The August Canal Interpretive Center is located in the historic Enterprise Mill on the canal. In addition to its wonderful museum, it is where visitors embark on one–hour cruises, sunset cruises, moonlight music cruises, and chartered field trips on the canal. Just as Columbia was the place the Native Americans crossed the Congaree River, Augusta was where they crossed the Savannah River. Both locations were on the Fall Line, the shallow rapids of the river. The Georgia settlement was named by James Oglethorpe for Augusta, the princess of Saxe–Gotha and mother of King George III.

Coincidently, the first settlement on the Congaree, 60 miles to the east, was also Saxe–Gotha, a Swiss–German land grant in which the town was later named Granby.

Augusta was the second capital of Georgia from 1785 to 1795. During that same period, Columbia was founded across the river from Granby as South Carolina’s second capital.

Boatmen poled the canal boats on the early Augusta Canal. The Enterprise Mill is pictured in the background. The British forts at Augusta and Granby were connected by a wagon road along the Fall Line, which eventually became US–1. In 1833 the Charleston– Hamburg (now North Augusta) Railroad gave the cotton trade in Augusta a faster access to the world market than the road or river to Savannah. But the railroad also created greater competition, and Augusta soon faced a crisis as trade diminished.

Railroads spelled the end of the canals in South Carolina (Santee, Saluda, Columbia, and Landsford), but it gave Henry Harford Cumming of Augusta an idea. He proposed a canal around the rapids on the Savannah River that would power the coming manufacturing industry.

A Canal Board was created in 1845, and the Augusta Canal was completed in 1850. Factories, including the famous Confederate Powderworks, were built along the canal and though interrupted by the Civil War, Augusta became a booming economic center after Reconstruction.

This exhibit in the Interpretive Center shows the mill village for workers (left) and the mill (right) across the canal. The Augusta Canal captured the power of a 52– foot drop in the Savannah River, and Augusta became an electric city by 1892. (As a matter of comparison, Columbia was electrified by its second canal in 1894.) Hydroelectric power lighted the streets and homes, ran the trolleys, and powered new factories such as the textile mills – Enterprise Mill, King Mill, and Sibley Mill – and the Lombard Ironworks.

Flooding almost destroyed the canal and its factories in the 1920s and 1930s. The canal was rebuilt during the New Deal and became the source of Augusta’s water supply.

In the Augusta Canal Interpretive Center, the textile mill manager is depicted. After World War II the textile factories began to close and the canal lost its purpose. Conservationists got to work and saved the canal from demolition in the 1960s. In 1977 the canal became part of the Historic Augusta Canal and Industrial District. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1998.

Linda and I toured the very informative Canal Interpretive Center of which these photographs were a part. After Linda scoured the gift shop, we boarded the replica Petersburg Canal Boat for a onehour cruise on the Augusta Canal.

Next week: A Ride on the

Augusta Canal
The photograph in the Interpretive Center shows a canal boat on the Augusta Canal.
Before the advent of child labor laws in the 1930s, children worked in the textile mills, as shown in the photograph of a factory on the Augusta Canal.