Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Figure 14. Charles Lyell’s illustration of a gully near Milledgeville, Georgia, in the
1840s (Lyell 1849, fig. 7).
methods. Still, the more diversified northern economy made the effects of
soil depletion on northern states less pronounced than in the South.
In the 1840s British geologist Charles Lyell toured the antebellum South,
stopping to investigate deep gullies gouged into the recently cleared fields
of Alabama and Georgia. Primarily interested in the gullies as a way to peer
down into the deeply weathered rocks beneath the soil, Lyell noted the
rapidity with which the overlying soil eroded after forest clearing. Across
the region, the consistent lack of evidence for prior episodes of gully for-
w estward hoe 131