Georgia's "Little Grand Canyon" was carved by 1820s cotton farming
The Coastal Plain of southwest Georgia is, geologically speaking, very soft. The bedrock is unconsolidated sand and clay deposited 65 million years ago when the entire region was sea floor. The topsoil that grew on top of that bedrock, over the next 50 million years, was thin — maybe two feet at the deepest. It held the land together. It was held in place by deep-rooted native grasses and longleaf pine.
In the 1820s, white settlers arriving in southwest Georgia did what 19th-century American settlers did everywhere: they cleared the forest, plowed up the grasses, and planted cotton. Cotton is a row crop. Row crops leave bare ground between plants, and bare ground sheds water. The plantation owners plowed their fields right up to the property lines. They built no terraces, dug no drainage. The first major rains hit the freshly-plowed fields and the two feet of topsoil started moving.
The pace was alarming from the start. By the 1850s, Stewart County farmers were watching gullies appear in their fields that they couldn't cross with a wagon. By the 1890s, the gullies were 50 feet deep. By 1920, 100 feet. The state government tried to intervene, but the damage was self-sustaining: every rainstorm enlarged the gullies, the gullies undercut more soil, the soil flowed down the gullies, the gullies got deeper. The exposed walls revealed layers of pink, orange, red, and white sand that had been laid down 65 million years before — bands of color that no human had ever seen before they were exposed by terrible farming.
By the time Georgia made the area a state park in 1971, there were 16 canyons up to 150 feet deep. They became known locally as the Little Grand Canyon. The land at the rim is still essentially flat — pilots scanning the ground notice it as a sudden colored gash in otherwise unremarkable farmland. Native vegetation has reclaimed the slopes. The walls are stable now, and the canyons get a little deeper every year. From altitude, Providence Canyon is one of the most distinctive features in the entire Coastal Plain — a man-made geological accident on a scale that would normally take a million years to produce.