to build hydraulic waterscapes that specifically benefited cities, industries, and leisure-seekers at the expense of old agricultural landscapes.¹⁰ The milewide Clarks Hill dam and massive lake on the Savannah River about twenty miles upstream from Augusta was among the Corps’ first attempts to remake the New Deal big dam consensus and deliver economic building blocks to the Sun Belt’s boosters without disrupting social relations.¹¹

Southern Democrats in Congress, state capitols, and chambers of commerce enthralled by the New Deal big dam consensus continued to solicit and plow federal dollars into big-ticket Corps water and energy developments to bust droughts, tame flooding, and boost Sun Belt commercialism. From the beginning, the Clarks Hill scheme appeared to have wide support, but it was a project that took many people into uncharted territory. The Corps was challenged to manage seemingly tangential new objectives and the social engineering required for something like Clarks Hill on the eve of the modern civil rights movement. This new nature—artificial lakes with attendant recreational possibilities and public health responsibilities—needled the fracture lines within a political party that was less and less solid.¹² Crafting blue lakes from a land of red clay to avoid future droughts and floods in mild Sun Belt climes proved more difficult than anyone anticipated.

Droughts, perceived as natural disasters, like flooding, provided an impetus for southern river valley residents to support dam and reservoir construction across the region after 1945. Drought in 1941 had again demonstrated that environmental conditions, like the oft-cited and manufactured labor and race problems, were among the most important barriers to regional economic growth. The White House, Congress, and the Corps responded by reengaging a modified New Deal land, soil, and water conservation program. Since the 1930s, engineers planned for Clarks Hill to provide electricity, flood control, navigation, and “other beneficial effects,” including the opportunity to “eliminate entirely” power “outages” along the Augusta Canal “due to low water.”¹³ While the Corps may have downplayed its own 308 Report in 1935 (the New Deal–era survey that identified eighteen potential multiple-purpose dams and reservoirs in the Savannah River valley), local boosters won support at various levels of the federal government to achieve real commitments.¹⁴ The Corps completed another round of surveys throughout the valley in the early 1940s and published the results in June 1944 while Allied forces prepared for the massive D-Day landing in Europe.¹⁵ By the end of the year, Congress agreed to fund construction for the Savannah River valley’s largest water and energy scheme.

The Clarks Hill site itself was, from an engineering perspective, not challenging. Situated 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 also carry his name.¹⁶ There the valley funneled water collected from a 6,144-square-mile 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 Georgia 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; it would be the largest south of Tennessee and east of the Mississippi River.¹⁷ The Corps 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 remarkable dam and reservoir project in that everyone is for it. The reservoir area is composed 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.¹⁸

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 superintendent of education before serving as the county’s attorney and entering the South Carolina legislature in 1933 for five years. Thurmond rounded out his state service as governor between 1947 and 1951 and then moved on to the U.S. Senate, where he remained for more than fifty years (eighteen as a Democrat and thirty-nine as a Republican). As governor, Thurmond advocated for the New Deal until liberalism challenged white supremacy and President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to purge southern senators during the 1938 campaign. Thereafter, according to historian Kari Frederickson, Thurmond and many of his contemporaries were “moderately liberal” Democrats who promoted “bureaucratic efficiency and industrial development” because economic development was perceived as the key to the future.¹⁹ Agricultural and industrial promoters in the South and across the nation beat a path to new federal dams and artificial reservoirs throughout an era of depression, unemployment, and war. As the powerful Democratic boosters closed ranks, they nurtured an emerging Sun Belt economy as equally dependent on water and energy as it was on federal engineers and a healthy infusion of federal dollars.

Georgia senator Walter F. George articulated his interest in the Clarks Hill project in slightly different terms. He was fishing on the Flint River when he learned that the senator he would replace, the famous populist Tom Watson, had died.²⁰ Walter George (1878–1957) was a lifelong Democratic senator (1922–57) and friend of the New Deal big dam consensus, though his bona fides were allegedly influenced by Georgia Power Company campaign contributions.²¹ In the long term he believed big dams would provide electricity for dairy farmers and decentralized industrial development. But in the short term, Senator George, like many other Americans, also worried that the end of World War II might bring about a labor shortage and an economic slowdown, so he “advocated taking all precaution through providing employment, by developing industry, and making use of the high resources of the country” to avoid another economic depression.²² By the end of 1944, a majority-Democratic Congress expressed concerns over how the war might wind down, how to convert war production to meet domestic needs, and how to employ millions of demobilized veterans. In this context, Congress approved of the Flood Control Act of 1944 in December (and had previously approved in June what became known as the G.I. Bill). This mammoth public works legislation presented a master plan for nationwide postwar employment, regional development, and a new round of economic stimulus to avoid a return to Great Depression economics. It was logical legislation that Senator George, who later had a large artificial reservoir on the Chattahoochee River named in his honor, and other Americans could accept.

The Flood Control Act (1944) became a legitimate extension of late New Deal liberalism and the big dam consensus. Americans feared a postwar unemployment spike and anticipated that the government would intervene in the economy and prime the pump, but they favored a curtailed New Deal–like response. Rather than revive “social” Keynesian projects or create new agencies to manage unemployment and economic decline, the postwar local leadership partnered with the federal government to pump up regional economies through “commercial” Keynesian projects, according to one historian. These short-term public works projects subsidized private contractors, created employment primarily for white men, and built a foundational infrastructure for Sun Belt commercialism.²³ Liberal operatives had designed large-scale New Deal public works projects like the TVA to create jobs and inject money into all levels of the economy. Once completed, TVA’s dams did generate energy for factories and contributed to production of fertilizer for farmers. In sum, regional planners had hoped that the TVA would create a modern industrial society that complimented a revitalized agricultural sector. Post-1944 multiple-purpose projects, however, would be different.

Congress, via the Flood Control Act (1944), stripped the regional planning model down to a techno-selective river planning model. The Corps’ leadership also embraced a limited understanding of comprehensive development and how multiple dams in a single valley could compliment one another. Most important, the Corps’ Sun Belt projects did not serve industrial and agricultural production equally, included no soil or forestry programs, and only halfheartedly supported navigation. By and large, boosters and the Corps could promote and tailor individual postwar hydroelectric and flood control projects to meet locally specific needs in ways the TVA never did. As such, the postwar multiple-purpose river projects like Clarks Hill resembled vehicles for pork barrel politics and constituent service. By the end of the war, Congress positioned the Corps to serve as the main agent responsible for placing dams and artificial reservoirs in the nation’s watersheds, and the Corps began its post-1945 mission in the Savannah River valley with the Clarks Hill dam and lake.

In the Savannah River valley alone, the Corps bundled together ideas cribbed from the 308 Report (1935) and a June 1944 study before including a recommendation for eleven dams and artificial reservoirs throughout the Savannah River basin in the 1944 Flood Control Act.²⁴ Starting with the Clarks Hill project and a $35.3 million congressional appropriation, the Corps set a course to reshape the valley.²⁵ Benefits of this project specifically included the ever-desirable year-round navigation below Augusta, flood protection for that same city, and cheap electricity for Augusta and the lower Savannah River region. Boosters hoped that the dam, like those in the Tennessee Valley and in North Carolina (Yadkin River) erected by private institutions before 1933 and public agencies afterward, might also attract the chemical or aluminum industry, which required access to raw water supplies and low-cost electricity.²⁶ As a pork barrel project, Clarks Hill combined flood control, hydroelectric power production, and navigational improvements, thus making the public works project an easy sell to various constituencies throughout the valley. Not only would the Clarks Hill dam eliminate the long history of destructive seasonal floods in the Augusta region, according to Corps engineers, but the dam would also stabilize “low-water flows for navigation below Augusta” as well as “produce hydroelectric power for industrial purposes and rural electrification.”²⁷ The dam might also conserve enough water to save the region from future electrical shortages such as those caused in part by the severe 1925 and 1941 droughts. Finally, the Corps and its congressional enablers considered the dam “the keystone”—the first of nearly a dozen dams in a coordinated project that might reorganize the valley’s water, people, and economy.²⁸

There was clearly support for the federally financed Clarks Hill multiple-purpose project, but a vocal minority of industrial and corporate interest groups initially maintained an aggressive oppositional stance. Georgia Power Company executives—and others from their Savannah River Electric Company subsidiary—soon changed their tune and opposed the federal project by 1944. Furthermore, company spokesmen ignited a firestorm after launching a campaign promoting private enterprise in an effort to sink the public energy, navigation, and flood control project. The energy company had held its first license to build at Clarks Hill between 1926 and 1932, but in a rare and unprecedented move it surrendered the license during the Great Depression when it could no longer afford to move the project forward and the Corps presented a viable plan to do so.²⁹ The Georgia Power Company publicly floated the idea of reapplying for a second Federal Power Commission license in 1939 but found little support among Augusta’s leaders and dropped the idea.³⁰ But in 1946, the Georgia Power Company again announced plans to reapply for a second license. With depression and wartime sacrifice nearly behind the nation, the Georgia Power Company wanted to revive its version of capitalism—or, as critics would claim, a natural monopoly—through a private Clarks Hill project. After more than a decade’s worth of battles with the TVA, companies like Georgia Power took the emerging postwar period as a moment to reassert their definition of free-market fundamentals as private power companies did elsewhere.³¹ The Georgia Power Company—the most successful New South water and energy project builder in the Savannah River basin—received ample assistance in its quest to reclaim the Sun Belt’s water, energy, consumers, and commercial future.

To fight these battles and push back against the Democratic Party’s leadership, the company enlisted supporters around the state to rally for a return to the early twentieth century’s private energy and water model. Georgia newspaper editors channeled Georgia Power’s message in a coordinated campaign opposing federal projects like Clarks Hill. House editorial boards harped on the same themes of private enterprise and favored taxpaying development over tax-spending and tax-exempt public projects.³² Many opponents to the Corps’ plan argued that if private industry wanted to spend the money, the state should enable it to do so and then collect taxes. “We,” the Milledgeville Union-Recorder’s editorial board stated, “very definitely believe private capital should have its right to exercise free enterprise, the same kind of pioneering spirit that built this country into the greatest nation the world has ever known.” Milledgeville was the Piedmont town near the Georgia Power Company’s recently restarted Furman Shoals project on the Oconee River. The company initiated construction at Furman Shoals (now known as Lake Sinclair and Dam) in 1929, stopped in 1930 during the Great Depression, and restarted construction in 1949. And when Georgia Power began operating Sinclair Dam in 1954, Milledgeville benefited from local tax payments. This was enough to justify the editor’s opinion that the company was in a better financial “position to develop” Clarks Hill.³³ Despite the crippling 1941 drought conditions, the conversation on Georgia Power’s side generally stuck to economic motivations and did not dare suggest that protecting water supply and water quantity was necessary for future economic development.

The Georgia Power Company’s move to relicense Clarks Hill took some boosters by surprise and frustrated others. Lester Moody, the secretary of the Augusta chamber of commerce, rejected Georgia Power’s proposal in 1946 and championed the federal project thereafter.³⁴ The Augusta business community and others also rebuffed their adversaries’ attempts to link a public energy program with socialism. After the Georgia Power Company called the federal project socialistic, Moody replied: “If working to improve the conditions of the people living in the Savannah River Basin area is socialistic, then I am a socialist.” The socialist label, he continued, “was just another version of the old story that is always used when one attempts to do something to improve living conditions for a people.”³⁵ One of Moody’s cohorts, Augusta Herald publisher William S. Morris Jr., the father of the Morris media empire’s current CEO William “Billy” Morris III, endorsed the federal project over the private project. Like Moody, Morris likewise contested Georgia Power’s assertion that the federal project was akin to socialism: “We cannot support the power company’s argument that the development of the Savannah River constitutes Socialism, because the rivers and streams and all other natural resources belong to the people, and should be developed in a manner which would be most beneficial to all the people.”³⁶ Lifelong southern supporters of private enterprise, Moody, Morris, and others found fellow southern boosters’ and journalists’ “socialism” and “socialistic” criticisms unfounded, and they recognized the language as a rhetorical leftover from the fight against fascism in Europe and from fears of Soviet expansion, and as a product of dropping temperatures at the onset of the Cold War. Distrustful after years of private energy company monopoly, valley residents rejected the legacy of private hydroelectric dams that had generated power that was, as Governor Strom Thurmond’s hometown newspaper declared, “transmitted away” from the hinterlands “for the emolument of people elsewhere” in water- and energy-poor cores.³⁷ Taxes, free enterprise, and electricity, however, were not the only conversation topics.

Clarks Hill not only moved forward as a project to minimize flood- and drought-induced damages or as an energy and navigation scheme, but it also became a major tool for reshaping the Savannah River valley’s recreation future. Recreation became an official part of the traditional multiple-purpose project planning by way of the Flood Control Act of 1944. If the desired troika of benefits insulated humans from seemingly uncontrollable environmental 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 waterscapes 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 generally agreed that leisure opportunities should provide democratic access and physical stimulation. Democratic access—or outdoor recreation for middle-class and working Americans—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 President 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 fashion interwar outdoor recreation facilities and stimulated local economies while serving visitors 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 Georgia’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 coordination 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 Conservation Corps, $6,300,000 on CCC camps working on State Park areas in Georgia.”⁴⁰

Amidst all of this physical activity and parkscaping, Georgia’s newly organized Department of Natural Resources and other state and federal agencies assembled a recreation survey in 1939. The Report on Outdoor Recreation in Georgia ultimately highlighted the necessity of preservation and a state park system. Acquiring or setting land aside earlier rather than later would ultimately save “large sums of money” needed to research, relocate, and establish state parks, monuments, and historical sites. The authors wanted to learn from other states’ experiences, “where rapid development and growth of population, business and industry” had “outstripped the love for recreation.” The study’s authors concluded, “It appears entirely logical and feasible to anticipate future trends, and look ahead, by at least acquiring, preserving and partially developing areas, which future generations will need for recreation, and probably will appreciate even more than today’s generation.” Recreation, apparently, was “alive in the hearts of Georgians.”⁴¹

When the authors of Georgia’s state park report recognized that recreation was alive in citizens’ hearts, they also acknowledged that those hearts were in black and white bodies. Recreation conversations among leisure-seekers, state planners, elected officials, and federal bureaucrats always included discussions about race, class, and gender. Numerous writers have argued that private recreational opportunities were central to the formation of African American identity and community throughout the Jim Crow era. Another has revealed that even the NPS system planned in the 1930s to racially segregate users when they began building southern national parks—including the Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah—only to reverse course in 1942 after African Americans lobbied the NPS.⁴² State parks—areas not considered by these studies—also became contested ground for outdoor recreation at southern water and energy projects in the Jim Crow era. State park systems throughout the South chose different paths to exclude or include African Americans. And plans for segregated state parks in Georgia and South Carolina—and eventually the Savannah River valley at Clarks Hill—were not without precedent.

North Carolinians may have operated the first state park in the American South—Jones Lake—for African Americans to leisurely interact with the environment in a Jim Crow setting in 1939.⁴³ While African Americans built and operated numerous private coastal recreational areas and communities, no other southern state legislatures or park systems appear to have created segregated parks for African Americans before 1940.⁴⁴ Georgia planners thought a lot like the federal and state officials in North Carolina. Throughout the State Planning Board’s Report on Outdoor Recreation in Georgia (1939), the writers advocated for segregated recreational facilities based on racial and socioeconomic categories. Due to Georgia’s demographics and assumed Jim Crow–segregated future, the authors declared that “separate areas and facilities for education, welfare, recreation, and other activities were required for” white and black residents.

Georgia officials expressed the belief that “every citizen should be provided for.” For white “land owners,” prime destinations apparently included coastal and mountain destinations “during the warm summer months” and “especially when crop prospects” were favorable. But for “the white tenant class of the farming population,” the report observed, “recreation among the men and boys” consisted primarily “of hunting and fishing” and sports. Additionally, these white tenant families—perhaps white wives and girls more specifically—enjoyed “old fashioned church sociables [sic] … and special events” such as barbecues. Finally, the authors assessed African Americans, who were not subcategorized as property owners or tenants or by their sex. The authors’ racial stereotypes assumed that African Americans’ recreation was “peculiar to their racial characteristics” and only “centered around churches.” As such, African American recreation facilities only needed to include “simple local developments, such as playfields with barbecue grounds and swimming pools.” African Americans, so the thinking went, would not like the beach or mountains, and these prescriptions ultimately limited African American exposure to particular types of outdoor recreation and environments. Based on these combined demographic and assumed social characteristics, Georgia not only needed “two area systems, one for white people” and one for African Americans, but institutionalized facilities for “low income groups” and men who did not have the money, time, or transportation means to travel “very far in search of recreation.”⁴⁵ According to the Report, Georgia had little public land like the American West and needed a recreational plan that played to the region’s racial, socioeconomic, and rural realities.

Sun Belt boosters and politicians stumping for the Corps’ Clarks Hill project took this recreation advice seriously. They disseminated information about plans for segregated recreation at the Savannah River valley’s multiple-purpose dams in anticipation of a postwar leisure boom. By the late 1940s, Augusta’s chamber of commerce secretary Lester S. Moody and South Carolina’s governor J. Strom Thurmond consistently campaigned for Clarks Hill as a public source of industrial energy and flood control. Both also openly supported the Corps’ recreational plans. Moody, in particular, did not underestimate recreation as an economic engine for his region and looked at Clarks Hill as a destination for all overworked and “half sick” Americans seeking a sublime nature. Singling out Clarks Hill, Moody envisioned the artificial reservoir as a “mecca” [sic] for “thousands of visitors” who had the financial means to travel great distances, rent boats, sleep in lakeside cottages, and pump thousands of recreation-related dollars into the Savannah River valley’s emerging Sun Belt service economy.⁴⁶

South Carolina’s then-Democratic governor J. Strom Thurmond worked the other side of the river and did not limit Clarks Hill recreation and nature appreciation to nonlocal visitors with potentially deep pockets. Thurmond, of course, recognized first and foremost that Clarks Hill would benefit one particular class: industrialists. Clarks Hill would lure industry south, according to Thurmond, because of cheap energy and the region’s “freedom from [labor] strikes.” But Thurmond also supported the Clarks Hill project because it would provide public recreation space for “the working people, the farmers, textile workers, barbers, [and] mechanics,” the very “people on the street who” did not have the money to join golf or hunt clubs or buy “fine horses.” Speaking before an Augusta audience familiar with South Carolina’s horse country in Aiken County, Thurmond explained that Clarks Hill would include a “16,000 acre park … for the recreation and enjoyment of the working man.” At Clarks Hill, Thurmond’s archetypal “common man” could enjoy free access to public space to “hunt and fish” and thus presumably avoid a legacy of conflict over trespassing on private land.⁴⁷ Moody, Thurmond, and others recognized class divisions among recreation enthusiasts and leisure-seekers. But class alone was not the only topic in the discussions about recreational facilities in the Savannah River valley.

Though Moody and Thurmond tipped their hats to the newly proposed waterscape’s local and nonlocal users, they did not limit recreational benefits to white nature seekers and water lovers. While campaigning for governor in October 1946 and defending the Clarks Hill project, Thurmond declared the water and energy scheme’s recreational aspects as “one of the most important benefits of the project.” He added, “If the Federal Government develops the project,” as opposed to the Georgia Power Company, the NPS recommended “beautiful parks, for whites and blacks, separate parks.”⁴⁸ Thurmond should not be identified as a defender of democratic outdoor recreation. In wooing his white constituents, what he ultimately promised to white leisure-seekers was that they would never have to share recreation space with African Americans.⁴⁹ Two years later, Corps planners followed the NPS report’s advice and announced plans for at least two separate swimming, picnicking, and camping facilities on Clarks Hill’s shoreline. In Georgia, the Corps recommended the “Keg Creek Negro [sic] Area,” located about thirty miles north of Augusta and about two miles east of Leah, Georgia (now a day-use area). And in South Carolina, the Corps recommended the “Hickory Knob Negro [sic] Area,” located about two miles south of Bordeaux, South Carolina, and currently the site of the state’s most popular state park, Hickory Knob.⁵⁰

Race, not unlike class, continued to enter recreational planning conversations in conjunction with Sun Belt water and energy developments. Georgia’s state park system was a relative latecomer to democratic recreation and operating state parks for African Americans. The state opened its first African American park, George Washington Carver State Park, in 1950 on land leased from the Corps after operations commenced at the multiple-purpose Lake Allatoona project. Georgia also maintained at least three other parks for African Americans by 1955.⁵¹ South Carolina’s system, on the other hand, followed closely behind North Carolina’s and excluded African American visitors between 1934 and 1938.⁵² Thereafter, some parks had “Negro [sic] Areas,” such as Lake Greenwood State Park, a reservoir for hydroelectric operations built with New Deal Rural Electrical Administration funds.⁵³ While these parks provided separate facilities, they were hardly equal. Greenwood’s 12,000-acre artificial lake, for example, was for white visitors only. These segregated state parks and swimming areas became flashpoints for civil rights protesters beginning in the late 1940s.⁵⁴

Legal cases emerged in Maryland and Virginia to challenge segregated access to or exclusion from municipal and state park facilities before and after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision declared segregated (so-called separate but equal) education unconstitutional in 1954.⁵⁵ A Maryland legal case combined three suits involving exclusion from public pools, bathing areas, and a public beach. Upon hearing the Maryland case after the Brown decision, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (Richmond, Va.) ruled state park segregation unconstitutional on March 14, 1955.⁵⁶ The court soon ruled on subsequent Virginia cases and ordered the state’s park system desegregated. But rather than consider an integrated arrangement, Virginia leaders elected to follow the path of “massive resistance” and white supremacy. They closed all parks in response to the Brown case, and they considered leasing or selling parts of the system.⁵⁷ Together, the recreation-inspired legal challenges to segregation demonstrated how state parks and access to water-based recreation served as loci for civil rights activists and massive resistance. African Americans challenged segregation in schools and on buses as well as at state park gates and on shorelines in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the years leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Corps had planned to segregate black and white nature seekers at Clarks Hill in the Savannah River valley.⁵⁸ Two events blocked those plans. First, one South Carolina state park official claimed that “the establishment and development of the two state parks proposed on Clark [sic] Hill” would burden the existing system of twenty-one parks that served 3 million visitors and already could not balance maintenance with new construction.⁵⁹ The second, primary reason for the cooled discussion about segregated parks emerged when lower courts applied legal precedents and the Brown v. Board of Education decision to public recreation facilities. When Virginia officials closed state parks in 1956 to avoid court-ordered desegregation, South Carolina state park administrator C. West Jacocks defended his state’s segregated system as it also faced a challenge from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Charleston chapter over access to Edisto Beach State Park. Jacocks justified his operations because he thought the park system provided an equitable geographic distribution of parks and facilities for white and African American visitors. Clearly not interested in park integration, Jacocks threatened, “Should any ‘power’ eventually bring into being the enforced non-segregated use of the state parks, there is every indication that there will be no use.” In that event, he intoned, “the parks will be closed.”⁶⁰ Despite his best face, Jacocks knew that his facilities could never be truly separate and equal.⁶¹ Separate and equal recreation facilities—as recommended for Clarks Hill’s Hickory Knob (S.C.) and Keg Creek (Ga.) sites—could never have been possible, given the project’s federal authority. Furthermore, any such arrangement would have only delayed an inevitable confrontation over racial inequality evident in other arenas—swimming pools, schools, and public transportation—throughout the United States. Such events forced the hands of administrators like Jacocks, who eventually followed through on threats. South Carolina attempted to close selected parks in 1956 to avoid desegregating the entire system but eventually closed all parks in response to a 1963 U.S. District Court desegregation order.⁶² Clarks Hill planning proceeded, but when segregation as a legal instrument died, plans for segregated parks along the lakeshore died as well.

Planning for the recreational future of the Clarks Hill project required significant socioeconomic considerations, corrective action, and time. The Corps and other agency staff all came to realize that creating an artificial lake to generate electricity for industry and provide leisure space in a peopled and agricultural environment was not easy. Implementation of the Clarks Hill water and energy project clearly roiled environmental questions as much as it confronted social and economic inequalities in Georgia and South Carolina. Plus, the Georgia Power Company executives were not the only voices to protest federal plans for Clarks Hill. Everyone was actually not “for it,” and even those who did support the federal Clarks Hill project were not always happy with the Sun Belt environments they got.

The real estate planning and land acquisition process produced conflict when the Corps physically removed people from the Clarks Hill dam and reservoir project area. As Andrew Sparks reported for the Atlanta Journal Magazine in 1947, “Although some farm land will be inundated, there are remarkably few home sites in the vast area,” since most valley residents “built on high ground” above the valley floor.⁶³ Corps real estate reports identified more than 500 property owners in the project area: “It is estimated that approximately 45 percent of the reservoir area is owned by individuals, 45 percent by the Savannah River Electric Company, 4 percent by the Twin City River Company, 3 percent by the United States (National Forest) with the remainder in the stream beds.” A total of 450 individuals—white and African American—comprised the approximately 128 resident and tenant families requiring physical relocation from a project area that grew to encompass more than 150,000 acres.⁶⁴ Based on the initial purchases of 96,000 acres, there was an approximate average of one person for every 213 acres in the Clarks Hill project area. As a point of reference, beginning in the mid-1930s, President Roosevelt’s administration began acquiring more than 200,000 acres of abandoned and severely eroded upland in South Carolina to assemble the Long Cane District of Sumter National Forest, which now abuts the Clarks Hill reservoir. That area was not as sparsely populated: According to one source, there were 3,300 families in the area. However, only 25 percent of families owned the land they farmed; 74 percent were renters, tenants, or sharecroppers; and squatters constituted 1 percent.⁶⁵ If the same multiplier is applied to the Clarks Hill project, the potential total number of affected individuals rises from 450 to 1,800. This suggests the Corps underreported the number of people affected by its project. Or maybe not.

Other, non-Corps-generated surveys and documents confirm that the Savannah River valley was a sparsely populated but working landscape. In the mid-1940s, the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology initiated a national archeological salvage project known as the River Basin Surveys. The basin survey program evolved from TVA-sponsored archeological activity at New Deal dam and reservoir sites before becoming a formal program applied nationwide to dam and reservoir sites after World War II.⁶⁶ In 1947, the River Basin Survey sent two archeologists, Carl F. Miller and University of Georgia professor Joseph Caldwell, into the Savannah River valley to investigate the Clarks Hill dam and reservoir area as one of the Southeast’s first major interagency archeological salvage projects. The two men traversed a generally unpeopled landscape in transition, and their narrative descriptions and photographs clearly indicated the used, abused, and abandoned states of the Savannah River valley’s landscape.

The area’s old domesticated fields and orchards had transformed into a feral landscape. The land was not wilderness; but it was not entirely domesticated, and the territory obscured past uses as much as the land was obviously scarred by some of those uses. As Miller walked across private property and drove state highways in Georgia and South Carolina, he looked for Indian mounds and potential settlement sites on knolls, in fields, and at the junction of watercourses on sandbars, in bottomlands, or adjacent to shoals. He then read back through layers of modern landscapes to find pot shards, human remains, bone tools, and Indian mounds in wooded areas, orchards, cotton fields, and pastures. Miller’s notes included brief narrative descriptions of sites, indicated the existence of inconsistent landownership records or occupation status, and noted previous land uses and current property conditions. At the time of Miller’s surveys, dated January through April 1949, the survey sites were typically located in cleared and fallow fields. But landowners and tenants or renters clearly continued to use many fields—for cotton, orchards, and cattle—set to be covered by the water stored behind Clarks Hill dam to control downstream flooding, produce energy for distant urban and industrial consumers, and improve navigation in the lower valley.⁶⁷

Miller and his archeological contemporaries also noted land in various stages of use and ecological evolution a few years before University of Georgia biologist Eugene P. Odum—often cited as the “father of modern ecology”—began evaluating old field succession downriver at the Barnwell (S.C.) Savannah River site nuclear bomb factory in 1951.⁶⁸ Miller categorized erosion generally and specifically in the Clarks Hill reservoir area. One “badly eroded knoll … was covered with broom straw and small pines.”⁶⁹ Another knoll, near South Carolina bottomland on the Little River, was “marked by sheet erosion” and ubiquitous loblolly and slash pine trees.⁷⁰ Some of the “old plowed” fields “had been allowed to grow to pine and shrub” in McCormick County, South Carolina. Other fields identifiably “old” and “terraced” were “partly overgrown in pines and broom straw.”⁷¹ Very often Miller found evidence of Indian habitation in plowed fields, pastures, and canebrakes, and at other times he did not.⁷² Despite occasionally striking out, Miller consistently observed an agricultural landscape that—in the absence of constant human labor and domestication—had been “allowed to go back to nature.”⁷³

About the same time that Miller and Caldwell conducted their Clarks Hill investigations, an NPS historian investigated potential historic sites during March and April 1949. Operating independently of the River Basin Survey and the interagency archeological salvage project, Edward Riley investigated and reported on nearly twenty locations in the proposed Clarks Hill reservoir area, including an eighteenth-century military fort, “dead towns,” ferry crossings, and cemeteries. Riley’s recommendations to the NPS varied from doing nothing with some areas to improving road access for others. For most spots, Riley was a harsh historian: “Archeological investigation of the sites is not feasible. It would probably contribute little to the known history of the towns.” To be fair, Riley evaluated these areas for their national significance and not just their local interest, and as such he believed that “none of the sites to be covered by the reservoir has sufficient significance to require preservation.” But at a basic level, NPS historian Riley diverged from River Basin Survey archeologists Miller and Caldwell. Riley only recommended “erection of historical narrative markers at the various” historic sites not older than the eighteenth century, since little could “be done to interpret the history of the reservoir area.” In contrast, archeologists Miller and Caldwell identified hundreds of pre-eighteenth-century locations illustrating the complex and long environmental history of an area shaped by shifting natural and cultural conditions as well as energy regimes.⁷⁴

Journalist Andrew Sparks later reported from one of the sites Riley considered insignificant and highlighted valley residents’ ambivalence about selling their property and relocating. According to Riley, “The only town which will disappear under the dammed-up water” behind Clarks Hill was Lisbon, Georgia, an “out-of-the-way, one-store hamlet” sixty-five miles upriver from Augusta as described by Sparks.⁷⁵ Located at the junction of the Broad and Savannah Rivers, Lisbon had been an important tobacco and cotton trading center in the late 1800s but declined as railroads stifled river transportation. In the 1940s, Lisbon still included a working river ferry, a post office, and a handful of other buildings.⁷⁶ As Irene DuBose, a resident from the small town explained to Sparks, “They’ll have a hard time pushing us out but I reckon I’ll go.” Another resident, Lisbon ferryman Jim Evans, commented, “I ain’t going to wait for them to start” building the dam or flooding the reservoir; “I’ll take my five children and get out. I’ll farm somewhere I reckon.”

Like DuBose and Evans, individuals and family estate agents, plus other Clarks Hill corporate landowners, including electrical utilities (the Savannah River Electric Company, a Georgia Power Company subsidiary, held title to nearly 40,000 acres) and local banks, eventually sold their property to the federal government. Many individual and corporate sellers willingly worked with the Corps, eagerly sold eroded farms battered about for decades in a volatile agricultural economy, and moved out of the valley. In a procedure familiar in the past and encountered in the future, not all transactions were so smooth. Some individual and corporate landowners reluctantly sold property only under condemnation proceedings or vacated property only as the reservoir’s rising waters began to cover their property; they protested the right of the federal government to condemn land as well as the land’s assessed economic value, which often did not account for the property’s historic or emotional value.⁷⁷

So was everyone “for it”? In 1943, when Colonel P. A. Feringa made this remark about the federally financed Clarks Hill project, he was technically more correct than wrong. Flooding that nearly caused a catastrophic levee failure in Augusta in 1929 and a 1941 urban drought that resulted in a major energy crisis made the multiple-purpose navigation, flood control, and hydroelectric dam development at Clarks Hill more appealing to the Savannah River valley’s residents in 1945 than the Georgia Power Company’s water and energy scheme. Within a few years, this assumption was briefly challenged, but the Corps’ project moved forward and workers poured the first batches of concrete for Clarks Hill dam in 1948. The topography of the Savannah River valley did not call for a tall western dam best exemplified by the iconic Hoover Dam (1936). That Colorado River dam, which stood taller than 500 feet and measured just over 1,000 feet in width, was far different from the Clarks Hill dam. After increasing from an estimated 1944 cost of $35.3 million to a 1954 cost of $78.5 million, the concrete dam and earthen embankment stood just shy of 200 feet tall and nearly one mile (5,280 feet) wide across the Savannah River when completed.⁷⁸

When Clarks Hill dam’s floodgates closed and the reservoir began to fill in 1951, the project remained incomplete. In late 1952, an Atlanta journalist declared that the Savannah River was “imprisoned” behind the dam and had turned into “Georgia’s new ocean” covering 71,000 acres with more than 1,200 miles of shoreline. At the time, Clarks Hill Lake was the “biggest man-made lake southeast of TVA.” Many held out hope that the dam would “tame the river in floodtime, preventing more than a million dollar’s worth of damage every decade” and store water for “periods of drought” last experienced in 1941. Others hoped that Clarks Hill would become the Sun Belt’s “biggest vacationland between the Blue Ridge mountains and the sea.”⁷⁹ Supporters, critics, and observers assumed Clarks Hill would serve many interests well into the future, thought this was not readily apparent to everyone.

Clarks Hill began producing energy in 1953, and all dam watchers waited to see what the dam could do. But the project—including park planning, concession contracts, real estate claims and leases, and domestic water supply allocation—was unfinished and contested well into the 1960s. While the Corps eventually acquired all the land titles it needed, there were numerous situations where individual and community support for a federally financed Clarks Hill traveled a difficult path. From road and bridge relocations to public health and malaria control to shoreline aesthetics and timber clearing, there was no shortage of grassroots resistance to the Corps.⁸⁰ Citizens successfully won concessions from the Corps to alter road relocations that positively benefited communities affected by the new reservoir, and they also influenced the Corps’ timber operations to protect public health. These citizens, not unlike their elected representatives, learned that while they were all “for it” during the conceptual and planning stages, the Corps’ execution of Clarks Hill was not simple, clearly explained, or so easily acceptable.

Many of these issues were new and unanticipated by those who conceived of and who supported the Clarks Hill development, and they illustrated the continuing and unintended management issues the Corps, elected officials, engineers, and residents had to confront in their new hydraulic waterscape. And even before Clarks Hill went online, the Corps’ next massive artificial Savannah River valley project moved from idea to reality. The Hartwell dam and lake scheme, as recommended in the 1944 Flood Control Act, would also face many of the same endorsements, trials, and rejections the Corps experienced with the Clarks Hill project.

Just as there was no real politically Solid South, Sun Belt boosters found themselves equally divided over the region’s water and energy future. The Georgia Power Company waged an unsuccessful political battle to win approval for a privately financed Clarks Hill water and energy project and to avoid what their surrogates interpreted as the road to socialism. The energy companies and their supporters consistently trumpeted the importance of private enterprise and raised the specter of socialism, though this message was often interpreted as flagrant hyperbole. For example, the Atlanta Journal editors surmised in 1947 that the Georgia Power Company was “not only fighting for something” it wanted but was primarily “spearheading a campaign in behalf of the National Association of Electric Companies” lobby and “to stop further development by government of the nation’s river systems on the pattern of the Tennessee Valley Authority.” In the editors’ opinion, the battle over Clarks Hill was just one front on a nearly thirty-year-old war: “Shall there be any further governmental developments like TVA, or shall TVA remain a sort of yardstick or object lesson, and our river systems be developed for power production by private initiative in the manner it deems best for production of profits?”⁸¹ In the matter of Clarks Hill, many supporters clearly sided with public power and rejected private power.

In perhaps the most forceful and clear language, Governor J. Strom Thurmond declared in 1947, “We know the government always completes its projects.” In directly calling out Georgia Power Company executives who were then restarting the almost twenty-year-old Furman Shoals (Lake Sinclair) project on the Oconee River, Thurmond reminded South Carolina citizens that they could not always be sure about a private energy company’s interest in finishing projects.⁸² Thurmond also noted that “opposition to the nation’s water development system stemmed from ‘bulwarks of wealth and private interest,’” not from those who purportedly held public and community values.⁸³ Furthermore, the private energy company was apparently selective in calling federal projects socialistic. Thurmond claimed that Georgia Power had not branded the Corps’ Allatoona dam in northwest Georgia as “Socialistic.”⁸⁴ The company may have behaved this way because it was planning new coal-fired plants downstream of Allatoona on the Etowah River, such as Plant Hammond (operational in 1954), and it was keen to have a federal dam regulate the river’s flow. Thurmond—more well known for his future leadership in the Dixiecrat revolt, his racial politics, and his eventual jump to the Republican Party in 1964—was a complex character who contributed to the breaking apart of the Democratic Party over the issue of civil rights. This advocacy for Clarks Hill undoubtedly played into Congress’s decision to change the name of Clarks Hill Dam and Lake to the J. Strom Thurmond Dam and Lake at Clarks Hill in 1988.

To say that dry and high river years, drought and flood legacies in the Savannah River valley, did not equally shape the Savannah River valley’s history as did politics or labor history would be an understatement. Water and its shifting behavior contributed to the reasons why people chose to move into and throughout the valley for centuries. New South boosters had consistently trumpeted the region’s stock in plentiful, high-quality water as a reason to call the American South home from the 1890s to the 1950s. As such, devastating flooding in river communities and droughts that compromised electrical production and industrial development did not always strike innocent Georgians and South Carolinians. Water was a top-tier factor in the region’s economic growth, and water in the wrong quantities at the wrong times also compromised that growth. Natural disasters—the droughts and the floods in the Savannah River valley—were thus nature’s and people’s making. Many other manufactured problems—racial inequality, eroded land, the need for bridge relocations, and public health problems—also influenced conversations about the valley’s shape, where people lived, and the ability for communities to thrive along the riverbanks and reservoir shorelines.

After completing the Clarks Hill dam and reservoir project, Corps and federal engineers continued to build hundreds of large and small reservoirs throughout the American South for a variety of purposes in places southerners had lived in, farmed, hunted, and appreciated for centuries. In the post-1945 period, the Corps’ work in southern valleys tied the region’s water and energy future to questions about democratic recreational access. Outdoor recreation discussions also forced some southerners to negotiate the color line and confront socioeconomic realities. If Sun Belt boosters celebrated their ability to segregate public recreation space, then they also defined where and what kind of recreation activities would be available for white and black men and women, rich and poor, during their free time. Unfortunately, this process also determined and limited how Americans engaged with and learned about nature. In a Sun Belt comprised of used, abused, and abandoned landscapes, the Corps and other institutions faced major challenges in creating democratic and accessible leisure landscapes while also building hydraulic waterscapes.

In the last half-century, longtime valley residents, including those forced to move and make way for the Clarks Hill reservoir, had to share a transformed landscape perhaps best described by William Faulkner in his collection of short stories Big Woods. In Faulkner’s Mississippi, an old hunter could lament that the new fishermen in powerboats had no memory of the old forests and fields below the surface of a “government-built” reservoir. Furthermore, the unappreciative sport fishermen lacked an ethic and simply left sunken bass plugs and beer bottles on the “Big Bottom” itself where the hunter had once tracked deer and bear on foot.⁸⁵ The old agricultural economy and landscape had been consumed by human fears of future floods and droughts; it was consumed by corporate dreams of energy independence; it was consumed by insatiable boosters and clever congressional leaders who repackaged the New Deal big dam consensus as a solution to southern water problems.

Flush with public funds and hungry for institutional validation after World War II, the Sun Belt Corps’ river planning program manufactured new environmental and social conditions in the Savannah River valley and beyond. However, before the Clarks Hill reservoir had even completely filled up, drought once again struck the American South in the 1950s and cast doubt on the role new reservoirs could play in maintaining adequate water and energy supplies for a region that suddenly did not have enough water again.