Ogeechee River

Ogeechee River
The Ogeechee River near Savannah, Georgia
Country	United States
State	Georgia (U.S. state)
Tributaries
- left	Canoochee River

The Ogeechee River is a 294-mile-long (473 km)blackwater river in the U.S. state of Georgia. It heads at the confluence of its North and South Forks, about 2.5 miles (4.0 km) south-southwest of Crawfordville and flowing generally southeast to Ossabaw Sound about 16 miles (26 km) south of Savannah. Its largest tributary is the Canoochee River, which drains approximately 1,400 square miles (3,600 km²) and is the only other major river in the basin. The Ogeechee has a watershed of 5,540 square miles (14,300 km²). It is one of the state's few free-flowing streams.

The Ogeechee runs from the Piedmont across the fall line and sandhill region. There it flows across the coastal plain of Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean. From a shallow clear running stream with several shoals, rapids, and a small falls at Shoals, below Louisville the river becomes a lazy meandering channel through cypress swamps and miles of undeveloped forests.

The Ogeechee River basin contains parts of the Piedmont and Coastal Plain physiographic provinces, which extend throughout the southeastern United States. This boundary follows the contact between older crystalline metamorphic rocks of the Piedmont Province and the younger unconsolidated Cretaceous and Tertiary sediments of the Coastal Plain Province. Other rock types found in the basin include metasedimentary rock, schists and phyllites, felsic and mafic metavolcanic rocks, and amphibolite. Coastal Plain sediments overlap the igneous and metamorphic rocks of the southern edge of the Piedmont Province at the Fall Line.