Natural erosion by wind and water created many of the landmarks now protected by national and state parks in the United States. Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon, the Badlands—erosion is the centerpiece of some of the most famous landscapes in the country. But as far as I’m aware, there’s only one state park devoted to showcasing manmade soil erosion. That’s Providence Canyon State Park in Lumpkin, Georgia.
I’ve not had the opportunity to see Providence Canyon for myself yet, but the photos on the park’s website are beautiful and reminiscent of the larger canyons of the West. “The earth strata changed from red to yellow to brown, mauve, lavender, jade, ochre, orange and chalk white,” journalist Stuart Chase wrote back in 1935. “Pinnacles rose from the gully floor, sometimes with a solitary pine tree on their top at the level of the old land, banded and frescoed with color.” While briefly noting that the canyon was "caused simply by poor farming practices during the 1800s," the website doesn’t mention that Providence Canyon was one of the most frequently cited examples of the dangers of soil erosion in the 1930s.
Up through the mid-nineteenth century, Providence Canyon didn’t exist. These three thousand acres of land in Stewart County, Georgia were occupied by farms, homes, schools, and churches. But when farmers plowed up and down hills, left soil bare between crops, and failed to return enough organic matter to the soil, the erosion started. Sheet erosion turned into small rills, which soon turned into enormous gullies that started undercutting fields and buildings. Once the gullies reached a depth of 150 feet, it was too late for farmers to stop them.
“Even when some sort of protective weed or forest cover has formed, the walls keep caving under, eating back,” USDA writer Russell Lord wrote in the 1938 bulletin To Hold This Soil. “After heavy rain, it is said, you can sometimes hear them crumbling and crashing from considerable distances. When such a gully throws an arm across a road, that road is gone. When it turns an arm toward a farmstead, that family has cause to consider moving.” Smaller gullies could be restored by leveling the sides and planting them with quick-growing vegetation. But Providence Canyon was too big and too far gone. It could never be farmed again.
US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz was thinking of the kind of agriculture that caused Providence Canyon when he said in 1971, “We can go back to organic agriculture in this country if we must—we once farmed that way 75 years ago. We know how to do it. However, before we move in that direction, someone must decide which 50 millions of our people will starve.” What Butz failed to realize was that the destructive farming of the late nineteenth century was not organic agriculture—in fact, organic agriculture was created in response to the erosion crisis.
The type of dramatic gully erosion that formed Providence Canyon is fortunately a thing of the past—both modern conventional and organic agriculture prevent that type of severe erosion. Meanwhile, Providence Canyon remains. While Georgia irreparably lost 3,000 acres of farmland, it gained a “Little Grand Canyon,” now a state park with hiking trails, backcountry campsites, colorful canyons, forests, and the rare plumleaf azalea. Yesterday’s environmental disaster is today’s outdoor recreation destination.