Savannah Rapids Park, Augusta GA

Here are a few old photos of Savannah Rapids Park on the Savannah River, in suburban Augusta, GA. This is the point where the river crosses the Fall Line, and the headgates for the historic Augusta Canal are here. These photos were taken around the headgates area, although it's a fairly large park and there's more to it than this. The website mentions something about a waterfall, although I don't recall ever seeing it. If I had, I'm fairly certain I would have taken a photo or two.

The main thing I do remember is looking around for alligators. I'd heard they showed up here now and then, and there were signs warning people to please leave the alligators alone, dammit. Ok, the signs didn't say "dammit", this being the South and all, but the point was conveyed. I didn't see any gators, though, and I was both relieved and disappointed. I'd seen alligators before, during a family vacation to Florida in the mid-80s. They were swimming around in a canal at Cape Canaveral, in fact. Somehow that didn't really count because it happened in Florida, though. Anyway, I finally saw a wild non-Floridian alligator at Hunting Island, on the South Carolina coast, and somehow managed not to get any photos of it. I told coworkers about it later and they weren't that impressed. I think the best analogy is with bears in the western US: Not something you see every day, and a real nuisance when they do show up.

Going back through these old photos, I'm struck by how few photos I have of the Augusta area, despite having lived there for several years. I'm not sure why not; the old historic downtown was quite photogenic, at least if you ignored all the empty storefronts. The Augusta Canal took a very scenic route from the headgates into downtown, past historic cotton mills and under historic bridges, before petering out in weeds and neglect in a bad part of town. I haven't been back in the last decade and maybe it's changed since then, but it wasn't exactly the most economically vibrant city, other than the one week every year when it became the center of the golf universe, and the locals all left town for the duration. Savannah and Charleston had it beat in the tourism department, it was too close to Atlanta to be much of a business hub on its own, and any business that didn't gravitate to Atlanta likely ended up in Columbia or Greenville-Spartanburg, SC instead. Locals seemed to regard this with a mix of puzzlement and resignation. Grand development schemes came and went without rousing the city from its economic doldrums -- a riverfront condo tower in a city that shunned condos and avoided downtown after dark; big new history and science museums the local government couldn't afford to actually operate or maintain; minor league baseball and even hockey(!) teams that came and went; even a riverfront "Georgia Golf Hall of Fame" full of cheesy (and often vandalized) statues of famous golfers. Nothing ever seemed to pan out, and nobody could figure out why. Augusta would make a lot more sense if there was some sort of centuries-old curse on the place, a curse where nothing really terrible ever happens, but the city's forever doomed to watch enviously as nearby cities get all the goodies and it doesn't. But, as usual, Savannah and Charleston ended up with all the cool ghost stories.

Willamette Falls

A slideshow of Willamette Falls photos, from the viewpoint off 99E on the Oregon City side of the river. This is about the best view you can get of the falls without owning a boat or getting a job at one of the paper mills next to the falls. It's the only industrialized, urban waterfall we have in the area and doesn't fit our usual idea of waterfalls, which are tall, skinny, and mostly untouched by the modern world. So tourist guidebooks to the area often ignore these falls. The closest US analogies I can think of might be the Falls of St. Anthony in Minneapolis; Spokane Falls in Spokane, Wa; and High Falls in Rochester NY.

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Willamette Falls is a significant place in Oregon history, so at the risk of sounding like a third-rate Wikipedia clone (and one that relies heavily on Wikipedia, at that), it feels like I should at least try to relate a few interesting tidbits about the place rather than just going, hey, here's yet another slide show, enjoy.

The waterfall

People who care about these things claim Willamette Falls is somewhat of a big deal: 17th widest waterfall in the world, and 37th largest by volume of water. It would be in the top 20, in fact, except that much of the river is diverted away for hydropower, which we'll get to in a minute.

Fish

Several of the photos in this set show people fishing below the falls. The falls have been a prime fishing spot for migratory fish since time immemorial, primarily salmon and lamprey. Because of this, Willamette Falls and other major waterfalls around the Northwest were major cultural centers for native tribes of the region, and figured prominently in stories and legends. (One appeared here recently in a post about Coalca Landing State Park, explaining the origin of the park's once-famous balancing rock). The tribes retained their traditional fishing rights here after the 1855 treaty in which they lost virtually all of their land. The word "retained" is important here: Despite what the nation's racist uncles may have said over Thanksgiving dinner, this is not a matter of the federal government granting special rights to a minority. They were here first, the falls and the fish were theirs to begin with, and they never gave up their pre-existing rights.

I should note, however, that fishing rights don't guarantee an actual supply of fish. Lamprey populations continue to decline, and salmon runs are no healthier here than they are anywhere else.

History

The falls also explain why Oregon City is where it is. The town was founded in 1829 as a Hudson's Bay Company outpost (the main fort being across the Columbia River at Ft. Vancouver), as the falls were a convenient way to power a lumber mill. It would be several decades before the founding of Portland, so Oregon City was the major settlement in the region and served as the territorial capital. That, in turn, meant that the Oregon Trail ended here, as newly arrived pioneers had to stop by the courthouse to file their land claim papers.

The falls also meant that Oregon City was initially the head of navigation on the Willamette. A number of East Coast cities were founded along the Fall Line, and it would have been reasonable to think the pattern would repeat here as well. Ships couldn't go any further upstream, and moving products by land in the pre-rail, pre-paved road era was difficult and something you wanted to minimize if possible, so it seemed logical that a seaport would develop here. Portland soon took this role away from Oregon City, however; the credit's often given to (relatively) easier land routes, particularly the old Plank Road west to the farmland of the Tualatin Valley. This later evolved into Canyon Road, and then today's Sunset Highway (US 26).

Transportation

The falls didn't remain a barrier for long; in 1873 the Willamette Falls Locks opened, giving river traffic a route around the falls. They were initially a private venture but later became an Army Corps of Engineers project.

Over time river traffic lost out to the railroads, and both dwindled further once paved roads and motor vehicles arrived in the Northwest. The falls saw very little traffic in recent years and maintenance costs continued to escalate, so the Corps finally placed the locks in "non-operating status" in 2011. This seems to be bureaucratic lingo for "permanently closed" without actually saying "permanent".

Power

People in the Northwest usually think of hydroelectric power as something that involves a massive Bonneville-style dam, but Willamette Falls is home to PGE's historic Thomas W. Sullivan Plant, which has just a low dam above the falls to divert water into its turbines. Constructed in 1895, it's one of the nation's oldest hydropower plants still in operation, and was recently certified as "green power", which seems to mean that it's considered relatively benign to fish. An earlier hydro project at the falls enabled the nation's first long distance transmission of electricity, in June 1889, sending power from the falls to downtown Portland, 14 miles away. A historical marker in downtown's Lownsdale Square marks the event.

A page at the Willamette Falls Heritage Foundation provides a look inside the Sullivan Plant, which has a set of rather steampunk-looking vintage turbines.

Paper

The most prominent, and smelliest, part of the development around the falls is the paper industry. The falls were home to the Blue Heron paper mill on the Oregon City side, and the West Linn Paper Company on the West Linn side of the river, but the Blue Heron mill closed abruptly in 2011. The mill specialized in paper recycling, and apparently it's now more profitable to ship waste paper to China than it is to recycle it here. Which is yet another reminder that international trade is often bizarre and nonsensical. There are a few photos of the now-demolished powerhouse for the Blue Heron mill here

Future

In 2011, both the locks and one of the two paper mills at the falls closed, and both closures seem to be fairly permanent. The other mill seems to be prospering, as far as I know, and the hydro plant is licensed to operate thru the year 2034, but the closures still raise a question of what (if anything) to do with the falls going forward.

Willamette Falls Heritage Foundation and the Willamette Falls Heritage Area Coalition are interested in the historic preservation aspects of the falls, the latter group wanting to involve the National Park Service in the effort. The city government is apparently interested in shifting gears and becoming a creative class hub, and Metro's expressed interest in buying the old Blue Heron site, which would likely mean at least part of the site becoming a park at some point in the distant future, and probably repurposing at least some of the historic mill buildings, similar to what's under discussion for the remote Bull Run Powerhouse. Speaking strictly as someone who likes taking photos of waterfalls, that sounds like a great idea. With one important caveat, namely that I'm not interested in throwing anyone out of work just so I can get better waterfall photos.

Lafayette Locks • Yamhill Falls

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Today's adventure takes us out to rural Yamhill County, to Lafayette Locks County Park, on the Yamhill River near the town of Lafayette. It's hard to believe today, but back in the early 20th century the little Yamhill River had a bit of commercial steamboat traffic on it, shipping Yamhill Valley crops to market. Shipping was impeded by some rapids (known somewhat generously as "Yamhill Falls") at this point in the river, so local boosters convinced the US Army Corps of Engineers to build and operate a modest lock system, the remains of which you see here.

The old locks were on the far side of the river and aren't accessible from the park, and the riverbank's thick with trees these days, so you really don't get a good look at things like you do at Cascade Locks. Nor is there good access to the river unless you're up for a muddy scramble down a steep bank. Still, the park has a large and well-maintained picnic area, and it's a pleasant place to stop even if the park's signature attraction is across the river and behind some trees.

The locks are a little-known historical footnote, and usually it's hard to find a lot of information online about something this obscure. But back in 1990 the Oregon Historical Quarterly published a long two-part article about the locks: "From Dream to Demolition: The Yamhill Lock & Dam", by Suann Murray Reddick, in Vol. 91, Nos. 1 and 2, which as far as I can tell remains the definitive work on the Lafayette Locks. The previous link goes to a JSTOR preview of Part 1; if you have a Multnomah County library card, and you want to read the full text of both parts of the article, you can get PDFs at 2 permalinks: Part 1, Part 2. The locks are also mentioned briefly in an earlier article, "Tributaries of the Willamette: Yamhill, Santiam, Calapooya" ( Vol. 44, No. 2 (Jun., 1943)), by Ruth Rydell, giving a perspective on them while they were still in operation.

The two parts of the Reddick article come to about 90 pages. I've read the whole thing, along with the relevant parts of the Rydell piece, and I'll try to summarize the tale briefly. But if that's still TL;DR for you, I'll pass along a couple of other links first: Here are three historical photos, a YouTube video about rafting the rapids here, and a short blog post with a few photos. Also, the City of Dayton, downstream of the locks (and home to the Ferry St. Bridge), has a short article on their website about Yamhill river shipping. Dayton was effectively the head of navigation on the river until the locks came, and the article indicates river traffic had dried up there by the 1920s.

Now back to our story. Part 1 of the Reddick article details the decades-long struggle to get the locks built. Yamhill Falls was one of the few places the Yamhill River could be forded, so an Indian trail passed through here prior to European settlement. Settlers saw the value of the area early on, and the falls were homesteaded in 1840, well before any sort of local government had been instituted. By the 1850s, the Yamhill Valley had become a prime agricultural area, and initially the only way to get products to market was by boat (the same state of affairs encountered at Butteville, Cornelius, and elsewhere.)

The falls, puny as they were, still presented an obstacle to river traffic, and the first proposal to build locks on the river came in January 1859, a month before Oregon statehood. This privately financed proposal went nowhere, as did further attempts continuing into the 1870s. At that point railroads had come to the Yamhill Valley, but exorbitant freight charges led local boosters (but never quite enough investors) to see an opening for a cheaper river-based alternative. After the last private proposal fell through in 1876, attention turned to convincing Congress to fund the locks instead. This took another twenty years of lobbying, with a reluctant Army Corps of Engineers repeatedly surveying the area and coming up with different (but never very positive) recommendations every few years. Finally, in 1896, the political pressure succeeded, and Congress appropriated up to $200,000 toward the locks proposal.

Part 2 picks up with the construction of the locks. Construction turned out to be more difficult than expected, due to problems with flooding and weak, eroding river banks. The locks finally opened on September 22nd, 1900 -- rather than the original target of December 31st, 1898 -- and construction ran to over $72,000, about 20% over budget. The article points out that the locks were essentially obsolete the day they opened; the first proposal had come in 1859, when much of the area was still howling wilderness, but four decades later the Yamhill Valley had electricity, telephones, multiple railroad lines, and a few paved roads, and riverboat traffic was declining even on the Willamette and Columbia.

Within a year, the cheaply built locks proved inadequate to the task, and sustained serious damage due to the same flooding and erosion issues it had encountered during construction, as well as collisions with drifting riverboats and errant logs from log rafts. The Corps of Engineers invested an additional $22,000 in repairs just in the first year. A 1903 study gave a couple of options for strengthening and upgrading the lock and dam, but suggested they weren't worth investing in as the locks saw very little traffic. The lack of traffic was something of a chicken-and-egg problem; the locks were inoperable during high river levels, and shipping companies were unwilling to risk having their boats stranded on the upstream side of the locks in that situation. This absence of traffic in turn made the Corps not want to bother fixing the dam's high water problems.

So by 1903 traffic through the locks had essentially petered out already, only three years in, and the Corps of Engineers floated a serious proposal to abandon the locks altogether. Naturally there was a local public outcry, and suspicions that the railroads were in on the proposal. The matter was forwarded on to distant Washington DC, where it ran into bureaucratic inertia: The locks were neither abandoned nor upgraded, but simply maintained in their current state and repaired every so often.

Various schemes for shipping people and cargo on the Yamhill River came and went, and none lasted long. By 1912, the article notes, just 386.6 tons of freight and 327 passengers used the locks in the course of the entire year. This minimal level of traffic continued into the 1920s, and the Corps classified the locks as "proper for abandonment". Rydell quotes an Oregonian writer to the effect that, during this time, there was so little river traffic the locks were opened every ten days "just to shake the rust out and to show that all is well."

Traffic picked up in the late 1920s thanks almost entirely to log rafts, and local farmers became increasingly interested in the reservoir behind the dam as a source of irrigation water. Another study was commissioned in 1931 on options for upgrading the dam, but again nothing came of it. Log traffic increased through the 1930s and peaked in 1943, when 101,981 tons of logs passed through the locks. Rydell mentions that in 1942 (the previous year) an average of two log rafts per day had passed through the locks. At that point there was every reason to assume this level of traffic was the new permanent state of affairs.

The log raft trade declined quickly after World War II, however, as the Yamhill Valley started running out of trees, and modern log trucks took much of the remaining business. By 1953 the locks were back on the chopping block, thanks to the loss of traffic and Congressional budget cuts. As in 1903, there was a public outcry, in part about the locks themselves, and in part about the adjacent park, which had been developed by the first lock keeper back when the locks opened. This time, local protests proved futile, and the locks and dam were officially abandoned on February 4th, 1954. The newly formed county parks department took over the locks and the park roughly a year later.

Back in 1908, the state's Deputy Fish Warden had already raised alarms about the dam as a barrier to migrating salmon, and he somehow convinced the feds to install a primitive fish ladder at the dam. The article doesn't mention any further concerns about fish until after the abandonment of the dam, at which point the Oregon Fish Commission stepped in and raised new concerns about the dam and salmon. The dam was still used for irrigation water at that point, and a farmers-vs.-fish battle ensued that should seem all too familiar to anyone who witnessed Southern Oregon's Klamath River water wars just a few years ago. And similar to the Klamath situation, the state sided with the fish. Or more precisely, it sided with sport fishermen who thought the river looked promising. By 1960, the Oregon Fish Commission was insisting that the county had to provide adequate fish passage, or the dam would have to be removed. Meanwhile, the abandoned and unmaintained locks and dam continued to deteriorate, and the county had no funds on hand to repair them. They county sided with farmers and dragged its feet cooperating with the state, and several years of legal wrangling ensued. Then, in 1963, a subtle and little-noticed change to state law removed the county's power to block state action on the dam, and on September 18, 1963 the state dynamited the dam, to the great surprise and dismay of the local community. A 1976 proposal to build a shiny new dam for irrigation went nowhere, and contemporary (circa 1990) discussion around building a new dam or at least creating a fish pond at the old locks seems to have come to nought as well.

The article goes on to point out that, from a sport fishing perspective, the promised benefits to fish may have been somewhat oversold, and (as of 1990) neither coho nor chinook salmon populations had become established in the river. It isn't indicated whether there had ever been coho or chinook in the river before the dam went in, which is the key point ecologically speaking. It's quite possible nobody knows.

Another thing the article barely mentions, but which I'm intrigued by, is the fact that the old Yamhill Falls site was a major river crossing prior to European settlement, so presumably local tribes had been using this spot for thousands of years before pioneers arrived with their money-making schemes. So the area is at least potentially an archeological site, albeit a heavily disturbed one. I wonder if anyone's ever taken a professional look at it?

Anyway, thanks for reading this far. I don't usually do blog posts quite this long anymore, but I basically go wherever the source material takes me. As I mentioned earlier, the park isn't terribly exciting these days even if you're a history nerd like me. But it does preserve an unusual bit of local history, and it's certainly a change of pace from other better-known Yamhill Valley attractions: The aviation museum, the big Indian casino out west of McMinnville, pretentious wineries and art galleries everywhere, and that sort of thing. So if you go, take a picnic lunch along, slow down, and just watch and listen to the river for a while. It's quite nice, really.