Qualla: Columbia Canal https://qualla.com/columbia-canal en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:06 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Columbia Canal https://qualla.com/columbia-canal Columbia Canal: Introduction https://qualla.com/columbia-canal/ The men who dug the Columbia Canal between 1820 and 1824 came over from Ireland on indenture contracts that promised them passage and wages in exchange for their backs. Many of them are buried at St. Peter's Catholic Church four blocks east. They died of cholera, of dysentery, of the malarial summers along the Congaree, and of the simple accumulated brutality of moving a Fall Line's worth of earth with picks and mule carts. The canal they finished - three and a tenth miles long, with four lifting locks descending 34 feet around the rapids where the Broad and Saluda Rivers meet to form the Congaree - made river commerce possible between the upcountry and the Lowcountry for exactly sixteen years before the railroads arrived and made the whole effort obsolete.

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]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/n/3/columbia-canal-wp/dnn3-columbia-canal-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Columbia Canal: 1824: A Canal Around the Falls https://qualla.com/columbia-canal/ South Carolina built it the way states built things in the early nineteenth century: with public subsidy and indentured labor, on a route surveyed to follow a natural ravine between Columbia and the river. The completed channel ran 3.1 miles along the Congaree, from a point betwe...

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]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/n/3/columbia-canal-wp/dnn3-columbia-canal-1824-a-canal-around-the-falls.mp3 0:06 2 full Columbia Canal: 1891: A Canal That Made Power https://qualla.com/columbia-canal/ In 1888 a new generation of engineers redesigned the canal not for boats but for electricity. The reworked channel started at Gervais Street and extended three and a half miles north, 150 feet wide and ten feet deep - a moving column of water massive enough to spin industrial tur...

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]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/n/3/columbia-canal-wp/dnn3-columbia-canal-1891-a-canal-that-made-power.mp3 0:06 3 full Columbia Canal: Memorial and Flood https://qualla.com/columbia-canal/ In September 2008 the St. Columbia division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians dedicated a granite memorial along the canal to the Irish laborers who dug it. Some are named on the stone; most are not. Then, in early October 2015, the same storm system that devastated parts of Sou...

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]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/n/3/columbia-canal-wp/dnn3-columbia-canal-memorial-and-flood.mp3 0:06 4 full