Product details
- ISBN 9780820376882
- Dimensions: 279 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Sep 2026
- Publisher: University of Georgia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Today, few Southerners are aware of the economic, social, technological, and historical significance of the thousands of watermills that once stood along streams across the Southern landscape in the thousands. Beginning in the early twentieth century, however, the transition to newer technologies was rapid, making the visual preservation and written record of Southern watermills vital to our understanding of regional history. Driven by Ken Boyd’s remarkable photography from the past five decades, Historic Watermills of the South provides a rare glimpse into the history, evolution, and significance of Southern watermills to grind grain, saw lumber, power textile machines, and perform other useful work. Boyd uses more than two hundred fine-art color, black & white, and hand-tinted photographs to present an illustrated history of more than eighty watermills scattered across more than a dozen Southern states. These photographs vividly recount a way of life that has now passed. Indeed, a number of the images in Historic Watermills of the South photographically preserve watermills that no longer exist. And for others, these are the best-existing images of mills located in remote, rural, isolated, and often mountainous, marshy, or otherwise difficult locations. Boyd’s Historic Watermills of the South is a true visual preservation of a technology that changed the face of a region.
KEN BOYD is a photographer, researcher, and writer who has taught courses and published works on subjects ranging from traditional darkroom methods and vintage nineteenth-century photographic processes to creative digital techniques. He is the author of Historic Watermills of North America: A Visual Preservation, The Art of the Locomotive, and Historic North American Locomotives: An Illustrated Journey. Retired from a career in environmental research at Southern Company, Ken lives with his wife, Dori, also a photographic artist, in Hoover, Alabama.
