My home town, is a
HALF mile down
Appalachian towns inundated for the creation of TVA Dams
[1]
"Now I look down on the water
That rose up on that day
By the banks of the old Watauga
Where I once used to play"
Read more lyrics from Old Crow Medicine Show's song Half Mile Down
In 1933, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed into law, the Tennessee Valley Authority after years of previous conservative presidents rejecting the idea of massive government owned properties. The purpose of such an act was simple- reduce flooding in the Tennessee Valley, to aid in the development of the land and its people, and aid in national defense [2]. Since its creation, the TVA has brought into existence 29 dams, 5 fossil plants, 3 nuclear plants, and a number of other power-generating sources like natural gas sites [3]. Though we have seen its successes almost 100 years into the future [4], at the time it was uncharted territory for both the government and its citizens.
It is easy in the 21st century to see today the positive effects of the TVA's creations- bodies of water created from their dams that provide everlasting summer memories, riverbanks that no longer flood uncontrollably, cheap and clean electricity- there are some consequences to these dams that are not as known, even to the people living in the areas around the dam created lakes.
Inundation. A word meaning to flush or flood something out. And that is exactly what happened to many towns situated right where most Tennessee lakes are today. Countless numbers of families were forced to move from their homes, often land on which they and their parents and their parent's parents had lived for over one hundred years, onto new land outside the reach of the new lakes that would be created. The video to the right is from 1936, the year that the first TVA dam, Norris Dam, was created [5,6].
The goal of my project is to give light to these people that have been forgotten, even by their neighbors and descendants. I want to feel and understand their pain, sorrows, worries, to understand and listen to what they went through when others during the time did not. By understanding and listening to these people who had their homes and lives and even other family members taken from them, it is easy to understand just how important the connection to one place can be.