Savannah River

For nearly its whole length the Savannah River is the line between Georgia and South Carolina, a boundary first set in the 1787 Treaty of Beaufort and still argued over in court two centuries later. The river forms where the Tugaloo and Seneca rivers meet, a junction now drowned beneath Lake Hartwell, and runs 301 miles (484 km) southeast to the Atlantic near Tybee Island. Its basin of roughly 10,600 square miles (27,400 km²) reaches into the Blue Ridge of North Carolina.

Two colonial cities anchor it. Savannah was founded in 1733 near the river's tidal mouth and is now home to one of the busiest container ports in the country. Augusta was founded in 1736 at the fall line, the head of navigation. In the 1950s the federal government built the Savannah River Site, a 310-square-mile (800 km²) nuclear complex on the South Carolina bank that produced plutonium and tritium during the Cold War. Upstream, three Army Corps of Engineers dams, Hartwell, Richard B. Russell and J. Strom Thurmond, turned the upper river into a chain of large reservoirs.

• North Carolina
  The Tar Heel State, from the Blue Ridge to the Outer Banks drains
• Savannah
  Georgia's historic port city of oak-shaded squares flows through
• Georgia
  The largest state east of the Mississippi by area located in
• South Carolina
  The Palmetto State, from the Blue Ridge to the Lowcountry located in
• Port of Savannah
  The largest single container terminal in North America serves