But Pleasure Boaters Love It : ‘Tenn-Tom’ Isn’t a Draw for Commercial Traffic

When the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway opened for business two years ago next month, the rugged, red-and-white towboat Eddie Waxler was chosen to make the first official passage, pushing four heavily loaded fuel barges.

The Waxler symbolized the dream of promoters that the $2-billion channel--the biggest and most controversial civil works project ever undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers--would become a major route for commercial traffic in the United States.

By linking the Tennessee River in northeastern Mississippi with the Tombigbee River in west-central Alabama, the 234-mile-long “Tenn-Tom” forms a shorter route from the American heartland to the Gulf of Mexico. Its enthusiasts envisioned barge trains streaming through it laden with millions of tons of coal from Appalachia, grain from the Farm Belt and timber from the South for world markets.

But as the long-disputed waterway prepares for its third year of operation, the heavy commercial traffic those backers foresaw has failed to materialize.

Bolstering critics’ arguments that the Tenn-Tom would amount to little more than a “$2-billion fishing hole,” the channel has become primarily a playground for the boating crowd--and officials worry that, among its other uses, it may also have opened a new route for drug smugglers.

Among the waterway’s biggest users now are what one Corps of Engineers official calls “fat cat” yachtsmen from Chicago and other points north who, in ever-increasing numbers, prefer the Tenn-Tom to the Mississippi when they migrate to Southern coastal waters in the fall and sail home in the spring.

Cruise companies also are beginning to join the picture. Last year, the 112-foot Viking Explorer ran its first cruise between Florida and St. Paul, Minn., by way of the Tenn-Tom and that cruise has since become a regular feature.

“It seems to attract just about anybody who has anything to do with the water,” James Chatham, owner of the Midway Marina here in Fulton, said, looking out over the Tenn-Tom as the late afternoon sun silhouetted the backdrop of graceful pines and splashed the deep-blue waters of the canal with golden highlights.

Markets Suffering

“On a typical spring day,” he said, “you’ll see skiers being pulled by their boats and fisherman out fishing in their boats and, behind them, a $2-million yacht passing by on its way back north from Florida. There’ll be some tows, too--but not in anywhere near the numbers there was supposed to be.”

A Corps of Engineers study had predicted there would be more than 27 million tons of commercial shipping--particularly cargoes of coal and grain--in the first full year of the Tenn-Tom’s life. In fact, in nearly two years, less than 5 million tons of barge traffic has moved.

“We couldn’t have opened at a worse time,” said Samuel R. Green, chief spokesman for the Corps of Engineers’ district office in Mobile, Ala. “The oil glut knocked the hell out of the coal market. The grain market was also shot as a result of the grain embargo in 1980. Those two commodities were going to be the mainstays of the Tenn-Tom traffic.”

Pleasure Boats Galore

But if commercial traffic hasn’t taken to the Tenn-Tom in the hoped-for numbers, boaters have exceeded all expectations. Last year, pleasure boats outnumbered commercial craft passing through the Aberdeen Lock in Mississippi, one of 10 locks on the waterway, by 1,280 to 433, according to the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Development Authority.

Promoters had hoped the Tenn-Tom would serve as a giant catalyst for new industry and economic benefits in impoverished northeastern Mississippi and western Alabama. A federal study made in 1978 predicted that its construction would result in the creation of about 135,000 new jobs, most of them in factories, by the year 2000.

But the biggest economic beneficiaries so far appear to be the marina operators, boat dealers, marine repairmen and bait store owners who have rushed in to serve the pleasure boat trade.

“Our business has turned out to be much more profitable than we ever imagined it would be,” said Carolyn Chatham, 47, who operates Fulton’s Midway Marina with her husband, James. “We started out with a single pier with slips for about 20 small boats. Now we have three piers with room for 65 to 70 boats of all sizes and full services, including telephones and cable TV.”

‘Folks Kind of Laughed’

The marina, which is set on a gently sloping 35-acre site overlooking the channel, also boasts a brand-new 200-seat restaurant, with a genuine Cajun pirogue, or wooden canoe, as the salad bar.

Nine of the boats now moored at the marina’s piers belong to Northern yachtsmen who used to winter their craft in Florida but now prefer Fulton because of its more temperate climate and shorter distance from home.

“Folks kind of laughed at us when we were building the first pier in 1984,” she said. “It was all dry land down there then. But I told them to remember Noah: you have to have faith. And then, one day, the water started rolling down.”

And with it, she added, the dollars. The marina has been so successful that her husband sold his automotive parts business and she quit her teaching job to run the facility full-time.

Busy and Growing

But while Midway Marina is busy and growing, a port facility and industrial park that is being built with public money four miles downstream is still in the early stages of construction--and, so far, it has few if any solid prospects for occupancy when the doors open for business.

“There aren’t any figures available to back me up, but I don’t think it would be going too far out on a limb to say that the biggest producer of revenue along the Tenn-Tom these days is recreational boating,” said corps spokesman Green.

One potential economic activity that worries officials, however, is drug smuggling.

The Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, prompted by the arrest of four “known drug smugglers” aboard a stolen deep-sea fishing boat last spring, is convinced that the waterway is almost certainly being used as a pipeline for illegal drugs. No cache of drugs was found aboard the boat, and not a single narcotics confiscation has been made elsewhere on the Tenn-Tom.

But drug enforcement officials fear that where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

‘Opportunity Is There’

“We don’t have any idea as to how big a problem there is . . . but the opportunity is certainly there for smugglers to piggyback drugs in barges or hide them on pleasure boats,” said Dan Davis, associate director of the Mississippi narcotics agency. “You can enter the Tenn-Tom at the Gulf of Mexico and go all the way up to Ohio without anybody stopping you.”

The unexpected success of recreational boating on the Tenn-Tom has prompted many a community along the waterway to redirect its economic development efforts. In Columbus, Miss., a town of 30,000 that was once a booming capital of the lush “Black Prairie” cotton empire in the 1800s, county and local leaders and Chamber of Commerce staffs are joining forces to promote the area’s tourist attractions in a big way.

Columbus is the birthplace of playwright Tennessee Williams, the site of the nation’s first state-supported college for women and the home of more than 100 antebellum Greek Revival mansions, including a magnificent plantation home known as Waverley that dates back to the 1850s with a distinctive octagonal-shaped cupola.

‘The Unsung Heroes’

“We used to think of development chiefly in terms of the commercial traffic and the industrial growth that the Tenn-Tom promised,” said Charleigh D. Ford Jr., executive director of the Columbus-Lowndes Chamber of Commerce. “But recreational boating and tourism are rapidly turning out to be the unsung heroes in all this.”

One restaurant in Columbus already has a courtesy phone at the Tote ‘n’ Float Marina in nearby West Point. Boaters can phone in and have a courtesy car pick them up for a night out dining.

Private developers also are hoping to cash in on the Tenn-Tom’s new-found promise. Danny Finn, owner of the Depot Restaurant in downtown Columbus, said he and two other businessmen are making plans for a resort complex that would include a 250-slip marina, 100 vacation condominiums, a convention facility and tennis and racquetball courts.

A Royal Flush

“Columbus is going to be one of the hottest spots between Tennessee and the Gulf of Mexico in a few years,” he said, as his eyes brightened like those of a river-boat gambler being dealt a royal flush.

Green said other resorts on the drawing board include projects that will cost an estimated $25 million to $30 million each at Aberdeen and in Tishomingo County, Miss.

“I think some of these guys are developing a Disneyland complex,” Green said. “Originally, they would have been happy with a park with trees, a few picnic tables and maybe a tennis court and swimming pool. But some of those country boys up there are thinking big tourist bucks.”

Pat Ross, assistant administrator of the Columbus-based Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Development Authority, said there are several reasons for the waterway’s popularity with private boaters. Among them are the chain of large lakes that the canal created and the 13,000 acres of land set aside along the banks for outdoor recreation.

No Treacherous Currents

“It’s scenic, it’s slack water so you don’t have any treacherous currents to fight and, for people transiting to or from the Gulf, it can save hundreds of miles over the traditional Mississippi River route,” she said.

But, critics contend, if the Tenn-Tom is to live up to its potential and justify its enormous price tag, it must also attract more muscular industrial and commercial development to its banks.

From the time the project was first conceived in the 1800s as a means of linking more than 16,000 miles of navigable inland rivers and waterways in 14 states, industrial development has been its main selling point. It was on that basis also that the Tenn-Tom’s boosters defended the staggering congressional appropriations required to keep the project alive during its 12 years of construction.

Asset With Wider Potential

“The growth in recreational boating and tourism is something Alabama and Mississippi can sorely use,” said David Cheng, a research economist with the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. “But we have an asset with a much wider potential and efforts should be made to encourage industrial development as well.”

However, the experience of Greene County, in the “Black Belt” of Alabama, well illustrates the problems that many communities in the region face.

The county economic development board spent more than $10 million on a barge-loading facility and an adjacent 2,000-acre industrial park in hopes of attracting new business to the area, which has an unemployment rate of more than 14% and a per capita income of around $7,000 annually.

To date, however, only one business has located there: a Scott Paper Co. log-handling facility that employs about a half-dozen workers. A German firm that bought 500 acres of prime property for about $2,000 an acre a few years back has since reneged on its promise to build, and negotiations for construction of a pickle-processing plant remain bogged down.

Booker T. Cooke Jr., Greene County’s director of planning and development, said the county’s efforts to improve the picture have been hampered by unsound decisions made by the local industrial development board, the lack of expertise in economic development and the often subtle but still strong racial discrimination the majority-black county faces.

‘A Prime Example’

“Here’s a prime example,” he said. “We were negotiating with a Canadian firm that stamps out metal parts for automobiles. The man from the company told me that when he was at the state development office, which is responsible for recruiting industry for Alabama, he was asked if he wouldn’t want to locate somewhere with a lower percentage of blacks.

“He said our own state economic development people told him that the blacks in Greene County have a low educational level, are shiftless and don’t like to work. Can you beat that?”

Cooke said the county is now in the process of reorganizing its economic development effort and hopes to hire an East Coast consultant on industrial locations to provide more expertise.