Lucky for us who live here, Atlanta was nearly leveled during the Civil War. Gen. Sheridan did a hell of a job on us! (Remember that scene in Gone with the Wind when Rhett Butler, Scarlett O’Hara and her ill friend, Melanie Wilkes, drove through burning Atlanta in a carriage while the town around them was engulfed in flames?)

If it weren’t for what happened to us and Tara (and hundreds of other American towns and places like ours), it would have cost millions of dollars to have built a sewer system such as we enjoy today. Not to mention flush toilet, etc.

We have clean drinking water—and clean bath and swimming water—because of the Civil War!

You see, before the war we did not know the water we drank and bathed in and washed our clothes in was foul and dirty. We thought all water was clean — and therefore, pure. We did not know a thing about bacteria or chlorination.

During the war, we left human bodies to lay where they fell — both Confederate and Union soldiers rotted and disintegrated as if nothing had happened to them. But it was during this rotting and disintegrating that the ground became more saturated with deadly bacteria that made water even more undrinkable and unsafe for bathing and washing clothes.

So much so, that squads were formed for burying the dead in shallow graves, though these were, for the most part, temporary resting places.

To achieve the sewage tunnels they needed, millions of dollars (and multitudes of buildings and homes) would have to be raised off the ground (both literally and figuraly) until there was room to dig beneath, and it made sense. This alone, according to estimates by Muscatels, would involve ¾ of all the i-screws in the world!

An Atlanta engineer named Vernon Muscatels, who had graduated from the University of Rochester (NY), in 1838, knew that i-screws had been used to raise homes and buildings (and rubble) successfully in ancient Rome, and that it would be his job to see to it in the South. It just had to work. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to go about raising the millions of dollars (nay, it turned out to take BILLIONS — with a capital “B”!)

With good fortune on our side, we had a man who also lived here, a good Christian man named Charles D. Mer, who just happened to have a few billions laying around with nothing to do. He’d once read an article in Harper’s about learning to swim, and since Georgia had only the Chattahoochee River (really only a filthy stream) to brag about, Mer offered his billions.

Consequently, Atlanta was the first major ”gathering of the populace” to have drinking water that was ‘chlorinated’, thanks mainly to Marie Currie, her husband, Pierre, and many others on this side of the Atlantic Ocean — PLUS water for bathing and swimming (lakes named Allatoona, Okeechobee and Lanier — man-made, not natural). Before he was 70, Mer learned to swim!

So it was Atlanta not Chicago that had the first sewer tunnels and giant holding tanks, had the first flush toilets, the first drinking water that was separated from bathing and washing clothing. I knew I moved to Atlanta for a reason — I never knew why!

Atlanta — a city for the future! A city immortalized by a writer named Margaret Mitchell! (And she only wrote ONE book!)


Copyright© 2014 by Robert A.Mills, all rights reserved, may not be published, nor re-written nor broadcast the without author’s permission