The Augusta Canal: The South's First Industrial District
Near Augusta, Georgia
In eighteen forty-four, a banker and railroad director named Henry Cumming looked at the Savannah River and decided Augusta should build a canal. The city was in an economic slump, cotton prices had fallen, and railroad competition was diverting trade away from the river. Cumming hired John Edgar Thomson, chief engineer of the Georgia Railroad, who measured the river and calculated that the Savannah dropped fifty-two feet over six miles, more than enough to power a generation of factories.
Construction began the following year, in eighteen forty-five. By November of eighteen forty-six, roughly two hundred workers had completed the first level of the canal. The historical record notes directly that summer heat decimated the white work crew, and that Black labor, enslaved and free, finished the job. The canal opened for business in eighteen forty-seven.
What followed was something the agrarian South had never seen. A grist mill and a sawmill came first, then the Augusta Factory, then mill after mill lining the waterway for two miles. By the end of the nineteenth century, Augusta's canal district was the largest industrial complex in the South. At the height of the cotton trade, between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand bales passed through the city's Cotton Exchange each year. Augusta was briefly the second largest inland cotton market in the world, behind only Memphis.
The canal was designated a National Heritage Area in nineteen ninety-six, and stretches of it are still navigable today by kayak and replica canal boat. The towpath runs along the original alignment. The headgates that controlled water flow into the mills are still in place. The redbrick factory buildings that line the upper stretch have been converted into offices and studios, but their bones, the massive millstones, the original wooden sluices, the beam-cut granite channels, remain embedded in the walls. The water still moves. The power that built an industrial empire out of a river's fall still runs through this town.
