The Southern Marble Company Pipeline a.k.a. "The Ditch"

The Southern Marble Company can be seen in Land Lot 106, of District 4, in the 1903 Pickens County map.

In the 1890s the Southern Marble Company (located where the Imerys Corporation is presently at on Hwy 53 in Marble Hill, Georgia, built a combination of a pipeline and channel for a gravity-fed water delivery system from nearly two miles north to their marble plant. The water would pass beneath Hwy 53 and shoot out from a small pipe to power a Pelton Wheel which operated their *gang saws. One informed county resident described the water pressure as being strong enough to remove the paint from a truck!

The Pelton Wheel, named after Pennsylvania inventor Lester Pelton, was first created in 1878 and was in large scale use by the 1890s. The Pelton Wheel at the Southern Marble Company was an undershot wheel, as opposed the traditional overshot wheel. This meant the water would be channeled into a small pipe that would hit the buckets of the Pelton Wheel at the bottom forcing it to move forward instead of filling them from the top, thereby forcing the wheel to spin clockwise.

A Pelton Wheel with a water pipe located at an old Copper Mine site in Washington State.

When "the ditch" was first built, a lawsuit was brought against Southern Marble by Manson Darnell for altering the topography of his land by building the ditch. His brother, Sion Arrington Darnell, Pickens County's famous attorney, legislator represented him. Initially, Sion won the case against Southern Marble in the lower courts. Eventually, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned his win and called for a retrial.

Another lawsuit involved the land the pipeline was built on also happened in 1894. Roxanna Disharoon forced the sale of much of the land the pipeline was built on to satisfy a judgement against none other than James P. Harrison, the owner of the Perseverance Quarry located on Cove Road two miles east of Jasper.

James P. Harrison later died in a tragic railroad trestle collapse near Ball Ground in 1904.

Click here to read that story.

When the ditch was built, it was a mixture of cement covered water channels and later corrugated metal pipe for the elevated areas of the terrain. Interestingly, corrugated water pipes were patented in 1896 by the American Inventor James H. Watson, of Indiana. I had wrongly assumed the entire two miles of the system would be made entirely of metal pipe.

The largest known section of the pipe that ran concurrently with the ditch. A cement pillar can be seen near the middle of the photo about a foot before the fallen tree.

Watson's corrugated metal culvert patent from 1896.

In actuality, only a half-mile or less of the two-mile system is made of metal. There are by most accounts only three sections of the pipeline made of it. The rest is set up like a cemented mill race.

The cement channel can be seen along the entire left side of this photo.

At the far northern end, a reservoir was built south of Jasper Dawsonville Road (Cove Road) and the water from there was gravity fed to a pond north of Hwy 53. From there it routed its way beneath the road to the Southern Marble Company.

Although some people believed the Georgia Marble Lake located North of Cove Road by Cowart Mountain Road was part of the water pipeline system, it's just folklore. The real name of the Georgia Marble Lake is Long Swamp Watershed #8. The men would maintained the ditch emphatically denied the connection. Although the Georgia Marble Company acquired the Southern Marble Company circa 1916, the reservoir wasn't completed until 1964.

NOTE: Some people erroneously claimed the water from this pipeline reached into the area that currently is in Bent Tree. However, Buckskull Spring and Darnell Creek are not the source of this water. It came from an unnamed creek, informally known as May's Creek.

At its peak condition, the ditch had a wooden boardwalk that ran beside much of it, several bridges (metal and wooden) and support structures along it. Many residents of the Marble Hill/Dug Road/Grassy Knob sections of Pickens County have fond recollections of Sunday strolls along "The Ditch". The Cowart, Fouts, Henley, Lawson, and Pendley families walked and played there.

Over the years, many different people were tasked with maintaining the ditch, especially in the fall. In the Autumn months, caretakers from families with the last names MacArthur, Jones, and Fitts would clean fallen debris out weekly.

It seems the pipeline was abandoned by Georgia Marble around the 1960s.

These days, the boardwalk is gone, the metal and wooden bridges are gone, as are the wooden boardwalks. Sadly, the whole area is being reclaimed by Mother Nature. One hundred years from now, I imagine all that will be left is the concrete supports and channel dug for the ditch.

I hope you enjoyed this post. For some readers, this may be the first you've heard of the ditch, for others it may have reignited fond memories. With any luck, this post will help keep memories of another largely forgotten fragment of our past alive!

• Definition - Gang saw: a saw that uses multiple blades to cut stone, simultaneously.