Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Figure 16. North Carolina gully system circa 1911 (Glenn 1911, pl. iiib).
The social and economic impacts of colonial soil erosion were not limited
to the farmers who kept moving to find new land to grow tobacco. Just
as in ancient Greece and Rome, coastal ports became choked with sediment.
Most colonial port towns were located as far inland as possible to
minimize overland transport of tobacco. These locations, however, bore
the brunt of accelerated soil erosion when material stripped from hillsides
reached the estuaries. Half a century of upstream farming converted many
open-water ports to mud flats. John Taylor noted that silt washed from
hillsides by upland farming buried the bottomlands, filling in coastal rivers
and streams and plugging estuaries. At a time when rivers were the nation’s
highways, the sediments washed from hillsides into rivers and ports were
everybody’s problem.
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