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PAUL S. SUTTER ON 'GEORGIA'S LITTLE GRAND CANYON'
| SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I followed a hunch about a little-known park in my new home state of Georgia. Celebrated by some as "Georgia's Little Grand Canyon," Providence Canyon State Park protects what is, at over 150 feet deep, the largest in a series of erosion gullies that riddle Stewart County. It is the spectacular product of what its own website admits were "poor farming practices in the 1800s."1 How ironic, I thought, that this place of such severe environmental degradation had become a park. My hunch was that, as a stunning visual spectacle of a much broader soil erosion problem that had plagued the region, Providence Canyon had a forgotten history. Arthur Rothstein's 1937 photograph, titled "Erosion. Stewart County, Georgia," only furthered my suspicion. I found the image among a series of nineteen photographs, some of which bore the same curt title, in the online collection of Farm Security Administration photographs available at the Library of Congress' American Memory website.2 Rothstein was a prominent visual chronicler of environmental maladjustment during the Depression era, and finding these images suggested that Providence Canyon had indeed once served as the poster child of southern soil abuse. Subsequent research confirmed my hunch, but it also revealed a history of contestation and alternative meanings that led me to question the logic behind my initial sense of irony. |
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After discovering Rothstein's photographs, I headed to the library and began pulling 1930s books on soil conservation off the shelf. To my great satisfaction, I found Providence Canyon depicted almost everywhere I looked, and often quite prominently. It appeared as figure 2 in Hugh Hammond Bennett's magisterial study, Soil Erosion (1939); figure 1 was a contrapuntal image of a forested landscape with its aboriginal soils anchored and intact. Providence Canyon had a prominent place in Russell Lord's Behold This Land (1938), where he called it, following local tradition, "Providence Cave" (as in cave in, not cavern). Most strikingly, a photograph of Providence Canyon served as the frontispiece for Stuart Chase's 1936 classic, Rich Land, Poor Land. Soil conservationists and environmental writers of the 1930s had, to borrow Chase's words, "followed gullies to their supreme exhibit in this country—Stewart County, Georgia." Providence Canyon was a supreme exhibit indeed, and Arthur Rothstein was but one of many who anticipated the reformist power of fixing and circulating images of such a striking landscape.3 |
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But New Deal soil conservationists did not have a corner on Providence Canyon's meaning as a visual spectacle. Local residents had other plans for the place. Indeed, just months after Rothstein took his photos, the Columbus Enquirer in neighboring Columbus, Georgia, launched an editorial campaign to create a national park from the gullies of Stewart County. In their opening editorial on the subject, the editors praised Providence Canyon as "one of the true show places in mother nature's garden of the earth," and in another editorial a few days later they waxed: "When Nature scooped out the acres now missing from the spot and washed them from the location, she had a definite eye for beauty."4 Nature, it seemed to them, had made Providence Canyon park-worthy, though the editors' true goal was more likely to, as they put it, "swell the tourist crop." Providence Canyon, the paper noted in a succinct summary of its editorial position, was "a land that Nature built for tourists."5 |
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