Steven Noll, David Tegeder. Ditch of Dreams: The Cross Florida Barge Canal and the Struggle for Florida's Future. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. xi + 394 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8130-3406-5.

Reviewed by Christopher J. Manganiello (University of Georgia)
Published on H-Water (April, 2010)
Commissioned by Justin M. Scott-Coe (Monte Vista Water District; Claremont Graduate University)

The Life and Death of the Cross Florida Barge Canal

Steven Noll’s and David Tegeder’s new book, Ditch of Dreams: The Cross Florida Barge Canal and the Struggle for Florida’s Future, is an authoritative history of a convoluted public works project. With a keen eye focused on the power players at every level, this political history travels from Florida’s grassroots to legislative chambers, and into courtrooms and the halls of state and federal bureaucracies. Based on meticulous and comprehensive primary research--new interviews, government documents, collections from environmental organizations, and media reports--the authors’ much-needed Cross Florida Barge Canal history chronicles a critical episode in public works and environmental history. Ditch of Dreams is an important story because Floridians and engineers constantly redefined the canal’s purpose and redesigned the project in response to dynamic economic and political conditions. Generations of disagreement swirled around a few decades of construction, produced a vibrant environmental community, and turned an incomplete canal into a recreational area that still generates debate today.

For centuries, people dreamed of a canal across northern Florida. Beginning with Spanish colonists and intensifying with early nineteenth-century Americans, Floridians envisioned a waterway that would link Jacksonville on the Atlantic coast with the Gulf of Mexico, and eliminate a costly open-sea voyage around the tip of the Florida peninsula. In the early nineteenth century, entrepreneurs increasingly utilized two north Florida rivers that became central in the canal’s history. On the Ocklawaha River--an Atlantic Ocean drainage--paddleboats traveled upstream to deposit tourists at resorts, and lumbermen floated fresh-cut cypress rafts downriver to mills. On the Withlacoochee River, barges carried the phosphate mining industry’s fruit through a power company lock and dam to Gulf of Mexico ports. At about the same time, Florida boosters convinced Congress to authorize and appropriate funding for numerous Army Corps of Engineers surveys that eventually proposed a canal to link these two river systems. However, a lack of federal support, war, and economic downturns repeatedly foiled canal planners’ dreams throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During these critical moments, canal supporters and opponents always re-evaluated the waterway’s purpose and how the project affected north Florida’s environment.

By the time the Great Depression hit, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had warmed to a Corps plan for a thirty-foot-deep ship canal with no navigation locks that “would significantly dwarf such iconic projects as the Panama and Suez canal” (p. 3). Construction began in 1935, but many rallied to sink the project, including Florida citrus growers who did not want to lose labor to the canal project, Florida port officials who feared competition from new ports, and a chorus of others who worried that a deep ship canal would damage the region’s precious limestone aquifer. Canal adversaries and congressional allies opposed to the New Deal agenda defeated the project and terminated funding. Ship canal proponents quickly recalibrated the project’s benefits and redesigned a canal with locks to accommodate barges. During the World War II and Cold War eras, boosters kept the project alive by claiming that the canal was necessary for national security because it provided a shortcut between the Gulf of Mexico’s energy and defense industries and Atlantic markets. They also adopted flood control and recreation justifications to sell the scheme. By 1964, promoters convinced Congress to initiate a second round of serious canal construction, and the Corps once again commenced land acquisition, reservoir clearing, and canal excavation activities. The Corps and their allies confidently pushed forward, but within seven years they encountered intense opposition from a new constituency that eventually convinced Congress to de-authorize the canal once and for all.

Environmental historians will especially want to read chapter 6--“Floating Logs, Dying Trees, and Clogging Weeds”--where a fantastic post-1960 social struggle unfolds between activists defending the Ocklawaha River and those defending the canal. Noll and Tegeder present the canal’s postwar demise in well-known contexts. Chambers of commerce tripped over themselves to sell the New South to industrial developers, and federal agencies like the Corps complemented those local actions by developing the Sunbelt’s infrastructure. But the authors also join historians Jack E. Davis, Frederick R. Davis, Paul S. Sutter, and Albert G. Way in drawing out the region’s conservation and environmental history. In the early 1960s, the canal radicalized wildlife conservationists, wilderness advocates, and scientists in Florida well before Earth Day. With a master’s degree in zoology and a hunger for fact-based debate, Marjorie Harris Carr became the leading figure in the fight to save the wild Ocklawaha River from earthmovers intent on building a placid canal.

Marjorie Carr leaned on existing conservation organizations, including Florida Audubon groups and garden clubs, but she also turned to national organizations for assistance. After Carr solicited help from the fledgling New York-based Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), she and her local allies organized Florida Defenders of the Environment (FDE). FDE also initiated a canal environmental impact statement before the National Environmental Policy Act (1969) required all federal projects to do so. And finally, Carr and FDE leaned heavily on an argument that presented the Ocklawaha River as an undeveloped and biologically unique wilderness. But Carr also adopted other techniques. Noll and Tegeder present a useful argument that unites fiscal conservatives from the New Right with liberal environmentalists. These seemingly unlikely allies joined forces in the 1960s and 1970s to fight public works projects in other parts of the country. Noll and Tegeder also draw clear lines between the civil rights and environmental movements in ways most scholars have not, but this also poses more questions. As the authors point out, EDF lawyers adapted tactics first honed by National Association for the Advancement of Colored People lawyers who battled segregation in the 1950s. What other forces and factors affected the conservative-environmentalist linkage? In what other ways did the civil rights movement influence public works and environmental politics?

The Cross Florida Barge Canal was never completed but its story is still an important public works history. If Jeffrey K. Stine’s history of a contemporaneous Corps project--the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway in Mississippi and Alabama--is a guide, then the nation’s tax payers, the projected Floridian canal zone residents, and Florida’s environment are probably better off without the canal. People dreamed about the Tenn-Tom for as long as Floridians dreamed about their own canal, but the Tenn-Tom has hardly produced the jobs and economic growth that promoters claimed the project would deliver. In Florida today, the canal lands and existing waterways have been renamed the Marjorie Harris Carr Cross Florida Greenway to honor Carr and the successful citizen movement she steered.

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Citation: Christopher J. Manganiello. Review of Noll, Steven; Tegeder, David, Ditch of Dreams: The Cross Florida Barge Canal and the Struggle for Florida's Future. H-Water, H-Net Reviews. April, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29275

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