A Little Walk, Part One

Friday (April 11) offered clear skies and comfortable temperatures, so my girlfriend, Colby, and I decided to take a walk. We decided to walk by the river, a favorite spot for the two of us. While at Riverfront Park, we saw a barge pushing what seemed to be coal. For this post, I'll talk a little bit about the Black Warrior River...

According to the source of all sources (Wikipedia), the Black Warrior River "is a tributary of the Tombigbee River, approximately 178 miles long " and drains an area of 6,275 square miles.

To develop the coal industries of Central Alabama the Federal Government in the 1880s began building a system of dressed rock lock and dams that concluded in 17 locks and dams. The first 16 locks and dams were constructed of sandstone quarried from the banks of the river and the river bed itself. Huge blocks of stone were hand shaped with hammer and chisel to construct the locks and dams, and a few of these dams were in service until the 1960s. One example of the craftsmanship of the stone locks is at University Park on Jack Warner Parkway in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The bank side wall of Lock 3 (Later renumbered Lock 12 and today largely disassembled) is the last remnant of the locks and dams made of this dressed rock from the 1880s-90s. A concrete dam completed in 1915, Lock 17 (John Hollis Bankhead Lock and Dam) is the last and only existing of the original dams, and has been modernized over the years with the addition of spillway gates, and a larger single lift lock. Lock 17 and Holt Lock and Dam also have hydro generating plants owned by Alabama Power suppling electricity for the Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama areas. This lock and dam system made the Black Warrior River navigable along its entire course and one of the longest channelized waterways in the United States, forming part of the extended system that link the Gulf of Mexico to Birmingham. Birmingham became the "Pittsburgh of the South", shipping iron and steel products via the Black Warrior River through the Panama Canal to the West Coast and the world. Coal is barged to Mobile and is shipped throughout the world today making Mobile the largest coal port in the South.