Savannah-Ogeechee Canal

The Savannah-Ogeechee Canal is a sixteen-and-a-half-mile cut completed in eighteen thirty to link the Ogeechee River with the Savannah River, letting rice and timber planters move goods between the two watersheds without braving the open coast. Laborers, mostly enslaved, dug the channel by hand through swampy Georgia lowland over several years. At its peak the canal carried lumber, naval stores, and agricultural freight through four lift locks and two tidal locks across the coastal plain.

Railroads and changing trade slowly undercut it, and by the early eighteen nineties it had stopped operating as a transportation route. Its mossy towpath, stone lock walls, and a small nature center survive today as a preserved site just minutes from Interstate Ninety-Five.