Taming the Muskingum by Emory L. Kemp (review)

The Muskingum River snakes its way through eastern Ohio to join the Ohio River at Marietta. It has long been an important commercial waterway, yet its frequent floods have threatened lives and property along its banks. In Taming the Muskingum, Emory Kemp explores nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to manage and improve the river and its tributaries for navigation, flood control, and conservation. Summarizing the importance of human work in the river basin, Kemp notes "one should consider that many currents in water-resource management find a confluence in the early Muskingum Navigation and later Watershed Flood Control Project" (p. 126).

The book's organization is both chronological and topical. The first two chapters describe early settlers' use of the Muskingum and its tributaries and their efforts at navigational improvements, primarily in the form of canalization and slackwater dams. Kemp briefly contextualizes the work on the Muskingum as part of broader efforts along the Ohio's major tributaries before the Civil War and explains how technological advances—primarily in the form of railroads—resulted in a relatively short era of profitable canal commerce. Chapter 3 turns to the increasing concern for flood control provoked by a series of damaging freshets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably the 1913 flood that proved so devastating across much of Ohio. Damage in the Muskingum and Miami watersheds contributed to the Flood Control Act of 1917, which formally committed the federal government to flood control work. The fourth chapter is essentially a quick tutorial on "the 'state of the art' with regard to both earth and concrete hydraulic structures" in the 1930s (p. 64), followed by a final chapter describing the construction efforts of the Muskingum Watershed Conservation District (MWCD). This is the most detailed and contextualized portion of the book, outlining the work of numerous dam projects, the challenges of land acquisition in the district, and ongoing regional watershed management.

The book is in many ways "old-fashioned" history of technology. Kemp certainly knows his stuff, taking readers deep into the engineering and operational details of water management, drawing on his own engineering expertise as well as his extensive writing on other Ohio Valley water management projects. Sections of the text are enjoyably immersive, pulling readers in with fine-grained details; who knew that lines of saturation, hydraulic gradients, and spillway shapes could be so fascinating? Largely absent from the book, however, are broader framings of the origins and effects of technological systems, in this case a navigation, flood control, and conservation network that reshaped an expansive watershed. The voluminous body of literature on water management in the United States, especially the work of environmental historians on the American West (and, more recently, the Southeast), is notably absent. Chapter 5 comes closest to engaging with broader scholarly debates, as it does briefly explore the varied meanings of the MWCD for regional residents and some of the obstacles that engineers and contractors encountered in executing the flood control plan. Even here, in an interesting discussion of the intricacies of acquiring land for MWCD projects, little comparison is made to the numerous similar dispossessions nationally at the behest of a range of New Deal agencies.

Kemp writes in a straightforward style, and the numerous technical terms are for the most part clearly defined. He relies on government reports, the MWCD's papers, and local histories as his source base. The book is copiously illustrated with period photographs and engineering diagrams (some, it appears, from the author's personal collection). Missing, however, is a map showing Ohio's waterways, something that would be particularly useful given the author's frequent discussion of the courses of and relationships between the state's rivers. An appendix quickly outlining eastern Ohio's geological and environmental history would work better if incorporated into the book's first chapter, where these details could help readers better understand the material realities and challenges of regional hydrology.

Hydraulic engineers, New Deal historians...