The Towns Under the Lake

That pretty blue lake you've been driving alongside — Fontana — I told you it was haunted, and now I'll tell you why. Because to build it, they drowned people's homes. Whole communities are under that water, or cut off behind it, and the wound of it is still open today.

When the Second World War came, the government needed electricity, fast, for the war effort — so the TVA came into this valley and built Fontana Dam in a tearing hurry, and behind it this lake began to rise. And rising, it swallowed the valley of the Little Tennessee. More than a thousand families — over a thousand — were moved off their land, given a check and told to go. Little towns that had been here for generations went under: Judson, Bushnell, they're down there under the water, and at the low draw of winter you can sometimes see the ghost of Judson surface again in the mud. Other places, like Proctor up Hazel Creek, weren't drowned exactly — but the lake cut the road to them, so the people had to leave anyway, and the town just... stopped. Emptied out. The houses stand there yet, up a creek you can only reach now by boat.

Think on what that means. Not just houses — churches, schools, stores, the ball field, the graves of your grandparents. A whole world, three hundred years in the making, told to pack up in a matter of months so the water could come in over the top of it. Some folks understood the war needed it. That didn't make it hurt less. They stood on the ridge and watched the lake climb the walls of their own homes.

So when you look out at that lovely, peaceful water, see the second thing in it too. It's beautiful. And it's a flood that never went back down, sitting on top of a drowned world. The mountains gave up a valley for that dam, and the people gave up everything. Don't let anybody tell you it was free.