SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



a great industrial city with scores of textile mills, shoe 

 factories, woodworking plants. Like the aimless side- 

 walks of Muscle Shoals, row after row of great maples 

 that he planted across the open fields behind the gigan- 

 tic plants that now string along the Niagara River bear 

 silent testimony to his city-planning that came to 

 naught. 



What Schoellkof and his business associates did not 

 foresee was that cheap power is not a magnet to attract 

 light industry. At least it is not sufficiently strong to 

 offset a favorable labor supply, proximity to raw ma- 

 terials or to markets, or any of the other logical reasons 

 that commonly determine the location of a plant. But 

 big blocks of cheap power do attract those industries 

 that actually consume electrical energy in their proc- 

 esses, and within a couple of years cheap power made 

 Niagara Falls the American electrochemical and elec- 

 trometallurgical headquarters. It remains to this day 

 the country's great center for carbide and ferroalloys, 

 abrasives and refractories, alkalies and chlorine. 



This logical element in industrial practice has put the 

 Authority in the uncomfortable, and unwarranted, posi- 

 tion of being damned if they do and damned if they 

 don't. Inevitably the best progress made in attracting 

 industries to the region has been among the same types 

 of operation that flocked to Niagara Falls. They are con- 

 sumers of big blocks of power to process the available 

 mineral resources, in this case phosphate rock and baux- 



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