Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010
There’s a waterfall in the river not too far from my home. Well, more a series of waterfalls, plus a few areas of rapids. None are too impressive, the farthest falling only a few feet. Still, it adds up to a respectable drop as the river goes over the fall line.
Perhaps I should explain that last term.
The fall line is a line connecting all the waterfalls that occur when streams cross from the hard rock of the piedmont, essentially the edge of the Appalacian mountains (though it has worn to gentle hills in most areas by the time it hits the edge) and the soft sands of the coastal plain between the mountains and the sea. It’s a fairly straight line, too, and runs for quite a distance. It’s really close to the shore near New York City, where the hard rock of the Palisades goes all the way up to the Hudson River, and rather far from the shore near the southern end, being near Atlanta.
One easy way to tell where it is is to look at the cities, actually. A lot of cities got founded right near it, since the rivers were navigable right up to where you hit this line, so trade could easily flow up to that point, but not past. It also powered a lot of mills and other industries, since it was easy to power a waterwheel by a waterfall. You didn’t need to haul the water up, after all. So a lot of the pre-electricity cities founded along the east coast both dot this line and became rather important due to being where trade and industry met.
I love finding odd little geographical tidbits like that. Who would have thought that the odd quirk of the water dropping just a little as it went from one type of terrain to the next would have such an impact on so many people who now lead their lives by these falls?
I do wish people would respect them more, and not let their water bottles get caught up in them. Ah well, a girl can dream.
