“Darkness pressed against the car windows, deep and silent, and I couldn’t help but think I was seeing into the future when much of this land would be buried deep underwater,” Sheriff Will Alexander contemplated while responding to a Jocassee Valley bar brawl in the opening pages of Ron Rash’s novel One Foot in Eden. At the end of the story, Alexander’s bitter deputy drives out of the same valley “for the last time if I had any say in the matter. I wouldn’t be coming back here to fish or water ski or swim or anything like that. This wasn’t no place for people who had a home. This was a place for the lost.”1 Rash’s mountain drama was set in the South Carolina upstate after the Korean War, and the narrative stretches into the late 1960s, when “Carolina Power” finished acquiring mountain property, sawed timber from steep coves, and flooded the previously populated Jocassee Valley to complete a massive hydroelectric project. The narrative ranges immediately from emotional floods of posttraumatic stress and death to moments of lust and recovery. There was physical flooding too: autumn rain and a muddy creek surging into a Blue Ridge Mountain cabbage patch as a new artificial lake filled. These floods left trails of debris and spurred new discoveries as well as signaling the arrival of new social and environmental relationships in the Sun Belt’s hydraulic waterscape.
Like all excellent fiction, Rush’s novel relies on threads of fact. North Carolina–based Duke Power Company began acquiring property in the Savannah River valley’s mountainous and peopled headwaters in 1916. But it would be a long time before the trees and people were cleared from company land to make way for reservoirs in the South Carolina upstate. Between 1970 and 1990, Duke built three hydroelectric dams—and three nuclear reactors—including the Lake Jocassee project. Not unlike Georgia Power’s New South endeavor in the Tallulah and Tugaloo Valleys a few miles to the west, Duke’s Sun Belt schemes unfolded during a private phase of southern waterway development. Duke was not the only institution to bury parts of the Savannah River’s watershed deep under water.
As the North Carolina company initiated its own capital-intensive master plan, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers embarked on its third and final energy and water project down-valley at a place called Trotters Shoals between Hartwell (completed 1963) and Clarks Hill (1952). While independent and beholden to different constituencies, Duke and the Corps were also tied together; they both designed technological systems that complimented the existing energy and leisure waterscape in the same valley. And after 1960, both organizations reached the end of an era. When the Corps completed the Trotters Shoals dam (now known as Richard B. Russell dam) in 1983 and Duke finished the Bad Creek Reservoir (1991), there were no more worthy sites to build massive hydroelectric dams in the Savannah River valley, the American South, or the United States.2 The big dam era was over, and countryside conservationists and environmentalists could claim victories during a transition in energy regimes.
If the New South capitalists and liberal New Dealers generated energy, managed water quantity, and alleviated some valley residents’ fears about uncontrolled flooding or slow-moving drought, then both parties also invited a big dam backlash and encountered a new water problem in the Sun Belt’s waterways: poor water quality. When the Corps moved forward on the Trotters Shoals multiple-purpose dam and reservoir, it was compelled to address a new factor as the political landscape shifted under its boots and bulldozers. Before 1945, private and public engineers primarily approached water quantity as an environmental challenge when designing energy and water projects: How much water could operators store to generate electricity, facilitate navigation, or mitigate flooding? In other words, the traditional trio of benefits—hydroelectric generation, navigation, and flood control—promoted efficient water conservation and storage with only secondary concern for water quality. Corps engineers had previously worked with state and federal agencies in the Savannah River valley to manage fisheries and control malarial conditions at reservoir sites, but promoting recreation and public health was not the same as protecting clean water.3
The story of Trotters Shoals was different from that of Clarks Hill and Hartwell in two important ways. First, Congress dismantled the New Deal big dam consensus’s traditional trio of benefits. It officially authorized the Sun Belt scheme for power production and recreation and only incidentally for flood control or navigation. Second, the project was situated in the middle of the Savannah River valley’s Piedmont Province, and the shoals were among the last undammed twenty-eight miles of the Savannah River between the upper reaches of the Clarks Hill reservoir and the base of the Hartwell dam. Industrialists, conservationists, and environmentalists all weighed in on the function, benefits, and value of free-flowing water; they influenced the technocrats’ final execution of the Trotters Shoals dam along this unique stretch of river. Deliberation over the upper section of the Savannah River’s fate began as early as 1959, persisted until authorization in 1966, continued before construction began in 1974, and was far from finished when the dam began generating electricity in 1985. This lengthy twenty-five-year political drama involved powerful old and new actors who used equally archaic and novel arguments to lay claims on the Savannah River’s water and energy resources.
Environmental historians have long considered the post-1945 period as a turning point, whereby technical conservationists who promoted wise use of natural resources gave way to professional environmentalists who promoted beauty, health, and permanence. Domestic and urban expatriates who lived part time in the post-1945 countryside have been singled out as important contributors to the nascent environmental movement. Following this path of urban-to-rural migration, middle-class suburban homeowners have also been considered as the progenitors of modern environmentalism. In both interpretations, new arrivals in the countryside were motivated to protect their bucolic rural or new suburban landscapes from reckless and environmentally damaging development. As these part-time and suburban pioneers watched the destruction outside their plate-glass windows, they turned to local, state, and federal authorities to help alleviate the destructive cycles for which they were partly responsible. Most of these narratives involved liberal, white citizen activists in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast who leaned on scientific and political networks to resolve environmental problems, and these localized interest groups generated national environmental sensibilities and action. What about in the Southeast?
One limited regional comparison suggested that a general “weakness in environmental interest” existed in the Southeast. Samuel Hays attributed this sentiment “to the region’s agricultural roots, the persistence of rural attitudes and institutions, and the slower growth of urban populations with newer interests and values.” Only by the 1980s did the citizen engagement in environmental issues look like the engagement found in New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the Pacific Coast, but then only in the urban South.4 The events and actors involved in the Trotters Shoals and subsequent water and energy episodes demonstrate why conservationists and environmentalists in the Savannah River valley Sun Belt countryside did not wait until the 1970s or 1980s to begin balancing appropriate economic development, water quality, and environmental protection.
The New South and Sun Belt eras have a rich conservation and environmental political history. For example, Georgians led grassroots opposition to Georgia Power’s Tallulah Falls hydroelectric dam (1911).5 The interwar period was particularly fertile: Georgia volunteers organized one of dozens of Appalachian Trail clubs (1930) to complete the national trail, and the idea for the Wilderness Society was hatched outside Knoxville, Tennessee (1934).6 Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Herbert Stoddard, Archie Carr, and Marjorie Carr campaigned for, respectively, restoration of the Everglades, sustainable longleaf pine ecosystems, the conservation biology field, and the defeat of the Cross Florida Barge Canal.7 Also active during the interwar era, regionalists Rupert Vance, Howard W. Odum, and others repeatedly linked human behavior with environmental problems and solutions. Following in their father’s footsteps, ecologists Eugene P. and Howard T. Odum studied old agricultural fields and freshwater springs in the 1950s before helping translate ecosystem principals into a more easily consumed and international vernacular after 1970.8 These examples illustrate how countryside conservationists, outing clubs, academics, and scientists contributed to an environmental culture and legacy reaching back to the New South. An engaged Sun Belt citizenry continued this long legacy of environmental awareness and actively negotiated post-1945 commercial development and water problems in the shadows of dams inspired by New South capitalism and New Deal liberalism.
Sun Belt countryside conservation and environmentalism involved a wide range of participants concerned about the Savannah River valley’s beauty, communities, and commercial future. The people who participated in the Trotters Shoals battles between 1960 and 1970 lived in small towns, growing suburbs, and emerging urban centers, and they linked together the Sun Belt’s energy regimes, economic development, and environmental conditions. “Unlikely environmentalists” in Congress crafted federal water pollution control legislation in the 1950s while laying the foundation for the landmark Clean Water Act (1972). And sportsmen and recreationalists certainly leaned on Sun Belt state agencies to fight pollution in the 1940s and 1950s.9 However, the less-well-known participants—county lawyers, corporate executives, university employees, and journalists in the Savannah River valley—also weighed in on the value of dams, water pollution, and the Sun Belt’s future while congressional committees and staff built their own cases. The countryside conservationists and environmentalists repeatedly used water quality to justify a range of positions. They had an appetite for economic development, but not at the expense of southern waterways and certainly not at the expense of water quality in the massive federal reservoirs that were supposed to drive the Sun Belt’s growing recreational and service-based economy.
The Sun Belt’s environmental movement was diverse and was not solely focused on how best to manage the Savannah River valley’s water resources or how to protect wilderness. As historian Samuel Hays observed, “Internal Democratic party variations were especially noteworthy in the South, where rapid social change was creating new urban views within a more traditional rural climate.”10 While he placed this friction in the 1970s and afterward, the long sweep of Trotters Shoals’s history illustrates how the region’s conservationists, liberal environmentalists, and their conservative critics reflected internal debates within the Democratic Party over issues such as what constituted appropriate federal spending, the public good, and adequate regulation of private enterprise. Boosters, elected state and national representatives, agency bureaucrats, corporate executives, and citizens all spoke for the river because the water continued to represent potential energy for industrial production and offered new leisure environments. The Corps’ Clarks Hill reservoir and Hartwell dam also created a new river environment in between at Trotters Shoals. At this geographic location, along this last undammed stretch of the Savannah River’s Piedmont section, countryside conservationists and environmentalists challenged the Sun Belt economic juggernaut and powerful interests born of the New South and New Deal eras. The regional fight had implications for the rest of the country, the Democratic Party, and southern rivers.
As a New South institution, Duke Power Company maintained a vested interest in the Savannah River valley’s watershed and market territory. Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, the company had been responsible for coordinating the Catawba River valley’s water and energy since 1904 and also owned thousands of acres and a handful of waterpower sites in the Savannah River basin. Between the 1920s and 1960s, company real estate agents had amassed more than 100,000 acres along the Keowee River in South Carolina and thousands of acres downstream along the Savannah.11 The utility had been providing the South Carolina upstate with electricity since the early 1900s, linking Greenville’s and Spartanburg’s economies with Charlotte’s. Duke’s Sun Belt industrial and residential customer base continued to grow in South Carolina, but the company had no major electrical generation facilities in the valley or this portion of the company’s service area now known for its BMW, Michelin, and other transnational corporate citizens.12 Not unlike Georgia Power Company executives who challenged public power at Clarks Hill immediately after World War II (and lost), Duke Power executives had Sun Belt plans for their property and challenged public power directly at Trotters Shoals after 1960. Duke Power Company ultimately succeeded in capitalizing on its Keowee and Savannah River properties but not without a fight and compromise.
Duke Power Company, like other private utilities, considered the public power models exemplified by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Corps’ two new Savannah River valley projects as competitive threats to corporate monopoly. Since 1904, Duke’s executives had successfully engineered the Catawba River’s multiple dams to generate electricity, provide limited flood control relief, and supply water to municipalities and industries for free. Engineers also operated company reservoirs to eliminate malarial conditions, a forestry division managed more than 200,000 acres of working forest, and the public had access to ten company lakes by 1960.13 As Duke’s public relations executives liked to boast, the company built this elaborate hydraulic waterscape “without government subsidy,” and the public enjoyed many of its benefits “free of charge.”14 Today, Duke maintains eleven major dams and reservoirs along the 200-mile Catawba River (a major tributary in the Santee River basin). No federal agency maintains any facility on this river.15 Duke Power Company was compelled, however, in the 1960s to compromise with Congress and the Corps at a place called Middleton Shoals, a long series of shallow rocks below the Hartwell dam, to get what it wanted upstream of Hartwell in the Keowee and Jocassee River valleys.
Middleton Shoals became a flash point between private and public power advocates in the 1960s. Duke Power Company owned thousands of acres at Middleton Shoals, located eight miles downstream from the Hartwell dam and twenty miles upstream from Trotters Shoals in Anderson County (S.C.) and Elbert County (Ga.). As construction continued at the Hartwell dam, rumors of additional Savannah River valley dams generated both support and opposition to projects in the vicinity of Middleton and Trotters Shoals.16 Given their successful monopoly track record in the Catawba valley, Duke executives continued to publicly oppose any federal project that impinged upon private manipulation of the water and energy resources of the upper Savannah and Keowee Rivers. Numerous pro-Hartwell supporters believed utility executives and their surrogates were among the “many people using the Clemson issue” to stop the Hartwell dam project in the 1950s and 1960s.17
Duke executives had discussed building a coal-fired steam plant to generate electricity on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River for many years, and Middleton Shoals was the most promising site. Duke’s plans included a $289 million Appalachian-coal-fired thermoelectric steam plant capable of generating 700,000 kilowatts by 1965, with plans to expand to 2 million kilowatts.18 However, the energy company did not have the power to develop the river on its own. Because Middleton Shoals required a diversion dam that would stretch partway across the navigable Savannah River and redirect river water into the steam plant’s boilers and once-through cooling system, Duke Power needed congressional approval to proceed. The company had failed, despite support from South Carolina’s delegation, to obtain this right in 1962 because Georgia’s senator Richard B. Russell Jr. (D) blocked authorization in the Senate. Russell argued that Duke’s Middleton Shoals project conflicted with multiple theoretical federal dam and reservoir projects the Corps had recommended for that stretch of the Savannah River in the 1944 Flood Control Act. Given this resistance, Duke lobbied hard to win the favor of South Carolina’s congressman William Jennings Bryan Dorn (D) and Senators J. Strom Thurmond (D) and Olin D. Johnston (D).
Many South Carolinians generally favored the Duke facility at Middleton Shoals and were opposed to new federal water and energy schemes. River basin residents rightfully asked, Why build another dam and reservoir with the Corps’ preexisting Clarks Hill and Hartwell facilities already in place? The often-repeated reasons to support a private project included increased tax revenue, in this case $2 million per annum for Anderson County, South Carolina.19 The company also claimed the fully completed coal plant would generate more than $15 million annually in local, state, and federal taxes. But what no elected official wanted to admit, and what Duke president William B. McGuire (1910–2012; Duke employee 1933–71) divulged in a private meeting, was that Middleton Shoals would operate “tax free for the first three years.” Furthermore, McGuire acknowledged that “it would be a long time before they would actually put the ultimate capacity of this plant into operation,” and thus tax payments would remain low until Duke operated the plant at full capacity.20 Most South Carolinians—influenced by the media campaigns of Duke Power and other industrial advocates—supported private industry’s agenda. Some Georgians, along with their cross-river neighbors, also supported Duke’s Middleton Shoals project because they assumed that free-market principles and free enterprise would enlarge the local tax rolls and spur job creation on both sides of the Savannah. Many of these same people were probably not aware that their states were subsidizing industrial development by offering liberal tax incentives to create a friendly business environment for companies like Duke Power that were always quick to champion the invisible hand.
Duke enjoyed great support throughout South Carolina and in Georgia. According to opponents of federal development on the Savannah River, additional publicly financed dams and reservoirs wasted taxpayer dollars, eliminated potential industrial sites, and introduced unequal competition in the energy sector. Governor Ernest F. Hollings was one of successive South Carolina governors who opposed additional federal projects, and his “strenuous opposition” in 1960 led the Corps to scrap their initial plans to build two dams on this stretch of the Savannah River.21 The editors of the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, an institution that had enthusiastically supported the older Clarks Hill and Hartwell programs in the 1940s and 1950s, quickly switched sides and favored Duke’s private investment goals.22 Given these cheerleaders and formal positions, Duke’s Middleton Shoals project appeared well supported and pragmatic. However, the Corps’ dam projects were not dead yet.
Not to be outdone by the South Carolina political establishment or Duke Power Company, Augusta’s chamber of commerce executive Lester Moody and former Georgia state senator Peyton Hawes capitalized on Senator Richard B. Russell’s leadership to obtain a restudy of the Savannah River between the Clarks Hill and Hartwell dams. Hawes (1903–90) was a longtime political operative from Elbert County who served on the state supreme court and, in the 1950s, as chair of the Georgia chamber of commerce. After the prompt restudy, Corps investigators recommended “that the United States construct the Trotters Shoals Dam and Reservoir with a hydroelectric power installation.”23 But there was a catch: The height of the Trotters Shoals dam threatened to flood part of Duke Power Company’s Middleton Shoals steam plant site as well as other proposed industrial sites on the Savannah’s remaining undammed twenty-mile stretch of Piedmont river. The Corps’ restudy sparked an outcry from South Carolinians.
The Corps’ Trotters Shoals and Duke’s Middleton Shoals, however, were not exclusive projects, according to many professionals. This fact made Duke’s drive to terminate Trotters Shoals all the more difficult. For the next three years, Duke Power Company and other stakeholders in South Carolina and Georgia debated the merits and benefits of public energy at Trotters Shoals and corporate energy at Middleton Shoals. When Corps engineers ultimately released their plans for Trotters Shoals in 1962, engineers dismantled the old New Deal big dam consensus’s trio of benefits connected to every preceding multiple-purpose scheme.24 The Corps did not recommend Trotters Shoals as a flood control or navigation structure; Hartwell upstream and Clarks Hill downstream provided those benefits. Instead, Corps technocrats sold Trotters Shoals’s public energy and recreation benefits. As such, Trotters Shoals remained a water-quantity project that would soon become entangled with notoriously dirty pulp and paper mills.
In the late 1950s, South Carolina congressman William J. B. Dorn (D) launched an economic development mission to sell the Savannah River valley to the pulp and paper industry. Dorn never tired in his quest to bring jobs to his upstate South Carolina district and to increase tax revenues to benefit community businesses, schools, and roads. And he never stopped reminding people that the pulp and paper industry had a future in the region because cotton farmers had “gone to pine trees and cattle.”25 As early as 1956, Dorn arranged a tour for executives from the Mead Corporation, based in Dayton, Ohio; Duke Power; and South Carolina’s economic development team, all in an attempt to hook Mead and land a new industrial plant.26 Mead had already purchased property in the valley, and after the Dorn tour in 1956, the company announced plans to build a pulp and paper mill in South Carolina at the confluence of the Rocky River and the Savannah River between the Hartwell dam and the upper reaches of Clarks Hill reservoir.27 Dorn was pleased with the results of his industrial tour.
The Mead Corporation’s plans to harvest valley timber and manufacture paper products along the Savannah River also complimented Duke Power’s plans for a steam plant at nearby Middleton Shoals. Mead had purchased Savannah River valley property and timber from Duke and was positioned to purchase Duke’s electricity to energize the new mill. But Mead executives also felt threatened like Duke, since the Corps’ Trotters Shoals reservoir was set to flood some company assets, including one of Mead’s proposed mill sites. Duke’s and Mead’s objective—to develop a coal plant and a mill along the last undammed section of the Savannah River in the Piedmont—initially made Dorn’s and other boosters’ opposition to the Corps’ Trotters Shoals water and energy scheme easier. However, this effort to bring industry to this stretch of the Savannah River sparked more backlash.
Georgia politicians and boosters were dubious of Duke’s and Mead’s intentions. Georgia Democrats were also incredibly successful and almost unmatched in landing federal dams. Between 1950 and 1963, the Corps completed seven hydroelectric, flood, and navigation projects along Georgia waterways.28 This put the South Carolinians at a disadvantage, but Dorn, a reluctant public power supporter, eventually brokered a compromise with Georgia’s Senator Russell and Congressman Phil Landrum (D). For Georgians, giving up on the Corps’ Trotters Shoals and supporting Duke’s Middleton Shoals was a losing proposition, since the latter project would really benefit only South Carolinians. As one astute South Carolina attorney observed, “A large number of people have asked me why the people of Georgia are so whole heartedly” in support of Trotters Shoals and opposed to Duke’s Middleton Shoals project. “The obvious answer is that Duke Power Company has no influence in the State of Georgia.”29 Furthermore, Georgia Power Company and Georgia’s pulp and paper industry may have weighed in on this issue only in private, since the companies had little incentive to publicly support competitors in adjacent market territories. But it should also be clear that many Georgians supported Trotters Shoals on one condition. Newspaper editors, business interests, and Georgia governor Carl Saunders explained that they would prefer private development and industry in the Savannah River valley. But if companies like Mead could not make firm commitments, Georgians vowed to endorse Trotters Shoals.30 Mead’s and Duke’s wavering in the Savannah River valley eventually tipped the scales in favor of Trotters Shoals, Georgia, and the Corps.
Breaking the impasse over the Middleton Shoals coal burner and Trotters Shoals hydroelectric dam ultimately involved another water and energy site Duke coveted in the upper Savannah River valley, on the Keowee River. In 1965, Duke Power Company president William B. McGuire announced plans to build a $700 million Keowee-Toxaway hydroelectric and thermoelectric steam plant complex. Congressman Dorn enthusiastically pronounced the Oconee and Pickens County project “fantastic and almost incomprehensible.”31 As reported in local papers, the company claimed the Middleton Shoals coal plant was still on the table while also promising to build two new hydroelectric dams to create Lakes Jocassee and Keowee in addition to three steam plants on Lake Keowee’s new shoreline. This was a strange twist for Duke executives to discuss new hydroelectric dams after spending five years criticizing the Corps’ Hartwell and Trotters Shoals hydroelectric facilities on economic grounds or because hydro facilities were inefficient compared with steam facilities. (See Chapter 5.) But according to news reports, “The Duke president said his company needed hydro plants for use in peak hours and could use steam plants” throughout the rest of the day to maintain base loads (i.e., “peak hours” would include morning/evening or the hottest/coldest part of the day, when consumer demand can spike above the “base load”).32 When the company formally submitted an application to the Federal Power Commission (FPC) for a license to build the energy complex, Duke alluded to the possibility that future steam generation might be produced by nuclear fission reactions instead of pulverized black coal.33 Sure enough, one year later, Duke submitted a formal application to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to build three nuclear reactors, which now comprise the Oconee Nuclear Station. As the company began to move the Keowee-Toxaway hydronuclear energy complex project through the FPC and AEC licensing processes, electrical cooperatives established during the New Deal objected to further privatization of the Savannah River valley’s energy and water.
Congressman Dorn broke the impasse. Under his stewardship, the electrical co-ops relented because Duke Power Company agreed not to oppose the Corps’ Trotters Shoals dam. When Dorn announced the “Trotters Shoals, Middleton Shoals, and Keowee-Toxaway” compromise terms in July 1966, he pledged to support authorization for Duke’s Middleton Shoals diversion dam, Duke’s Keowee-Toxaway project in Oconee and Pickens County (S.C.), and the Corps’ Trotters Shoals development. When Dorn was done, after fighting for nearly a decade, he could claim, “This entire development, both Federal and private, will be second to none in the world.”34 On one level the compromise was novel and created a climate for public and private power to co-develop the Savannah River’s hydraulic waterscape. Congress soon authorized $84.9 million for Trotters Shoals in the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1966 and approved Duke’s Middleton Shoals diversion dam. Then the FPC approved Duke’s Keowee-Toxaway application.35 After 1966, the Savannah River valley’s comprehensive development plan of mixed corporate and federal institutions looked complete, and the Sun Belt’s commercial future looked bright.
The compromise, however, did not address a nagging water problem that had emerged in the years leading up to the 1966 agreement: water quality. As with previous federal water and energy projects in the Savannah River valley, boosters formed a committee—the Trotters Shoals Steering Committee—to promote the dam and lake. Georgia’s Peyton Hawes, picking up where Augusta’s Lester Moody left off, chaired the new committee and tackled water pollution head-on. He explained that Trotters Shoals, like the other two Savannah River dams, was designed to provide cost-effective peak electricity, water for municipal and industrial use, recreational opportunities, and a stimulus for economic development. Another anticipated benefit included projected increases in land values and the use of lakefront property for recreation and vacation homes. Hawes also proclaimed that the industrial sites along the free-flowing Savannah River between Clarks Hill reservoir and Hartwell dam were inappropriate for most industrial companies such as Mead.
Peyton Hawes explained in 1963 that chemical and pulp paper mills required clean water for production and fast-moving water for disposal and assimilation. As such, “Industries needing free flowing water” were often “polluting industries.” This kind of industrial development, Hawes argued, would turn the slow-flowing Savannah River below the Hartwell dam and the Clarks Hill reservoir into cesspools. And because Hawes and his allies believed the region was “one of the few areas in the nation where clean, fresh water is still available in substantial supply,” they wanted to “develop and conserve these great resources expeditiously and judiciously.”36 In their opinion, the solution to avoiding pollution and to saving this section of the Savannah from industrial effluent was not to harden effluent regulations or the enforcement apparatus. Instead, Hawes wanted to eliminate industrial sites by transforming the river into a clean water pool between two existing reservoirs.
Water pollution in the Savannah River valley was not necessarily a new problem. Water quality had long been on the minds of Savannah River valley residents. Since the nineteenth century, fishermen had lamented a decline in migratory fish, and Corps engineers observed sediment deposits throughout the upper and middle sections of the river. Lower Savannah River valley residents had also connected water pollution from Savannah, Georgia, with the pulp and paper industry in the 1930s.37 In the 1940s, U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists again linked soil-filled rivers with lack-luster Savannah River fisheries, and the Public Health Service provided the Corps with malarial control suggestions for the Clarks Hill project.38 Municipal and industrial pollution was not yet a serious concern in the upper Savannah River valley for these engineers, biologists, and public health officials. Water quality, as fishermen and professionals illustrated at the time, had more to do with sediment and muddy waters than with untreated municipal and industrial wastes. Put another way, water pollution initially resulted from a long legacy of soil management choices made by Savannah River valley farmers or forestry managers.
By the 1940s, serious water pollution began migrating upstream in southern watersheds like the Savannah and Tennessee systems and was no longer simply a land management problem.39 Beginning in the late 1930s, TVA technicians discovered that the majority of the upper Tennessee River valley’s water pollution originated from textile, cellulose, and paper manufacturing operations located upstream of Knoxville in the Holston, French Broad, and Pigeon Rivers that stretched into southwestern Virginia and western North Carolina. Some of these river stretches were, according to Daniel Schaffer, “so polluted that they were unsuitable for industries requiring clean water, could not be used for swimming,” and had reduced former trout streams to carp waters. By 1945, untreated industrial and municipal waste flowed downstream, entered TVA reservoirs, and compelled officials to act. However, the TVA’s board of directors was hamstrung by a hostile anti-TVA and conservative political climate that scrutinized any attempts to enlarge the institution’s 1933 legislative mandate. The New Deal institution was powerless to combat Sun Belt pollution, since TVA regulations could not supersede state water quality regulations. Agency engineers and consultants did provide data and technical details to state authorities, and they left enforcement to state agents with authority to negotiate with municipal and industrial polluters.40 The Savannah River was an interstate river like the Tennessee, but valley residents did not have a TVA-like actor that could work with Georgia and South Carolina to assess and manage water pollution. The Corps was an unlikely enforcer.
Corps engineers were aware in the 1950s that communities and industries in the Trotters Shoals reservoir area dumped untreated and partially treated waste into the Savannah River. As an institution, the Corps was not responsible for enforcing the Federal Pollution Control Act (1956), but Corps engineers were not oblivious to water pollution. In the Corps’ Savannah River, Georgia Review Report, staff noted that while the dumping of wastes was “currently permitted or tolerated” in the proposed reservoir’s footprint, discharges in reservoirs elsewhere in the county resulted in public outcry, requests for federal assistance to build treatment plants, and other “corrective measures” that might bring too much attention to industrial operations.41 To avoid this, the Corps recommended that state and local agencies take the lead responsibility on water cleanup or face federal enforcement action. Under the terms of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the first step in enforcement involved a “conference phase” where state and local authorities attempted to resolve water pollution problems. If state and local authorities could not resolve the problem, the U.S. surgeon general (Public Health Service) could take the alleged polluter to court. This happened only once before 1966.42
The pollution issue helped build support for Trotters Shoals. South Carolina countryside conservationists rallied behind Trotters Shoals, and they cited the potential for industrial pollution as the single most important reason to support the federal dam and reservoir project. As early as 1962, one group of South Carolina citizens rejected Mead’s plans for a pulp and paper mill on the Savannah River. Attorney James Nickles wrote to Georgia’s Senator Russell and stated, “The people of Abbeville County are not the least interested in” Mead’s mill because the company planned to “pour their poison chemicals” and industrial wastes directly into the Savannah River.43 The Corps regulated the Savannah River’s flow between the Hartwell dam and Clarks Hill reservoir, and Nickles’s allies argued that Mead’s proposed location was unacceptable “because there is no CONTINUOUS flow of water in the Savannah” due to the Hartwell dam’s regulation of the river.44 Like Georgia’s Peyton Hawes, these South Carolina countryside conservationists cited the potential for water pollution as a justification to dam the Savannah River and build a new reservoir that could fill with high-quality clean water. The Corps’ Trotters Shoals project, however, was still not a guaranteed project after Congress approved the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1966 and authorized the $84.9 million Trotters Shoals project. In the legislative and budgetary process, authorization to proceed is never the same as appropriation of the required monies; funding would come in fits and starts until the project was operational in the 1980s. The boosters, politicians, and citizens who defended Trotters Shoals and rejected polluting industries for twenty years faced a new issue after the private-versus-public-energy, jobs-and-free enterprise, and pollution challenges.
Sun Belt environmentalists rallied in the 1970s. The individuals who opposed Trotters Shoals on new environmental grounds differed slightly from the countryside conservationists. Local citizens plus university professors, state agency employees, and representatives from national conservation and environmental organizations raised a new tool in the name of Sun Belt environmental health and challenged previously powerful actors.45
A new piece of federal legislation invited public participation in massive federal public works projects. Congress—with a Democratic majority in the House and Senate—passed, and President Richard Nixon (R) signed into law, the National Environmental Policy Act (1969) three years after Congress authorized Trotters Shoals. NEPA, as the act was known, created the Council on Environmental Quality to set the nation’s environmental policy shortly before Nixon crafted additional legislation to form the Environmental Protection Agency in late 1970 to manage both the Council on Environmental Quality’s and NEPA’s mandates. NEPA, according to supporters and critics, threw a wrench into the gears of major federal public works projects across the country because the new policy required a pre-construction environmental assessment or environmental impact statement (EIS) that evaluated potential environmental effects and considered the advantages of alternatives, including the benefits of abandoning the given project. The assessment process also opened a federal agency’s entire construction process to two rounds of review. The first round was an internal review to resolve interagency quarrels. For example, federal agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Service could weigh in on how a Corps project might impact the agency’s mandate to protect fish and wildlife. The second round was an external evaluation that provided citizens with access to the same information used by agencies to complete a project’s initial assessment. The public could also submit formal responses that had to be included in the public record, and if any aspect of an assessment was incomplete, they could sue the agency.46NEPA established a project review process that forced the Corps to consider the environmental effects of their projects “in unprecedented detail.” Environmental historian Jeffrey Stine’s observation comes in the context of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, a massive navigation project that linked the Gulf of Mexico with the Tennessee River via Alabama and eastern Mississippi. The Tenn-Tom was one of the Corps’ first major water projects “built entirely under the auspices of NEPA.”47 Trotters Shoals dam and reservoir was also subject to the EIS process not only once but multiple times.
Corps engineers began building Trotters Shoals after 1970, so Trotters was the Corps’ first Savannah River valley project subject to compliance with NEPA. Trotters’s first EIS laid bare the Sun Belt’s water-quality challenges. Corps engineers defended the massive Trotters Shoals dam and reservoir project in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement while simultaneously arguing that the project would produce complicated new environmental conditions. Artificial reservoirs are, after all, convoluted environments. These working reservoirs do indeed create good fishery habitat and a new environment for anglers, pleasure boaters, campers, swimmers, and second-home owners to appreciate. But juggling the services—hydroelectric generation, flood control, and recreation—of the dams and lakes also hindered the reservoirs’ ecological functions. The new reservoir environment of the artificial lakes required technological solutions beyond hatchery science to maintain new sport fisheries, and one of the most significant problems was insufficient oxygen for aquatic organisms. Large artificial southeastern reservoirs behave differently from natural lakes in colder regions. Whereas some lakes and reservoirs experience a circulating inversion of hot and cold water twice a year (particularly lakes that have freeze-thaw cycles), southeastern reservoirs typically experience a single seasonal inversion. This single inversion, when combined with manipulated water levels and intensive solar heat gain, leave southern reservoirs oxygen-poor. For example, the Savannah River’s reservoirs “stratify” during the summer and fall, and cold water sinks to the bottom and warm water rises. By late fall and early winter, an inversion takes place that helps mix the water more completely. But before this mixing, water discharged from the dams—typically from the deepest portion of a reservoir near the dam—in the summer season has very little dissolved oxygen. The EIS authors expressed concern that low dissolved oxygen levels and cold water released from Trotters Shoals directly into Clarks Hill would further reduce dissolved oxygen, water temperatures, and water quality in the latter reservoir.48
Fishery health and oxygen levels were also related to the Sun Belt’s commercial explosion. The Trotters Shoals Draft Environmental Impact Statement observed that the region’s primary industrial sector—the textile industry—utilized significant “quantities of water for manufacturing and processing.” The Corps identified eleven textile mills in Georgia and nine in South Carolina that discharged industrial wastes into water bodies that would ultimately affect Trotters Shoals’s reservoir water quality. Industry was not the only pollution culprit: Seven municipalities also discharged municipal wastes into tributaries that would feed Trotters Shoals’s reservoir. The Trotters Shoals dam and reservoir moved ahead, but water quality, pumped storage, dredging, and earthquake engineering issues generated subsequent EIS reviews.49
Boosters tried to fight back after facing the new environmentalists and multiple EIS reviews that threatened to bring the Trotters Shoals dam and reservoir project to a halt. The first booster to do so was James R. Young. When the dam was threatened by another EIS review related to a proposed Savannah National Recreation Area in 1971, Young, an associate editor of the Elberton (Ga.) Star, communicated with an ally about an upcoming public meeting. Young did not “want the ecology opposition to arrive with any scheme to make an adverse issue of Trotters Shoals.” If other topics arose, such as pollution, commentators would be told to hold those subjects for a “subsequent hearing.”50 Young was not the only Savannah River valley resident who was put off by the new Trotters Shoals opposition community. Even old hands like Congressman William J. B. Dorn (D) were unsure of Trotters Shoals’s future, and he encouraged his allies to “keep fighting or this ‘far left’ crowd will kill everything.”51 Finally, Robert L. Williford, like the other old-school Trotters Shoals supporters, was equally concerned about the emerging and powerful environmentalists’ voices that threatened his water and energy project as well as local authority. In late 1971, the Elberton Star editor expressed frustration over the Georgia Press Institute convention’s organizational decision to allot two hours to environmental issues as requested by the Georgia Conservancy, an Atlanta-based nonprofit founded in 1967 (see Chapter 7). Williford branded the Georgia Conservancy “a highly controversial group of environmentalists who are fighting the activities of the US Corps of Engineers, the Soil Conservation Service and other agencies engaged in such projects as stream improvement, flood control, harbor improvement, snagging operations, watershed conservation and mosquito control.” As a newspaper man and Trotters Shoals supporter to the core, Williford “strongly” opposed the conservation agenda item, and he requested that the time slot be reassigned to “something of more value and interest to newspaper publishers.” Clearly frustrated, Williford called the Georgia Conservancy “a special interest group which came requesting time to promote their beliefs and programs.” In exaggeration mode, he did not think “we should provide a forum for such groups, and certainly not in response to their request,” because if the Georgia Conservancy got airtime, “Why not the Black Panthers, religious groups, or one of the thousands of others who have some ‘special kick’ going?” Williford was not the first person to associate the Sun Belt’s environmental concerns with civil rights problems. Countryside conservationists and environmentalists who rallied around water quality were only the latest manifestation of opposition to Corps water and energy projects.52
Frank Harrison was among a small group of regular writers to South Carolina’s congressional delegation who linked the Savannah River’s water and energy history to the nation’s civil rights conflict and postwar rights-based liberalism beginning in the 1950s. As a concerned constituent, Harrison was not alone in his critique of the Corps’ Hartwell and Trotters Shoals projects. Unlike some of his fellow writers who were prone to hyperbole, Harrison pointed logically to a new conflation of “rights” that eventually converged more concretely downstream at Trotters Shoals. First and foremost, Harrison opposed the Hartwell project because the economics did not make sense. The Corps wanted to build a taxpayer-funded and tax-exempt dam that produced electricity less efficiently than thermoelectric coal-fired steam plants as advertised by Duke Power Company. His protest bubbled from a collection of circumstances including his observation of the Corps’ Clarks Hill project land condemnation and purchase process as well as the Corps’ acquisition of water rights. Harrison had been personally involved in McCormick County’s (S.C.) fight for congressional authorization to legally draw water from Clarks Hill, and while ultimately successful, this experience only added to his sense that the federal government was usurping states’ and local municipalities’ water rights.53
As Harrison succinctly summed up his concerns, “The taking of huge areas of private property by the Federal Government is becoming increasingly dangerous especially in view of the recent Supreme Court decision and other actions of the administration in attempting to continue the centralizing of power in the Federal Government.” Harrison was referring to nothing other than the Supreme Court’s May 17, 1954, Brown v. Board of Education ruling that declared “separate but equal” facilities unconstitutional. Harrison thought he saw the writing on the wall and connected states’ rights, water rights, and civil rights: “The widespread increase of federal public use and recreation areas may result in serious political repercussions in this state and other states because these areas may become areas which cannot be used to any extent by members of the white race.”54 Harrison was not alone. For example, when the Georgia Farm Bureau assembled to set the 1955 state farm lobby’s agenda, they “expected to make a stand on four major issues—water resources, segregation, rural electric and telephone appropriations, and price supports on basic commodities,” according to one journalist. Farmers who had suffered through the 1954 drought were interested in “legislation for establishment of water rights” because existing law was unclear, out of date, and often pitted municipal, industrial, and agricultural users against one another.55 By the late 1950s, Georgians and South Carolinians saw states’, civil, and water “rights” converging across the Sun Belt’s hydraulic waterscape.
Water projects are an unlikely place to look for this conflation of rights and were far removed from the suburbs of Charlotte (N.C.), Atlanta (Ga.), and Orange County (Calif.), where others have found the roots of the New Right and modern conservatism.56 In the southern countryside, communities considered access to the Savannah River’s water as a critical component to their continually diversifying and growing commercial Sun Belt economy. Water politics was another site to locate social power, and the Savannah River valley’s water remained highly contested by those who supported federal energy projects and those who advocated for corporations. According to critics, the Corps’ public water and energy schemes made water access more difficult and directly challenged states’ rights and strangled local economic development. The Brown decision only exacerbated the southern water and power dynamic.
By the 1960s, southerners’ frustration with federal water politics threatened an already fragile Democratic Party. Constituent disappointment with Clarks Hill and reluctance with Hartwell morphed into a full-bore big dam backlash against the Trotters Shoals water and energy program. When the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations began to address civil rights between 1960 and 1965, some southern Democrats became confused about the party’s direction. As one letter to Senator Olin Johnston asked, “How can you kick Kennedys [sic] civil rights Bill and at the same time condone this power take over by the federal government” at Trotters Shoals? Another asked him to “oppose the so-called ‘public-accommodations’ legislation proposed by the Kennedy family,” while also asking him to reconsider his support for Trotters Shoals.57 While Johnston supported Trotters Shoals, his partner in the Senate, Strom Thurmond, did not. Trotters Shoals was the first of the Corps’ three Savannah River valley dams that Thurmond did not back, and he bolted the Democratic Party in favor of a Republican affiliation in 1964 because of the Democrats’ direction over civil rights.
Trotters Shoals’s opponents connected civil rights with Sun Belt water and energy projects. One letter commended Senator Olin D. Johnston on his decision not “to support the President on the Civil Rights package legislation demanded of Congress.” In the author’s opinion, the senator’s action proved “to me that you are not willing to submit to the influence of the mob, and of the Kennedy Dynasty. You, as a representative of the South and of the state of South Carolina, must help curb the growing power of the ‘liberals’ and help restore the system of governmental checks and balances.” South Carolinians, like Frank Harrison from years earlier, understood that if federal water and energy projects included recreation areas, then carefree recreation for whites would be impossible. Any public recreation areas at Trotters Shoals built with public funds or “any thing that has Federal money in it will have to be open to all races.”58
The public debate over Trotters Shoals incorporated New Right rhetoric and antiliberal arguments found in other parts of the United States in the 1960s. Clarks Hill, Hartwell, and Trotters Shoals opponents grafted water projects into a discourse of states’, civil, and water rights in the post-1945 period. Conservative constituents from small towns and rural counties used language that included throwbacks to the past while wrestling with the Sun Belt’s long-chronicled race and water conflicts. These responses from the urban and rural Southeast trumpeted the merits of privatization and free enterprise while criticizing public energy projects and federal intrusion into the nation’s economy; they also conveniently ignored the local incentives used to lure industry to the region. Finally, the conservatism stirred by water and energy projects in the Savannah River valley paralleled the thoughts and activities of grassroots activists sitting at kitchen tables who organized around taxes, zoning, and busing in the other parts of the country. The conservative letter writers who shared their ideas about Trotters Shoals and environmental politics identified entitlements—to local self-determination, to peaceful segregated recreation, or access to the water supply—as fundamental rights.
Trotters Shoals spanned a critical era in American environmental and Sun Belt history. Countryside conservationists and environmentalists faced formidable challenges in the post-1945 period. They were not alone. New South capitalists and liberal New Dealers had promoted dams as solutions for the region’s water, energy, and economic problems; they repeatedly met opposition. Whereas countryside conservationists concerned about water supply and quality helped put Trotters Shoals on the map, post-1970s environmentalists threatened to erase it to save an undammed stretch of river in favor of a National Recreation Area. When Trotters Shoals’s proponents packaged the project in the 1960s, they never could have imagined that a local, Savannah River project would become a national symbol.
Eventually, Corps engineers transformed the Savannah River’s Piedmont between the Hartwell dam and Clarks Hill reservoir. Corps project managers let the first construction contract in 1974 as they continued to purchase land for the project area from at least sixty families and property holders, including twenty-five farms.59 Trotters Shoals dam was renamed the Richard B. Russell Jr. Dam shortly after Russell died in 1971 to commemorate the senator and to make it very difficult for the congressional Public Works Committee to turn down future appropriations for a project named for one of the Senate’s most senior members.60 The Corps constructed a series of earthen and concrete dams stretching 6,000 feet across the Savannah River, and when water from the 26,000-acre reservoir first flowed through the dam’s four generators in January 1985, a nearly 100-year quest to maximize public benefits of the Savannah River basin neared completion.61 Today the Corps operates this hydroelectric dam—one of the largest east of the Mississippi River—only as a peak-power producer (with pump storage capability) during periods of high demand and does not operate it continuously.62
The Savannah National Recreation Area that would have preserved a section of free-flowing river in the Piedmont never materialized. When the Corps completed Trotters Shoals dam, it buried one of the last stretches of Savannah River shoals. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, Georgia countryside conservationists and environmentalists did win concessions for free-flowing rivers. Advocates fought for the Georgia Scenic Rivers Act of 1969 that named four rivers to a state scenic river system and recommended further study of others, and the legislation was modeled after the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968).63 The Georgia act prohibited dams, reservoirs, diversions, and other structural changes on the Jacks, Conasauga, Chattooga, and Ebenezer Rivers and was designed to help expedite rivers named at the state level more quickly through the national wild and scenic designation process. Another important Georgia river was missing from this list. The Flint River shared similarities with the Savannah River, namely, the Corps had plans to build more multiple-purpose dams, including one at Sprewell Bluff in the Piedmont. But the Sprewell Bluff and other dams never grew from the Flint River’s Pine Mountain bedrock. One Georgia governor’s big dam backlash helped make that history.
As Georgia’s governor from 1971 to 1975, James Earle Carter took on the Sun Belt’s water problems. As a candidate for governor, Jimmy Carter stood barefoot and ankle-deep in South River raw sewage to draw attention to one of metro Atlanta’s polluted rivers, identifying problems he would fix as governor, and to woo environmentally conscious voters.64 While campaigning, he was also convinced to paddle the state’s rivers. Based on his personal experiences paddling the Chattahoochee, Flint, and other Georgia rivers, Carter “immediately fell in love” with the state’s waters, according to one writer.65 Within years and in what was a seminal environmental activist moment in Georgia history, Governor Carter stopped the Corps on the Flint. He primarily cited an economic—fiscally conservative—argument to protect the Flint River from the Corps’ decades-old plan to build a multiple-purpose dam at Sprewell Bluff. Carter received thousands of letters and telephone calls from like-minded Georgians, as well as those who were concerned about the project’s potential to cause “environmental damages.” The decision was not easy for Carter. He had previously served as the chairman of the Middle Flint River Planning and Development Council that, in his words, “was instrumental in securing passage of” congressional legislation authorizing the Flint River dams in the first place.66 Carter stopped the Corps’ Sprewell Bluff dam project on the Flint River because “the construction of unwarranted dams and other projects at public expense should be prevented.”67 On the other side of the state, however, the Trotters Shoals water and energy project got a green light from Governor Jimmy Carter’s office up until his last day.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1977–81) thought differently and executed his own version of a big dam backlash. He announced his famous “hit list” in 1977 after less than six months in office and threatened to eliminate any water project in the country that was fiscally irresponsible, based on faulty cost-benefit accounting, an engineering folly, or detrimental to the environment. Among the more than thirty nationally targeted pork barrel projects—previously promoted by chambers of commerce, local steering committees, the Corps, the Bureau of Reclamation, and legions of elected Republicans and Democrats—was the Trotters Shoals development the former peanut farmer had supported as Georgia’s governor.68 As the nation’s chief executive, Carter placed the Trotters Shoals dam and reservoir project—already scrutinized by liberal and conservative critics for more than twenty years—under the microscope again. Previous opponents had tried to eliminate the Corps’ last major Savannah River valley project by championing free enterprise, defending potential industrial sites and new jobs, and raising the EIS shield. As such, President Carter’s newfound opposition to the Savannah River valley project represented only the latest attempt to kill Trotters Shoals. His hit list, however, soon crumpled under the weight of a congressional backlash by members of his own party and Republicans who hailed mostly from the American West. Before the end of 1977, Carter compromised with the Senate, and nearly all of the water projects—including Trotters Shoals—were fully funded.
Journalists, former aides, and scholars have repeatedly asserted that Governor Carter’s decision to reject the Corps’ Flint River project in Georgia informed his decision to critically examine the economic feasibility and environmental consequences of the nation’s water projects in 1977.69 But President Carter was unable to apply those same lessons and convince Congress to rein in spending even as the national deficit grew. As Guy Martin, the former assistant interior secretary during the Carter administration intimated, Carter failed because he pushed environmental issues more than economic issues. According to Martin, “Most Congressmen” did not “really care about wild rivers,” and “the New Deal mentality [was] entrenched up there—even the right-wingers” treated dam and reservoir projects as entitlements. Governor Carter’s rejection of a single water and energy project on the Flint River was bold and formative, but President Carter could not easily apply the same logic on the national stage when pork was on local tables.70 As an outsider—part countryside conservationist and part environmentalist—Jimmy Carter could not overcome Capitol Hill’s political and institutional momentum or implement revolutionary ways to think about water and energy.
Savannah River valley residents had organized for centuries to criticize and oppose elements of Georgia’s and South Carolina’s hydraulic waterscape. Aside from the Flint River case, southerners had a poor success rate when it came to beating dam proposals. Early-nineteenth-century fishermen protested antebellum dams in the 1850s, and anglers attempted to save migratory fish runs in the 1880s at the Augusta Canal diversion dam. Progressive preservationists unsuccessfully fought the Atlanta-based Georgia Power Company’s New South–era Tallulah Falls project in northeast Georgia in the 1910s. These events mirrored grassroots preservation and federal conservation moments observed in other parts of the nation. President Jimmy Carter’s attempt to apply a Georgia solution to the nation’s water problems likewise failed. But in the Sun Belt period, states’ rights, antipollution, conservation, and environmental activists became unaffiliated countryside associates dedicated to shaping the Savannah River valley’s Piedmont. Southeastern water problems had evolved beyond conserving water for energy production, channeling water for navigation, controlling floodwaters, and storing water to bust droughts. Sun Belt countryside conservationists, environmentalists, and conservative critics represented streams of a big dam backlash that recast the contours of national water and power politics. That was no small feat. By 1970, the nation’s water problem encompassed the old problem of water quantity, a lingering water quality problem, and a new demand. At that moment, Sun Belt commercial boosters—influenced by New South capitalists and New Deal liberals—were torn as some valleys were flooded to build lakes for water-ski boats and others were saved to balance working reservoirs with recreational, scenic, and wild rivers.