The Road to Nowhere

The North Shore is now so isolated that it can be reached only by a long hike or a boat ride. Going home was not supposed to be so difficult, Vance says. In 1943, the federal government promised to build a road around the lake so that the displaced residents could return for visits. The promise has not been kept.

"My dad and mother thought they'd see the road built in their lifetimes," Vance says. "Both my brothers died without seeing it."

Vance is a co-founder of the North Shore Cemetery Association. Every year she helps organize numerous trips across the lake to tend dozens of remote cemeteries that were left isolated. Such cemetery visits are called Decoration Days and are a common cultural practice across Appalachia. The purpose is to bring together families and neighbors and to honor departed ancestors. But Decoration Days on the North Shore have accrued an additional meaning. Vance and many of her former neighbors gathered here today are crossing the lake to keep alive the memory of a community that was washed off the map.

LESS THAN A MONTH after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Tennessee Valley Authority announced plans for construction of a 480-foot dam along the Little Tennessee River, whose electricity would power an aluminum plant in nearby Alcoa, Tenn. The resulting lake was going to displace hundreds of families, mostly those of poor farmers, miners and lumber workers. TVA paid about $20 an acre--a paltry rate, said many residents, whose dislocation was publicly justified as part of the war effort. One TVA poster read:

We are building this dam

To make the power

To roll the aluminum

To build the bombers

To beat the bastards.

Before the waters rose, the village of Proctor sat beside Hazel Creek in the Smoky Mountain hollows of western North Carolina, not far from the Tennessee border. Proctor boasted a theater, a school, three stores and a Baptist church, of which Helen Vance--then Helen Cable--was a member. The town had landed on hard times even before the ravages of the Great Depression. In 1927, the town's main employer, Ritter Lumber, closed its sawmill. By the end of the 1930s, the majority of families in Swain County, which included Proctor, were on relief rolls.

But Vance recalls growing up around Proctor with dignity. She lived with her parents and five siblings beyond the outskirts of town, near the river, in a two-story frame house that, like many in the area, had neither electricity nor running water. In summertime the children went barefoot, not wanting to wear thin their school shoes, whose purchase required scarce cash. Henry Cable, Vance's father, would make about a dollar a day, she says, working whenever he could in the region's sawmills. But the Cable family survived the bleakest days of the Depression mostly by farming and foraging. Canning season began in July, when the blackberry bushes teemed. Later, huckleberries ripened across the mountainsides, and Vance, along with her two older brothers, set out to fill their metal pails. Occasionally a bear would wander down from the mountains, get itself shot and provide the family with a plunder of meat. They may have been poor, she says, but so was everyone else in town, and the family never lacked food.

In 1942, the Cable family learned that its home sat in the flood zone. Henry Cable had started building the house in 1929. As the Depression took hold, construction became too expensive, and the house was never completed. Now the dam guaranteed it never would be. But TVA's roughly $70 million behemoth was not all bad news. Cable got a job helping to build Fontana Dam and earned more than $1 an hour, Vance says. "That was good money at that time."