|Despite its excellent defensive position, one of the downsides|
of the location of Jamestown was the encompassing swampland whose
mosquitoes spread much devastating disease upon settlement.
Much of the human history of the South has been one based upon agriculture. Southwestern Indians created sophisticated systems of cultivation and subsisted off crops of corn, beans, and squash imported from the Southwest. When the English aimed to permanently settle the region, colonies sought to establish economic gains for their stakeholders and country. Jamestown, the first permanent and successful English colony, was able to in the early decades of the seventeenth century, establish a profitable economy based upon the monoculture cash crop of tobacco. Jamestown's example became the model and what became the dominant agricultural energies of the South up until the Civil War (the continuation and spread of tobacco in the upper South, rice in the coastal regions of the Carolinas and Georgia, sugarcane in Louisiana, and cotton throughout the region in the eighteenth century), were marked by exploitative agricultural arrangements which relied on initially on indentured servitude and later race-based slave labor. Thus the South offers different possible meanings for different groups: life for Indians, profit for Europeans, and a lack of freedom for blacks slaves.
Navigable river systems are an abundant feature of Southern geography. Rivers provide humans with a speedy means of transportation and movement. It is not surprising then that places of their convergence become major centers of importance. A prime example is at Harpers Ferry in present day West Virginia. Remembered by students of U.S. history as the locus for abolitionist John Brown’s significant but failed revolution to destroy slavery in 1856, its older reputation as an industrial center of national importance is often overlooked today. Chosen for its importance as a convergence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, the U.S. government established a federal arsenal and armory. We made other connections with the waterways of West Virginia, as the state also contains the New River on which we rafted about nine miles of whitewater rapids. The river's name is somewhat of a misnomer as it is geologically one of the oldest rivers in the world. Indeed, many states we moved through prominently feature highway signage that reminds one through which watershed, or river drainage system, he or she is passing through and to monitor one’s impact upon that natural area.
|Van snapshot of part of a Tennessee watershed.|
|By 1940 FDR concluded that the TVA dams had turned a "vagrant"|
stream,"sometimes shallow and useless, sometimes turbulent," into a
controlled system that was marked by enough commerce, power,
and recreation that it would "serve in full the purposes of
mankind." (Image: LOC; Quote: APP)
- Mike Uhl