Chapter 5: Big Dam Backlash Rising in the Sun Belt

When Governor Sonny Perdue (b. 1946) prayed for rain on the state capitol’s steps during Georgia’s deepening drought on November 13, 2007, it was not the first time politics, religion, and water scarcity merged in the Peach State. In the 1950s, drought gripped Georgia for a third time in less than thirty years, and Georgians decided to “Pray for Rain” during the driest year in Georgia history since 1925.¹ In a display of sympathy and well-choreographed publicity, Governor Herman Talmadge (1913–2002) personally led a Sunday service designated as a “day of prayer for rain,” according to one newspaper. As the multiyear national drought climaxed in October 1954, the drought hit Georgia’s farmers and small communities hardest. Atlanta officials restricted city departments’ water use, and they developed a plan for rationing municipal water supplies that did not have to be implemented.² Fayetteville, a small town about twenty-five miles south of downtown Atlanta in the upper Flint River basin, was not so lucky. The Fayette County seat of 1,200 had to cancel school for the county’s 700 students because the town had no water; it was one of at least seven Georgia communities whose municipal water supplies had vanished.³ Urban municipal water customers were not the only individuals to feel the effects of drought. The state’s increasingly diversified truck farmers—including those in the Augusta and Savannah River region—also suffered as their fruit and vegetable crops withered on the vine. Richmond County dairy, cattle, and poultry farmers in the “death throes” became eligible for federal financial assistance.⁴ Overall, the state’s agricultural economy took a $100 million hit from a so-called natural disaster that Atlanta Journal editors characterized as not making “as much noise as fires and floods” or moving “as fast.” But the drought’s consequences were, in their opinion, “just as deadly.”⁵

Georgians—and other southeastern residents—once again encountered a serious water supply crisis, signaling that water insecurity continued to challenge the American South’s potential. The 1954 drought, not unlike droughts in 1925 and 1941, compromised urban water supplies and industrial operations, as well as agricultural livelihoods. But the 1954 event was different: It sparked “widespread interest … to find not just a temporary or expedient” solution, according to one observer. Many people, including those who served on the hastily formed Georgia Water Use and Conservation Committee, agreed on the need to “develop a long time policy that will be flexible in character and that will deal equitably and effectively” with all water consumers. The often forgotten 1950s Georgia drought occurred at a critical juncture during the so-called Cotton Belt’s transformation into the Sun Belt and was partly the result of “slow, but steady, social and economic changes.”⁶ These changes amplified long-standing environmental realities in a region defined by water and power. The 1950s southern drought and response ignited an intense backlash over how best to balance water and energy supplies as the New Deal big dam and liberal consensus began to unravel. The rising Sun Belt rediscovered an old vulnerability in a period of increasing change: Sustainable growth required a sustainable water supply.

Opposition to the New Deal big dam consensus coalesced nationwide as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ plan for the Hartwell Dam energy and water project surfaced in the Savannah River valley. Controversies over dams in the American West sparked resistance across the country. For example, the postwar public-private power debate over the Hells Canyon High Dam served as a critical tipping point for New Deal liberalism and post-1945 conservatism and environmentalism. The Idaho Power Company’s legal team successfully mounted a decade-long campaign to win control of the Snake River valley, “unplugging the New Deal” in the process, according to one scholar. The utility lobby trumpeted the economic value of free enterprise, won Republican president Dwight Eisenhower’s political support, and secured federal approval for three small corporate hydroelectric dams in 1957. These victories eliminated the Corps’ and the Bureau of Reclamation’s Hells Canyon High Dam project while simultaneously beating back plans set forth by New Deal–era agencies such as the Bonneville Power Administration. Interest group opposition at Hells Canyon—beginning in 1945 and initially led by an energy corporation—opened the door for other opponents, such as conservationists and ecologists who spoke for salmon and wild rivers. Unplugging the New Deal’s multiple-purpose dam program in the Snake River valley empowered old and new stakeholders across the country.⁷

A second western battle further cracked the New Deal’s big dam consensus. Successful opposition to one of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Storage Project dams in Echo Park (Colo.) also convinced an emerging postwar community of environmental stakeholders that federal dam building could be stopped. Activists defended Dinosaur National Monument and the National Park Service’s mission from a big dam on the Green River. By 1956, park and river advocates argued in favor of wilderness and questioned the bureau’s benefit-cost analysis and technological claims. They defeated the Echo Park dam and launched a national environmental movement led by personalities such as David Brower who championed wilderness and wild rivers for the next two decades. After Hells Canyon and Echo Park, few western dams moved forward without dedicated, professional, and nationalized opposition.⁸

In the Southeast, leaders in the rising Sun Belt doubled down. The New Deal big dam consensus changed tact but plowed forward at full speed to resolve the region’s persistent water and energy challenges. An interlocking group of stakeholders—local boosters, energy executives, members of Congress, and Corps engineers—drove the process from multiple angles. First, fast-talking local chamber of commerce agents adept at “selling the South” and long-serving Democratic Party operatives perfected a process initiated during the New Deal that captured federal dollars to finance the region’s military bases, airports, factories, and highways.⁹ Less-well-known Sun Belt boosters also continuously used water and energy projects to secure federal dollars and sell the region’s known commodity: low-cost, nonunionized labor. Second, energy corporations and their allies did not, however, completely unplug the New Deal in the American South during the same time period as they did in the Snake and Green River valleys. Corps and elected officials defended—and corporate executives criticized—publicly funded water and energy programs in the South. At the same time, private sector energy companies contributed to the region’s hydraulic waterscape by building their own hydroelectric dams or coal plants downstream from federal dams that regulated unpredictable river flows. The private sector’s opposition picked up at Hartwell, but it could not defeat the Corps’ two remaining Savannah River valley projects. Southern Democrats had reloaded the New Deal and successfully turned the valley’s environmental manipulation over to the Corps. Energy executives, citizens, and other federal agencies challenged the Corps throughout this process, but it would take these collective forces nearly two decades to build a serious big dam backlash to federal energy and water operations. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Corps’ victories in the Savannah River valley’s public-private power debate were very different from the celebrated outcomes that stopped big government dams in the American West’s Hells Canyon and Echo Park. But the free enterprise, fiscal restraint, and environmental rhetoric resonated in the American South.

The backlash and resistance to federal water projects in the Savannah River valley in the 1950s manifested in a complex moment of volatile global, social, and environmental conditions. Southerners articulated water problems—floods, droughts, and soil erosion—in newspapers, correspondence, and public meetings and throughout the levels of state and federal bureaucracies. As New Deal economic liberalism came to an end, according to historian Alan Brinkley, postwar “rights based liberalism” produced a limited regulatory environment while also responding to the civil rights and states’ rights movements.¹⁰ Agricultural, industrial, and municipal constituencies affected by water problems expressed a wide range of solutions to protect property rights, the local tax base, private enterprise, and the environment. Individuals and interest groups also wanted to reevaluate water rights in an era in which property rights and states’ rights converged with civil rights to redraw political loyalties after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case (1954). All of these issues touched as local boosters leaned on politicians to make sure full funding was extended for new Corps projects such as Clarks Hill, Hartwell, and nearly two dozen other major dam, reservoir, and waterway projects across the Sun Belt.¹¹ The Clarks Hill project—completed between 1946 and 1952 because, reportedly, “everyone was for it”—barely held together the region’s long-reigning but clearly fractured New Deal Democratic Party. The Hartwell project’s postwar debates over public energy, fiscal responsibility, and rights all contributed to dividing political parties and the states of Georgia and South Carolina. Opinions about the Southeast’s hydraulic waterscape could be found in the heart of these debates and continued to shape liberal and conservative discourse in the coming decades. Conservative rights-based ideas—like those espoused in other regions over busing, taxes, and entitlements—also influenced the Sun Belt’s energy and water choices while recasting future political affinities after the 1950s drought.¹²

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers technocrats had previously evaluated the Hartwell dam and reservoir site in multiple studies—including the 308 Study (1935) and as one of eleven projects approved in concept by Congress in the Flood Control Act (1944)—before completing the project in the early 1960s.¹³ The Hartwell Dam, a 200-foot-tall and 2-mile-long (11,000-foot) structure, is about ninety miles upstream and northwest of Augusta. Congress approved and engineers designed Hartwell to provide the primary trio of benefits like Clarks Hill and other multiple-purpose Corps projects as explicitly approved by the Flood Control Act of 1950 for flood control, navigation improvement, and energy production. They also envisioned a new hydroelectric dam that would impound a 56,000-acre reservoir (2 million acre-feet) to provide nearly endless opportunities for recreation on land and water.¹⁴ In the 1940s, elected officials remained generally mum about Hartwell and other possible federal dams in the river valley during Clarks Hill’s planning and construction period. Colonel Paschal N. Strong, on the other hand, did not remain so tight-lipped. Strong believed the Savannah River valley was “a gold mine for electric power.” And in 1949, while discussing Clarks Hill, the self-confident Strong declared, “You may be sure that the Savannah River will be developed and the Hartwell dam will be built.”¹⁵ Strong was not wrong, and Hartwell got a congressional green light and first appropriation one year later.¹⁶ With money in the pipeline to improve the Sun Belt’s water and energy conditions in the Savannah River valley, Corps engineers promptly began finalizing land surveys and construction designs for the valley’s second major postwar public works project.

Support for the new Hartwell scheme emerged from predictable directions. First, civic bodies mobilized to promote the project. Georgians and South Carolinians called Hartwell a self-liquidating “cash-register” dam that would pay for itself through electrical sales revenue to rural electric and municipal cooperatives established during the New Deal.¹⁷ The Hartwell Steering Committee—comprised of prominent Savannah River valley movers and shakers—believed the public infrastructure project would jump-start Sun Belt commercial development. Lester Moody, Augusta’s tireless chamber of commerce leader, was a primary spokesman, and he peddled promotional materials. For example, The Hartwell Project … Now: Presented to the Congress of the United States by the People of South Carolina and Georgia defined the social merits and economic benefits of the proposed dam for members of Congress while also adding some others, including soil conservation and recreation. National defense, however, quickly rose to the top as a new vehicle for Hartwell.

National defense likely represented a sincere attempt to secure federal dollars, given the nation’s emerging Cold War relations with the Soviet Union. The Hartwell Project … Now pamphleteers linked the new Communist threat with old fears expressed by their New South predecessors: Georgia and South Carolina lacked coal and petroleum reserves. Thus, the Sun Belt could not support itself during a national war emergency, and industrial operations could “be paralyzed” by striking miners or rail workers.¹⁸ The committee’s argument that hydroelectric facilities were good for national defense because river water was always available ignored the fact that rivers could, in fact, shrink considerably as they did in the past. Regardless of history, boosters interpreted Hartwell as a critical tool for national defense and energy security. When the promoters released The Hartwell Project … Now in 1949, they may not have known that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) planned to locate a nuclear weapons material manufacturing plant on the Savannah River downstream from Augusta. However, the Hartwell cheerleaders surely recalled that Congress was quick to approve New Deal and World War II public works projects when such projects supported national defense objectives.¹⁹ And if they did not remember, Georgia senator Richard B. Russell would have certainly provided the institutional memory.

Born in Winder, Georgia, Richard B. Russell Jr. (1897–1971) was elected to the state legislature in 1920, governor in 1930, and U.S. senator in 1932. He served in the Senate for nearly forty years until his death. As a New Deal Democrat, Russell supported agricultural programs and the Rural Electrification Administration’s enabling legislation. But by 1938, he was casting a critical eye on the New Deal after President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to purge Georgia’s other senator and southern Democrats who valued white supremacy over liberalism and civil rights.²⁰ After World War II, Russell came into his own, and he mastered the Senate’s rule-making and legislative process as a member of two powerful committees—appropriations and armed services—where he served for decades and at times as chairman. Russell excelled in his ability to win allies; he lobbied for their projects and expected their debts to help pave the way for his own interests. For example, Russell helped Oklahoma’s Robert Kerr, an equally savvy and powerful senator, win federal dollars in the 1950s for water projects. Half-jokingly Russell noted, “If any is left over after you … get through with the Treasury, I hope to get a few dollars for Georgia.” Dam and water schemes were an instrumental part of this horse-trading process that Russell tapped to build out Georgia’s hydraulic waterscape.²¹ Russell and the Savannah River’s boosters worked hand in hand to build an industrial and commercial sector in the valley and to meet their collective vision for a commercial Sun Belt.

To the boosters’ advantage, the Savannah River valley did accrue strategic capital when it became a part of America’s modified Cold War “garrison state.”²² After the Soviet Union tested its first fission atomic weapon in 1949, National Security Council Resolution 68 outlined the U.S. military response and included a call for a new generation of nuclear weapons: hydrogen bombs. By the end of 1950, the federal government had selected a site twenty miles east of Augusta in Aiken and Barnwell Counties (S.C.) and contracted Delaware-based E. I. Du Pont De Nemours & Company to operate a new nuclear facility—the Savannah River Site (SRS)—to produce tritium for the next wave of nuclear weapons.²³

The Hartwell boosters and the Corps grafted the SRS project into their promotional materials to fortify their cause in the halls of Congress while inadvertently sowing confusion.²⁴ South Carolina’s and Georgia’s Democratic leadership initially connected Hartwell and the SRS defense facility in the early 1950s based on projected regional electrical needs.²⁵ The real connection between the two facilities, they soon learned from the AEC, was not electrical supply but Hartwell’s ability to help regulate the Savannah River’s flow of water into—and ultimately out of—Clarks Hill’s reservoir. As one AEC spokesperson explained to South Carolina senator J. Strom Thurmond (D), Corps engineers’ combined operations at Hartwell and Clarks Hill would ensure water releases at a minimum flow of 5,300 cubic feet per second. These regular releases of cold water were necessary for the SRS’s water withdrawals and critical nuclear reactor operations.²⁶ These details mattered, but Sun Belt boosters and politicians ultimately branded Hartwell as a national defense project that also promised commercial development throughout the central Savannah River valley’s much larger hydraulic waterscape.

Another group of Sun Belt movers and shakers lined up in support of Hartwell’s recreational promise. This new crew was not interested in the traditional trio of benefits or national defense; they wanted to invest in property adjacent to the Sun Belt’s newest working reservoir. As Corps real estate agents began acquiring and condemning land from hundreds of property owners already living within the Hartwell dam and reservoir area in 1958, a small band of professionals and contractors eager to carve a new lakeside community from old farmland began corresponding with South Carolina’s Senator Thurmond. This new pro-dam crowd inquired about specific shoreline land management policies, such as property owners’ rights to access the public reservoir from private land.²⁷

It is important to point out at this juncture that the Corps incorporated a buffer or collar of land between the reservoir’s high-water line and adjacent private property lines for nearly every project all over the country. Working reservoirs—public and private—maintain these buffers primarily to protect water quality and to keep dirt from running off, accumulating in the reservoir, and compromising water storage capacity.²⁸ The distance between these lines or the amount of land contained within the buffer and collar could be a few hundred feet or more, depending on topography, a surveyor’s skill, and the final agreement between sellers and Corps real estate agents. Finally, and most important to understand, the Corps’ collar lands were (and are) public land and therefore open to general access. This final point made the real estate investors and property owners apprehensive about purchasing land abutting the collar or relinquishing ownership and riparian rights to land corralled within the buffer. Most property owners and investors ultimately wanted to build docks and boathouses, clear vegetation in the collar to improve the view, and enhance property values set to be further inflated due to proximity to a massive taxpayer-funded artificial amenity lake. Could property owners purchase or use the federal property in the buffer area between the water line and a private property line to build a dock? Senator Thurmond’s constituents inquired.²⁹ According to one Corps officer, private property owners adjacent “to the project boundary” had “the same rights as the general public in using the Government lands and access to the water.” The general public, in turn, could also access the collar from the lake itself. Corps officers also explained to Senator Thurmond that property owners could build floating docks, walkways, access roads, and other structures in the buffer areas on a permit application basis and as long as the improvements did not imply “exclusive use” or prevent public use of the reservoir or adjacent public lands.³⁰ As such, some property owners and real estate investors were positioned to gain significant financial benefit from the reservoir, and they supported the New Deal–inspired public works project because of the anticipated private rewards that came with Sun Belt leisure activities in a postindustrial waterscape.

Promises to serve national defense, dreams for personal playgrounds, and the reported trio of traditional benefits propelled Hartwell forward after 1950. These advocates—from chamber of commerce secretaries and media personalities to lawyers and general contractors who often landed lucrative federal construction contracts—functioned as cheerleaders for Hartwell dam for different reasons in the postwar period.³¹ Boosters, elected officials, and Corps engineers believed that Hartwell was one of the federal government’s most important Savannah River valley endeavors. Many people also understood that Hartwell was a relic of the New Deal big dam consensus, and a crop of critics emerged to oppose the venture after Hartwell received its first dedicated appropriation. As with opposition to Clarks Hill, a vocal group of conservative challengers opposed Hartwell when the project’s costs exploded and the Corps’ plans threatened property and water rights.

The backlash mobilized along multiple fault lines. In 1951, the Clemson College (currently known as Clemson University) board of trustees was anxious to learn how the Corps’ proposed Hartwell project might affect the school. Clemson commissioned alumni Cecil L. Reid, A. G. Stanford, and Ed D. Sloan, and their internal report determined that the Hartwell project threatened the college’s future. Reid and Stanford were both engineers; the latter worked for the Atlanta-based Robert and Company, an engineering outfit with direct ties to World War II defense factory contracts (e.g., the Marietta, Georgia, Bell B29 Bomber factory) and postwar civil infrastructure contracts (Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport).³² In their report, the alumni argued that the Hartwell dam’s regularly scheduled water releases for electrical generation would surround Clemson College with unsightly and insect-prone mudflats. Second, as water rose behind the Hartwell dam, the new high-water level would render the college’s raw drinking-water intake and sewage treatment facilities inoperable. Finally, and an issue that soon threatened to halt the project forever, the authors determined that the new reservoir’s water would inundate thousands of acres of college property. In their final assessment for the Clemson board of trustees, the three men believed a dike or levee—built and maintained by the Corps—was the best solution to keep the rising waters off campus property and out of the Tigers’ football stadium.³³

Reid, Stanford, and Sloan then used information from the private Clemson College report to publish their own publicity piece. The tone of the two documents could not have been more different, and The Truth about “Hartwell” reads like a red-smearing vituperative rant. The 1952 cover page alone made the mission clear: “SAVE CLEMSON from being surrounded by a sea of mud; SAVE SOUTH CAROLINA from Federal Control, from so-called Civil Rights, from Socialism and Communism; SAVE STATES RIGHTS.” Buried in the rhetoric were nuggets of truth. The three authors correctly identified a well-founded criticism of multiple-purpose dams: “A full reservoir cannot regulate floods and an empty reservoir cannot generate power.”³⁴ Managing a reservoir to collect floodwaters might mean keeping the reservoir low or nearly empty, but in order to produce electricity on a regular schedule, reservoirs need to be full. Since Hartwell was initially considered a flood control structure with additional benefits for power production and navigational improvements, the concern was legitimate. What, the authors asked, would the reservoir’s fluctuating level mean for Clemson—the mudflats, the mosquitoes, the sewage and water lines, and the relocation of buildings and roads? When Reid and his coauthors specifically targeted the Corps’ projected water levels, they landed clear opinions on the federal government’s encroachment on race relations, property rights, and the free enterprise system. Concerns about a new working reservoir served as key elements of the Sun Belt backlash against liberalism that critics concentrated on the crumbling New Deal big dam consensus.

Hartwell opponents used the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) much as those who opposed public water and energy projects like Clarks Hill had a decade earlier. The Truth about “Hartwell” explained that the TVA did not pay taxes, was a federally subsidized electrical company, and threatened the competitive marketplace. The TVA, Clarks Hill, and now Hartwell represented the slippery slope: “If the government can go into the power business and charge itself no interest and practically no taxes it should pay, why cannot it also go into the Oil, Bread, Shoe, Transportation or Insurance business. When it does this, is that not state socialism?” The conservative authors recommended that the Corps abandon its project or, at a minimum, reduce the height of the dam to keep the Clemson campus high and dry.³⁵ After school officials and alumni waged a nearly five-year, well-choreographed, and at times misleading public battle portraying Clemson College as a victim, the Corps eventually built the levee initially recommended by Reid et al. to keep Hartwell Lake’s rising waters from flooding portions of campus.³⁶ Regardless of the actual physical outcomes, The Truth about “Hartwell” ultimately preached one conservative conclusion: New Deal–inspired public energy and water projects threatened individual rights and compromised the free market.

South Carolina representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn (1916–2005) did not directly respond to The Truth about “Hartwell,” but he did put his own spin on the socialist and conservative rhetoric. Dorn, a New Deal Democrat who served thirteen congressional terms between 1948 and 1974, explained to one constituent that his visits to the TVA’s and the Columbia River’s multiple-purpose water and energy projects had hardened his resolve to see the Hartwell development through to completion. He believed Hartwell would deliver prosperity to “the desperately poor people of the Savannah Valley…. It will help small industries and in aiding small industries and the rural people, it most certainly helps those people to be independent and will help them to resist Socialism and Communism.” For Dorn the emphasis behind public projects and postwar liberalism’s goal was to put individuals back on their feet, promote local industry, and thus provide jobs for able-bodied white Americans who could then ascend to middle-class status. This was the Sun Belt’s operative goal for many southern Democrats.³⁷

Executives with the Charlotte-based Duke Power Company did weigh in on the Hartwell situation, but not because they were directly threatened at the moment. Duke Power, not unlike Georgia Power after 1945, wanted to revive its version of capitalism and eliminate competing energy proposals in the Savannah River valley associated with the lingering New Deal big dam consensus. Duke, of course, cut its corporate teeth in the New South era and turned the Catawba River valley into a vast “hydro-industrial empire,” according to one observer.³⁸ The company also provided hydro- and coal-generated electrical power to the majority of upstate South Carolina. Given this experience, Duke’s executives offered technical analysis to South Carolina’s politicians regarding Hartwell’s hydroelectric value in comparison with the company’s proven steam technologies. According to one Duke executive, the company had shifted to coal and steam generation after 1940 and had additional plants in the pipeline. Based on a long operations history, company employees understood the complexities of planning new facilities, managing generation, and attracting future customers. David Nabow recognized “that the large increases in the demands for electric power in the Company’s service area [had] outgrown the limited hydro-electric potentialities in this area.” As such, “the primary dependence must therefore continue to be placed on large and efficient steam-electric generating plants” and “economical hydro-electric sites” if necessary. In short, steam technology was more cost-effective and efficient than hydroelectric systems.³⁹ These market and environmental conditions led Duke executives and Hartwell opponents alike to begin merging their concerns and to ask big questions: If private enterprise and technology outperformed public hydropower projects, then why did the federal government continue to promote energy-inefficient big dam projects that symbolized a colossal waste of taxpayer money and an affront to water and property rights? A backlash that began with Clemson’s fear of mudflats, Reid’s states’ rights argument, and now Duke’s cost-benefit analysis began to coalesce.

The Truth about “Hartwell” and other individual voices represented a new conservative vanguard that articulated opposition to the Hartwell development, the lingering New Deal big dam consensus, and postwar liberalism. Even when Georgia and South Carolina delegates championed federal water projects as solutions for water problems, citizen support for public energy developments did not come very easily. Not all boosters shared the same vision of shaping the region’s economic future through water and energy endeavors like Hartwell. Civic bodies such as the Hartwell Steering Committee had enjoyed cross-border alliances in the past. However, and over the course of the next thirty years, South Carolinians increasingly became spoilers, and they defended private enterprise while rejecting Georgians’ vision of public energy and federal public works projects in the Savannah River basin. Property rights, water rights, and fiscal issues continued to dog Corps and elected officials. But did other solutions exist to resolve the Southeast’s water insecurity?

Hartwell critics latched onto flood control and water supply solutions in a competing federal agency’s neopopulist programs that embraced low-tech options. Taxpayers, such as S. Maner Martin, feared government expansion and bristled at spending public funds on a massive “fish pond” like Hartwell to solve the Sun Belt’s water problems.⁴⁰ Lucile Buriss Watson, who considered herself among the “reputable engineers” and “thinking voters,” opposed Hartwell because it represented “a major step toward Socialism and an extravagant waste of the taxpayers’ money.” Watson admitted her opposition to the project was grounded in self-interest because she did not want “the beauty and peace of our landscape spoiled by mosquitoes, mudbanks, motor boats, and hoards of fishermen!”⁴¹ Calling the proposed Hartwell reservoir a “fish pond” sounds like a misrepresentation of a body of water that would eventually inundate more than 50,000 acres and produce more than fish. But Martin’s and Watson’s choice of words about the massive Sun Belt working reservoir tapped into a larger discussion about the federal government’s role in resolving national water problems and what water storage and irrigation tools to use.

The 1950s drought was a turning point in the American South. As the lack of rain and competing demands exacerbated water scarcity in Georgia, some farmers turned to farm ponds to survive the water crunch in 1954. As journalist Bill Allen said in 1953, if midwestern states could claim the title of the “Land o’ Lakes” then Georgia was the “Paradise o’ Ponds.” By one account, Georgia could claim 12,000 farm and fish ponds that inundated 40,000 acres. Not only did the ponds produce nearly 450 pounds of fish per acre for anglers; farmers also used the ponds to water livestock, combat erosion, and control floodwaters. But these water supply tools should not be confused with the Savannah River valley’s enormous Hartwell or Clarks Hill reservoirs.⁴² These smaller impoundments and structures also revealed a growing competition for water among a variety of agricultural, industrial, and municipal water consumers vying for a common public resource. Farmers, factory managers, and city water managers clashed throughout the state as water supplies evaporated or dwindled. When farmers built ponds to water livestock upstream of factories, the reduced downstream flow compromised factory operations. In one county, an upstream farm pond so reduced downstream flows that five commercial enterprises were without water for nearly five months. In Newton County (Ga.), one upstream farm and irrigation pond consumed so much water that a downstream factory had to shut down because it could not produce enough energy in an onsite steam plant. And finally, some fish pond owners complained about the lack of dilution for pollution that washed downstream—from military installations, factories, homes, and other farms—into their ponds and killed fish or threatened livestock health.⁴³ Water problems in Georgia’s ponds in the 1950s were not limited to quantity; quality was an emerging and real concern.

The drought also affected urban and agricultural communities in the Savannah River valley and around Georgia. Newspapers published a grim report of urban drought in the summer and fall of 1954 before Governor Herman Talmadge’s prayer service in Macon. For example, the city of Washington’s water supply was so depleted that the city council considered “a complete shutdown of water service during certain hours of the day as a necessary conservation measure.” City ordinances also banned “unnecessary” water use activities such as car washing and lawn and garden watering and threatened $100 fines.⁴⁴ By the fall, the metro Atlanta community of East Point purchased and transferred 85 million gallons of water from Douglas County.⁴⁵

The drought was caused not only by a lack of rainfall but also by the region’s historical shift from the so-called Cotton Belt to a diversified Sun Belt. Southern farmers, of course, had always produced crops other than cotton, such as tobacco, vegetables, and fruit orchards. And boosters had been attempting to balance industry with agriculture since the nineteenth century. But Sun Belt economic choices accelerated and exacerbated a shift away from old monocultures such as cotton and the textile industry.

Livestock was one example of new growth in the post-1945 agricultural sector. In 1954, South Carolina agricultural officials thought the state’s 437,000 head of cattle consumed 8.5 million gallons of water per day, and this figure did not include other animals such as hogs and poultry. Water, as journalist W. D. Workman declared, was an irreplaceable “commodity” necessary for industrial, agricultural, and municipal development. But, water’s “vital importance” had been neglected by “layman and law-maker alike.” In South Carolina, like Georgia, the water problem was “not so much one of supply as of distribution and regulation.” In a refrain often repeated at the time and again in the future, Workman claimed that “the quantity of water which falls annually as rain” was enough to supply South Carolina’s “industrial, agricultural, commercial and residential potential.” However, increased demands for irrigation, energy production, and manufacturing; from dish- and clothes-washing machines; and for “modern plumbing facilities” all boosted water and energy consumption “terrifically.”⁴⁶ The Sun Belt South’s water problems had clearly reached a tipping point in the 1950s, but there was disagreement over the solutions and the utility of major reservoirs and small farm ponds.

Georgians directly confronted their water insecurity in the midst of the 1950s drought when the annual rainfall was twenty inches less than average. In late 1953, attendees of Georgia’s Association of Soil Conservation District Supervisors meeting discussed the state’s “water problems” and water law. Participants hatched an idea, and within months they assembled the Georgia Water Use and Conservation Committee to promote water “conservation” and “wise use” to protect the state’s future water supply. For clarification purposes, “conservation” in the 1950s equated with increased storage capacity, not necessarily a reduction in consumption. But the committee was honest about the water problem: Members did not blame the drought on “nature” and instead acknowledged the region’s historically “erratic” water supply and conflicting water usage as the cause.⁴⁷ In other words, the drought was the result of colliding environmental and cultural factors: a lack of rain and high demands on a limited supply.

To solve the state’s water woes, Water Use and Conservation Committee members recommended additional storage capacity, improved wastewater treatment, and possible changes to the state’s riparian water law. The committee—comprised of professors, lawyers, judges, business owners, extension agents, and federal employees—also suggested that the governor or the legislature create a water administration office that could conduct a statewide study to ascertain how much water the state had, withdrew from the ground, and consumed in different sectors. The committee was cognizant of the state’s diverse geography and that no single plan could solve all of the state’s water issues. They all agreed a plan was necessary for future economic growth and that the General Assembly needed to resolve the state’s water problems as soon as possible.⁴⁸

While the Georgia Water Use and Conservation Committee advocated for state action to protect Georgia’s future water supply, some members recommended and accepted any and all federal assistance. Columbus-based Jim Woodruff Sr. (1879–1963) was a radio station owner and chairman of the Georgia Waterways Commission. Woodruff, who has also been referred to as “the Father of the Chattahoochee,” wanted the state to “build multi-purpose dams on tributaries” of the major rivers where the Corps was already building large dams and reservoirs, including the Allatoona, Clarks Hill, Lanier, Seminole (Congress officially named the reservoir’s dam in Woodruff’s honor in 1957), and other projects throughout the Sun Belt.⁴⁹ Other participants were not as sanguine about additional massive dams and reservoirs as solutions to drought-proof the South.

Two alternatives to massive dams and reservoirs emerged with the backlash and represented methods to solve the Sun Belt’s water problem: irrigation and small watershed projects. First, Dr. George King, a University of Georgia irrigation engineer, corrected a misinformed historical comparison about the Southeast and the American West. “Until recently,” he explained to a Rome (Ga.) reporter in 1954, Georgians thought “irrigation was … something pertaining to the arid western states.” But after Georgia moved through “three drought years in succession” with a final year “of extreme severity,” state agriculturalists reconsidered the value of irrigation in the humid American South. King was really only rediscovering a problem already identified by a much older colleague. Georgia hydrologist Benjamin M. Hall noted in 1908, “In Georgia and other Southern and Eastern States the rainfall is much greater and more evenly distributed through the year, but, nevertheless, the lack of rain at the proper time often cuts a crop to one-half or one-third what it would have been.” Hall explained how “a small amount of water in storage and ready for use” would be beneficial for southern farmers but would also require a substantial investment that might not be as easily justified as irrigation was in the arid American West.⁵⁰ In the 1950s, King and others believed that Georgia’s water supply was “reasonably fair to copiously ample” south of a line drawn from the fall-line cities of Columbus through Macon to Augusta, and in parts of the Georgia mountains. The Piedmont area between the Coastal Plain and the Blue Ridge, however, faced serious challenges “obtaining enough water for general irrigation.” The state generally had plenty of water, but the water was not always in the right place at the right time.⁵¹ And King, like his predecessor Hall, understood the financial barriers to irrigation. So where would the new water supply infrastructure, water, and financing come from?

U.S. Geological Survey technician M. T. Thomson had an answer: Georgia’s Citizens and Southern bank began “financing irrigation installations” and urged “farmers to avail themselves” of the new revenue source and technological solution “where conditions justify.”⁵² Georgia’s farmers received loans from local banks for equipment, but federal tax dollars funneled through the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) bankrolled the state’s farm and fish ponds that filled irrigation lines. SCS engineers, who had been providing technical consultation for nearly two decades, helped build 1,289 Georgia farm ponds in 1953. To build a pond, farmers contacted the SCS for advice and, for a few hundred dollars, paid for an earth-moving equipment operator, the pipe, and the necessary material to build a small embankment dam. If the farmer declared the pond was intended to support livestock or to irrigate fields, the USDA’s Production Marketing Administration paid up to $300 (or about $2,500 in 2012 dollars) of the pond’s construction cost.⁵³ Additionally, farmers had access to free fish, including bass and sunfish, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Georgia State Game and Fish Commission to stock the ponds. Farmers could also obtain loans—facilitated through the USDA’s Farmers Home Administration—for diesel pumps, aboveground sectional irrigation piping, and wheeled pump-gun sprinklers to irrigate fields or more easily move water to farm animals. Farmers who utilized these federal tools irrigated between 15,000 and 25,000 acres of Georgia cropland by the mid-1950s.⁵⁴ Farm ponds, however, were pawns in a much larger game.

Letters from opponents to the Corps’ Hartwell dam and reservoir increasingly included the second alternative to solving the Sun Belt’s water problem highlighted by the 1950s drought. Some critics wondered why Congress continued to support the Corps’ colossal flood control plans over an emerging alternative.⁵⁵ Southerners had learned about the USDA’s emerging Small Watershed Program as the 1950s drought shifted from the middle of the country to the entire nation. In response to deteriorating national drought conditions, President Dwight Eisenhower approved expansion of multiple USDA financial farm assistance programs. The first initially provided drought relief in seventeen specific western states, and another made loans available to communities across the country.⁵⁶ Of greater significance to South Carolinians who were critical of Corps projects such as Hartwell, Eisenhower made permanent a USDA program that provided technical and financial assistance to local watershed groups who took “responsibility for initiating, carrying out, and sharing the costs of upstream watershed conservation and flood control.”⁵⁷ Known alternately as “The Small Watershed Program” or PL-566, its benefits included technical and financial support for flood control and soil conservation for agricultural projects. The USDA technically administered this federal “assistance” program, but local committees and districts were initially responsible for sharing some costs and managing the projects. Unlike the Corps’ reservoir schemes that required top-down acquisition of private land, which did involve unwilling sellers and condemnation proceedings, the USDA’s bottom-up farm pond incentives and Small Watershed Program catered to willing landowners and local community organizations interested in local control. The small watershed program was also cheaper and more democratic on paper, and this neopopulist and agrarian solution did offer flood control within specific watersheds.

The regional debate over who would build small or large dams was hardly confined to Sun Belt farmers during the Cold War. Luna Leopold and Thomas Maddock Jr. plunged into the national discussion in the early 1950s. Leopold, the son of conservationist and wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold, was a well-known geologist and engineer. He and Maddock (also an engineer) coauthored a book, The Flood Control Controversy (1954), to clarify what caused floods and how to best manage them. The two authors suggested that small watershed projects and land treatment methods (terracing, kudzu planting, etc.) would indeed manage flooding and soil in the headwaters, but these measures would do little to prevent flooding downstream, where large dams best alleviated flooding. Regardless of the technology, flood control did “not mean the elimination of floods,” in their professional opinion.⁵⁸ Big dam critics compared small watershed impoundments with the Corps’ big dams as though they were the same fruit, but Leopold and Maddox thought the options were more like apples and oranges. The Corps’ main-stem multiple-purpose reservoirs and the SCS’s small watershed projects were ultimately compatible, but they were not interchangeable. Despite this objective assessment, not all southerners were convinced, and many believed small watershed plans were economically and politically more valuable than multiple-purpose Corps dams. South Carolinians labeled the Corps’ projects as nothing but “big dam foolishness,” a characterization they picked up from a midwestern journalist who popularized opposition to the Corps’ general program of water management. Elmer Peterson published his book, Big Dam Foolishness, in the same year Leopold and Maddock published theirs. One particular USDA small watershed project in the Savannah River valley illustrates how the process worked and was infused with Peterson’s rhetoric.⁵⁹

The Twelve Mile Creek watershed project in Pickens County, South Carolina, located high up in the Savannah River’s watershed, contained 790 farms spread over 67,000 acres. According to one cheery Greenville newspaper writer, farmers and soil conservationists worked “to see how efficient a job man can do with Nature’s help in storing as much water as possible in the land where it falls and thereby reducing the flood flow with accompanying damage to land.” Journalist David Tillinghast toured the watershed, and he bristled at the cost of the Corps’ Hartwell dam and reservoir while enthusiastically trumpeting the benefits of the small watershed program. The Twelve Mile Creek project, which included small dams on headwater farms and land treatments in erosion-prone areas, was technically a much cheaper flood control option when compared with Hartwell.⁶⁰ Other editors followed Tillinghast’s lead in a statewide campaign. The Charleston News and Courier editor was more inclined to see federal money spent on multiple smaller watershed projects throughout the state. Smaller farm ponds in particular would provide a better “method of conserving water, and controlling floods at the source.” This type of watershed planning “could be adapted to the entire state with excellent results at half the cost of Hartwell Dam,” because the USDA’s small watershed project costs were “shared by local and federal sources.”⁶¹ Another columnist concluded that the cost-sharing alone made the small watershed program more democratic because farmers and conservation district members worked with federal engineers to complete projects and manage local water supplies.⁶² Local control—or a hyperfocused states’ rights attitude—soon infused the debate of water and power in the Savannah River valley.

Georgia’s and South Carolina’s 1950s drought not only highlighted competition among water users and potential alternatives to massive reservoirs; the drought also uncovered anxiety about water rights at a moment when states’ rights and civil rights agendas converged. One constituent explained to Senator Olin Johnston that the acquisition and management of the collar and buffer lands that surrounded Corps reservoirs represented a fundamental seizure of property: The “transfer of local ownership to centralized governmental ownership was Socialism to say the least.” Furthermore, “big Federal Dams take from the local people ownership and access to lakes or streams except as regulated by Washington.”⁶³ Washington bureaucrats, however, were not the only people responsible for determining water rights.

The Georgia Water Use and Conservation Committee recommended that the state legislature consider amending Georgia’s riparian legal tradition, a legal construction that entitles a property owner along a watercourse to use or control access to water so long as they do not diminish the overall flow or significantly impair downstream property owners’ access to water supplies. This tradition is more common in the eastern United States as compared with the western water allocation process of prior appropriation, whereby an individual holds access rights to water and can move large quantities over great distances.⁶⁴ The Georgia Water Use and Conservation Committee ultimately recommended that laws not be changed until the committee uncovered specific problems. However, the committee did argue that Georgia’s industrial development was handicapped by the “uncertainty as to the rights and duties of the users of Georgia’s water resources.” As such, “this uncertainty discourages investment in beneficial water use, and constitutes perhaps the greatest weakness in our law as it exists.”⁶⁵ The Georgia Water Use and Conservation Committee was not alone in articulating this aspect of the water problem. Whereas the USDA-funded farm ponds and small watershed projects vested water supply management responsibilities in adjacent landowners and local soil conservation district operatives, the Corps’ projects redrew property lines and thus transferred water supply management responsibilities to the federal government on behalf of the nation’s citizens.

As Corps and South Carolina officials debated the future of farm ponds, small watershed projects, and Hartwell’s reservoir in the midst of drought and power struggles, the Clarks Hill project moved into the operational phase. A serious topic emerged immediately that would affect all federal reservoirs: How would communities or industries access the physical water in the reservoir managed by the Corps? McCormick, South Carolina, was the first Savannah River valley community to broach the question. The Clarks Hill dam and reservoir was not originally authorized to provide a municipal water supply for any specific community in South Carolina or Georgia. McCormick officials convened a meeting in 1955 with Corps engineers to discuss the city’s proposal “to acquire water” from Clarks Hill after the reservoir was completed and operating, and because of a recent local water supply crisis. Corps staffers plus Senators Strom Thurmond and Olin Johnson ultimately helped McCormick leaders obtain specific legislation from Congress authorizing the Corps to divert 600 acre-feet (196 million gallons) per year from the reservoir to McCormick customers for an annual sum of $500.⁶⁶ City and local leaders appreciated the access to the reservoir but soon soured when they attempted to increase their water withdrawals and acquire surplus reservoir lands because the county wanted to woo industrial prospects; they entered a bureaucratic maze.

By the late 1950s, the Corps’ process for evaluating water supply requests had evolved according to the terms of the newly established Water Supply Act (1958). McCormick County executives and lawyers were irritated when they had to ask for permission a second time.⁶⁷ To be fair, McCormick County had sacrificed more than a fifth of the county’s taxable land for the Clarks Hill project, and many residents in the region were increasingly frustrated with the Corps’ management style.⁶⁸ Nonetheless, the Water Supply Act enabled the Corps to reallocate storage in federal reservoirs—like Clarks Hill—for uses that were not specifically included in a project’s authorization, such as domestic and industrial water supply. As Brigadier General William F. Cassidy explained to Senator Thurmond, after receipt of an application, Corps engineers would determine if water allocation would “‘seriously’ affect the purposes for which the project was authorized or would involve major structural or operational changes.” If a proposed request would ultimately alter operations at Clarks Hill, congressional approval was “required before a water supply agreement could be finalized.” And the final decision would hinge on the quantity of water removed and the quality of the water returned, as well as if the water would be returned to a different watershed.⁶⁹ In the opinion of the McCormick chamber of commerce, the federal government had to resolve what the chamber considered a federal reservoir water supply and water rights problem because county officials and boosters needed to convey to industrial reps searching for new sites that water was available from Clarks Hill and how much that water would cost.⁷⁰

As the Hartwell dam and reservoir project moved through the planning phases upstream on the Savannah River, South Carolina congressman William Jennings Bryan Dorn communicated with the Corps about the new reservoir’s water allocation process in light of the Clarks Hill and McCormick situation. Since Congress did not initially authorize Hartwell to provide a municipal water supply for any community in South Carolina or Georgia, Corps officers explained how the water allocation process worked, much as engineers had explained it to Senator Thurmond months earlier.⁷¹

In light of these water allocation negotiations and drought conditions, some South Carolinians reduced the issue to a question of states’ rights. One informed the McCormick chamber of commerce that federal control of water supply in federal reservoirs was symptomatic of “the gradual attrition of the individual states’ historical rights to control water resources.”⁷² Frank E. Harrison, McCormick County’s attorney, offered the same opinion in no uncertain terms to a group of Corps engineers. Harrison was particularly interested in the legal instrument that fundamentally altered water management and legal access to water in Clarks Hill, the planned Hartwell, and any future federal reservoir. Harrison wanted water management turned over to a “local water authority so that the common law rights as to water use can be restored to the people.” Harrison articulated how federal reservoirs, ringed by the buffer or collar of public land, fundamentally changed Sun Belt riparian rights. Communities and property owners lost access rights to water contained within federal reservoirs when the Corps acquired the shoreline. As such, Harrison and others respectfully argued that federal management of Clarks Hill’s water supply discouraged industry from locating in McCormick County because industry would have no direct access to the water supply without congressional approval. Harrison labeled the Corps “a military branch” that threatened to inflict “great damage to our country” by assuming “political power and economic control over large areas of our economy.”⁷³ To many southern Democrats frustrated by the New Deal’s disruption of race relations and labor norms but interested in water and energy projects, the Corps initially represented a better alternative to the TVA. By the late 1950s, however, even the Corps’ reputation was slipping, and the engineers appeared as intractable diplomats of federal domination.

Damage, of course, is relative. McCormick got the water it wanted from Clarks Hill, and as of 2013 two dozen other communities, utilities, industries, and golf courses also eventually obtained water from the Corps’ three major Savannah River valley reservoirs.⁷⁴ To some people, the Corps dominated the valley when it built the Hartwell dam, a 2,451-foot-long concrete and 10,000-foot-long earthen embankment structure. Behind the dam, a reservoir covered 56,000 acres. Clemson College, once concerned about the prospect of losing portions of the campus and stadium to rising reservoir waters, was protected behind a series of earthen levees built by the Corps. Furthermore, the Corps compensated Clemson College $2.2 million for nearly 8,000 acres of land and structures buried by Hartwell’s water, which represented a sliver of the more than 27,000 acres the USDA had deeded to Clemson for $1.00 in 1954 to help the school meet its land-grant mission.⁷⁵ But most property owners did not get the same treatment. The land required for the reservoir area necessitated the removal of 560 urban and rural families, “or a total population of 2,800” in a project area with a population of seventeen people per square mile. Not all landowners were excited to make way for the dam and reservoir project that required them to sell their property.⁷⁶ For example, one landowner was frustrated that he could not recoup the market value for the property he needed to sell. He pleaded with Senator Thurmond, “I am told the dam is to benefit this area, but why should I be pushed out of my home without being given full value, or enough to replace my home in the same general locality?” Harold Timms clearly understood the real estate dynamics at work, or at a minimum how they worked against him. Surrounding property values were destined to increase as more folks like him competed for remaining property or “due to higher value placed on resort type property.” Thurmond worked his magic by contacting the Corps’ real estate managers in an effort to ameliorate his constituents. Eventually, the Corps offered to acquire Timms’s property earlier so he might better plan his relocation while also allowing him to remain on the property during the project’s construction phase.⁷⁷ Not all situations had such happy endings.

Land condemnation cases blossomed during the Hartwell land acquisition process as other landowners fought to establish fair prices for their land. According to U.S. District Court case file transcripts, many property owners primarily struggled to establish fair per-acre values for land through condemnation proceedings, not unlike those who challenged federal real estate agents at Clarks Hill and other reservoir locations.⁷⁸ Based on selected transcripts, some of these farms were profitable for pulpwood, cattle, corn, and hay, and these property owners wanted to make sure they got fair value for what they considered good river bottomland. Condemnation proceedings favored white landowners who had the resources to fight in court, and people with good land had little incentive to sell. But property owners with poor land, or minority landowners with no resources to fight, took the money when offered.⁷⁹ Others held out until the bitter end, including seventy-eight-year-old Eliza Brock and her daughter, who leveled a shotgun at the workers who arrived to clear her land. Brock eventually settled out of court and accepted the Corps’ original offer for her property before moving.⁸⁰ As Clarks Hill and Hartwell land condemnation issues worked their way to resolution, constituent uproar did encourage Senators Olin Johnston and Strom Thurmond to repeatedly attempt to introduce legislation to reconvey to former owners the surplus lands the Corps no longer needed for project operations.⁸¹

But real estate issues alone would not hold up the dam’s construction, which the Corps had begun in 1955 and completed by 1962, when the reservoir filled and power generation commenced. The initial estimated cost of $68.4 million (in 1948 dollars, or more than $653 million in 2012 when adjusted for inflation) jumped to a final $89,240,000.⁸² But the Corps claimed in 1989 a return of more than $118.4 million from power sales to electrical cooperatives and other customers. While the development incited a conservative backlash and was not popular with all area residents, the Corps reported that nearly 750,000 people visited Hartwell in 1962. And in 2005, Hartwell Lake was among the top five most popular Corps projects in the nation, drawing in more than 10 million visitors. The boosters’ dream to build a recreational and leisure paradise while solving the Sun Belt’s water insecurity in the Savannah River valley appeared to have come true. The recent 2006–9 and 2011–12 droughts, however, combined with the Great Recession and volatile fuel prices, reduced the lake’s volume and communities’ ability to recover once-humming recreational, real estate, and associated roaring service economies of the past.⁸³ The valley’s hydraulic waterscape was clearly expansive, functional, and successful by some metrics.

The 1950s southern drought, not unlike the 2007 drought and Georgia governor Perdue’s prayer service, replayed the region’s old water and power challenges. For decades, southern boosters sold the New South and Sun Belt by offering up cheap and tractable labor, downplaying white supremacy, and showcasing bottomless stores of natural resources like water. Despite their best face, the boosters and politicians discovered that the region’s water problem—like the race and labor conflicts—persisted and was manufactured. After 1945, New Deal–inspired solutions for public water management encountered stiff resistance from Sun Belt conservatives and champions of private enterprise. As civil rights and states’ rights politics merged, conservative rights-based ideas influenced conversations about solutions for the Sun Belt’s water challenges in Georgia and South Carolina. The water rights issue was a real and legitimate concern for rural communities looking to compete in the growing commercial Sun Belt. Local leaders believed they were entitled to the Savannah River’s water that had always flowed past their communities long before the Corps—a representative of an unwanted expanding federal power in the 1950s—arrived on the scene. And neopopulist farmers who opted for farm ponds or to participate in small watershed projects contributed to limited water supply improvements on their own terms without ceding physical property to the federal government. In the end, no amount of political backlash or commercial success could ensure the region’s water supplies because social and economic decisions were not the only factors at play.

Droughts, not unlike floods, influenced the region’s economic development and the waterway’s environmental future. Massive Corps reservoirs, large utility reservoirs like Georgia Power’s, medium-sized SCS watershed projects, and thousands of small farm ponds served municipal, industrial, and agricultural constituents. The schemes produced electricity, delivered water to industry, reduced flooding down the valley, irrigated fields, became recreation destinations, and supported domestic animals, fish, and wildlife. Today, Georgia ranks fifth nationally—behind Texas, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma—for the total number of inventoried dams, with more than 4,600 structures. Collectively, all of these economic developments also fundamentally altered the region’s hydrologic cycle. Certainly the Savannah River’s watershed was never pristine or unaltered by those who depended on the basin for survival. However, the scale to which Georgia’s watersheds were altered after 1945, and particularly after the 1950s drought, had been unmatched. As one state employee concluded, “The measurements of low flows made during the drought of 1954 are important because on many small streams they are probably the only such measurements that will ever be made under predominantly natural flow conditions during an extreme drought. Since 1954, the flows of streams in Georgia have become more and more affected by manmade [sic] regulation from innumerable small ponds and by diversions for water supplies and irrigation.”⁸⁴

The Sun Belt’s elaborate hydraulic system of ponds, reservoirs, dams, canals, locks, levees, and channelized streams supported the region’s wide-ranging demographic and economic constituencies. But without any comprehensive management vision, this system would always be beholden to dramatic climatic, hydrologic, and political cycles. Environmental conditions—too much or not enough rain—had clearly visited the ever-growing region before and during Georgia governor Herman Talmadge’s time much as they would in the future during and after Governor Sonny Perdue’s.

As the Clarks Hill and Hartwell multiple-purpose projects demonstrated, not everyone supported these large water supply and infrastructure schemes. By the time the Corps and advocates for the valley’s next and final project moved forward, the social, political, and environmental landscape had shifted dramatically. The benefits, needs, and assumptions regarding what Sun Belt dams and reservoirs could deliver and for whom changed. The New Deal big dam consensus was crumbling, and vestiges of New South capitalism persisted. Innovative solutions for Sun Belt water problems emerged as the region’s energy and water plans encountered a new level of backlash.