The Chattahoochee drops 125 feet in two and one half miles across the fall line, creating 99,000 horsepower of energy and making it the South’s largest potential waterpower site until 1900. In the 1840s and 1850s, local entrepreneurs built four textile mills, a gristmill, and a sawmill along the river between 12th and 14th Streets. Union troops burned these factories in 1865. By 1876, William Young’s Eagle and Phenix Mills, the large buildings at the dam, dominated the city’s economy and ranked as the South’s largest textile mill. The Eagle and Phenix powerhouses, with their original turbines from 1899 and generators from 1908-1920 just upstream of the River Club, remain functioning hydropower museums and are a National Historic Landmark.