The Savannah-Ogeechee Canal

Somewhere nearby, under a tangle of pine and kudzu, the old Savannah-Ogeechee Canal still holds water. Sixteen and a half miles of hand-dug ditch, six stone-and-timber locks, and a story that goes straight to the bone of what the antebellum South was built on.

The canal was chartered in eighteen twenty-four and construction began two years later. The workforce that moved those thousands of cubic yards of Georgia clay was a brutal combination: enslaved African Americans and Irish immigrant laborers, often in the same ditch, in the same coastal heat. By March of eighteen twenty-eight the workforce numbered five hundred and seventy-seven. The canal was finished in December of eighteen thirty, connecting the Savannah River to the Ogeechee River and threading together the inland plantation economy with Savannah's busy port.

The canal was meant to make Savannah the cotton and timber capital of the South. One local newspaper predicted exactly that. For a decade or so, it delivered. Cotton, rice, bricks, naval stores, and natural fertilizer moved along it by flatboat and barge. But the engineering troubles began almost immediately. Wooden lock gates rotted in the humid Georgia air. Embankments eroded. By eighteen thirty-six the parent company had declared bankruptcy. A second company formed, widened the channel, and rebuilt with better materials.

The canal revived after the Civil War to serve the lumber industry, but a yellow fever epidemic in the eighteen seventies was blamed on the stagnant water, and public opinion turned against it. By the early eighteen nineties the Central of Georgia Railroad had made it redundant entirely. The last commercial boat passed through sometime around eighteen ninety.

Today the canal sits quiet inside a nature preserve southwest of the city. The stone lock footings are still there. The water is still there. And the landscape still carries the shape of the work that went into it, the work of people who built it without choosing to.