|
|
|
gallery
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. |
1
|
|
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 |
2
|
|
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 |
3
|
|
It was hard not to meet the national park proposal with incredulity. It seemed nothing short of brash and deceitful boosterism to portray the results, however scenic, of the human-induced destruction of tens of thousands of acres of land as natural and thus worthy of national park status. Yet I was also nagged by a tension in the soil conservationists' use of Providence Canyon as an image, a tension between its representativeness and its extremity. If we are to assume that Stewart County's farmers used roughly similar farming practices as did farmers in the rest of the cotton belt, then the question becomes why did the soils in Stewart County react to human manipulation in such extreme fashion? If we use Providence Canyon to represent southern soil abuse—and it is a stunning representation of a set of practices that did substantial environmental (as well as social and economic) harm—then we also have to recognize the ways in which it was not representative of what happened elsewhere in the region under the same land use practices. Or, to put it another way, I came to recognize that Providence Canyon was much more natural than I initially thought. |
4
|
|
Physiographically, Providence Canyon is a part of the Upper Coastal Plain; it sits about twenty miles below the Coastal Plain's border with the Piedmont plateau, the southern province better known for its history of human-induced soil erosion. But Stewart County, which abuts the Chattahoochee River on its west side and rises through a series of natural terraces to an upland plain almost seven hundred feet at its highest point, has substantial topographical relief for the Coastal Plain. Providence Canyon's geology is the product of the deposition of marine sediments that occurred between 85 million and 65 million years ago, when the area was alternately underwater and exposed. Looking at the canyon walls in the Rothstein photograph reproduced here, one can see two distinctive sediment layers. The dark top layer, known as the Clayton Formation, is composed of reddish sandy clay, likely washed down from the Piedmont. Beneath the Clayton Formation is a much deeper sediment layer, extending well over one hundred feet in places, known as the Providence Formation, which is made up of unconsolidated sand with silt and clay deposits. That profile, it turns out, was critical to Providence Canyon's extremity.6 |
5
|
|
When the first settlers arrived in Stewart County in the 1830s and began farming, they likely found a thin layer of topsoil atop of the Clayton Formation. Clearing and plowing exposed and stripped topsoil from the hilly western part of the county where agriculture was first focused, and then cropping and the elements began wearing away at the Clayton clays—a fairly typical southern story thus far. Once those clays were breached, however, and water encountered the unconsolidated sediment of the Providence Formation, gullying ensued at a dramatic pace. Indeed, Providence Canyon was likely well formed before the Civil War, after just a decade or two of frontier farming.7 |
6
|
|
Two erosional processes were at work in Providence Canyon. First, there was surface flow, by which rain flowing across the surface of the land dislodged and transported soils. This is the process most people envision when they think of erosion, and its accelerated effects were directly related to clearing, plowing, and the exposure of soil to the elements. The second process took place beneath the surface and likely was more important. Once rainwater breached the clay layer, it percolated downward through the Providence sands until it hit frequent lenses of greasy, impermeable kaolin (mined throughout the Georgia for a number of purposes, most notably to give magazine paper its glossy sheen). When water hit those lenses, it moved sideways in a process known as pipe flow. This pipe flow ate away at and destabilized the sands above it, resulting in a phenomenon known as mass wasting, whereby large amounts of sediment collapsed and caved into the canyon. It was this process that had encouraged locals to refer to the area as "Providence Cave."8 Providence Canyon, then, was certainly the result of human-induced environmental change, but its extremity was the product of its unique geological history and profile. |
7
|
|
How then ought we to read the Rothstein photographs, or interpret Providence Canyon State Park as it exists today? However satisfying it might be to adopt the New Dealers' position on this—and it was their logic that informed my initial sense of irony—the truth is that the national park boosters had a point. "Nature" had played a prominent role in scooping out the gullies of Stewart County, and the results were—and are—spectacular. To see what happened in the creation of Providence Canyon as partly the result of natural forces is not to excuse or glide over human agency, or ignore the political economies behind it, but it is to insist that human agency almost never exists outside of, or divorced from, its natural context. However tempting it is to make a spectacle like Providence Canyon stand for soil abuse throughout the South, such a representational strategy does not do justice to local environmental forces. Providence Canyon is a monument to poor farming practices working in concert with local geology and the elements. Neither natural nor human agency in isolation can make sense of the place. |
8
|
|
One final chapter in the history of Providence Canyon needs to be added to this story. In recent years, another group of interpreters—scientific creationists—has set upon Providence Canyon. What they see in the gullies of Stewart County is an example of rapid historical erosion that supports their case that larger erosional landscapes, such as the Grand Canyon proper, could have been created in only several thousand years. As Rebecca Gibson insists in her article, "Canyon Creation," which appeared in Creation magazine in 1995, "Providence Canyon beautifully illustrates how the geology of the earth is consistent with the short timescale of the Bible."9 All of this suggests that the local boosters need only be patient; Georgia's "Little Grand Canyon" may yet be the stuff of a national park. |
9
|
|
Paul S. Sutter is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and editor of the "Environmental History and the American South" book series published by the University of Georgia Press..
NOTES
This essay is adapted from Paul S. Sutter, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Georgia's Little Grand Canyon and Conservation in the South," in The Environment and Southern History, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson (Mississippi, forthcoming.)
1. See The Georgia State Parks and Historic Sites website: http://www.gastateparks.org/info/providence/.
2. Arthur Rothstein, photographer, "Erosion. Stewart Country, Georgia." Photograph. February 1937. Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photograph Collection. From Library of Congress: "America from the Great Depression to World War Two: Black-and-White Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1934–1945." http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/query/i?ammem/fsaall:@FILREQ(@FIELD(DOCID+@LIT (fsa2000006830/PP))+@FIELD(COLLID+fsa)). (accessed August 10, 2006). The other photographs can be found by going to the collection website, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html. A search for "Stewart County" will retrieve six of the photos, but another thirteen images with neighboring call numbers also appear to be of Stewart County. They have no titles or attributed creators, but my suspicion is that they are also Rothstein photos.
3. Hugh Hammond Bennett, Soil Conservation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 4; Russell Lord, Behold This Land (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1938), photograph in insert after 48; Stuart Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land: A Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of America (New York: Whittlesey House, 1936), quote on 94.
4.The Columbus Enquirer, October 27, 1937, 4; November 2, 1937, 6.
5.The Columbus Enquirer, November 2, 1937, 6.
6. The information from this paragraph is taken from Lisa G. Joyce, Geologic Guide to Providence Canyon State Park, Geologic Guide 9 (Atlanta: Georgia Geological Survey, 1985), 1–12; Helen Eliza Terrill, History of Stewart County, Georgia (Columbus, Georgia: Columbus Office Supply Company, 1958), 1:3–4; David D. Long, M. W. Beck, E. C. Hall, and W. W. Burdette, Soil Survey of Stewart County, Georgia (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Soils, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1915); and Francis J. Magilligan and Melissa L. Stamp, "Historical Land-Cover Changes and Hydrographic Adjustment in a Small Georgia Watershed," Annals of the American Association of Geographers 7 (1997): 616–18.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Rebecca Gibson, "Canyon Creation," Creation 22 (September-November 2000): 46–48. I found this article on the web at: http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/docs/v22n4_canyon.asp. See also E. L. Williams, "Providence Canyon, Stewart County, Georgia—Evidence of Recent Rapid Erosion," Creation Research Society Quarterly 32 (1995).
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|