Now here's the one I promised — the reason this whole impossible road exists. And it starts, of all places, at a little club meeting in Tellico Plains in the spring of nineteen fifty-eight.
For generations, the folks on the Tennessee side and the folks over in North Carolina were neighbors separated by a wall of mountain. To get from Tellico Plains to Robbinsville you had to drive way around — hours out of your way — because there was no road across the top. They'd been begging the government for one for ages, and getting nowhere. Until a fellow named Sam Williams stood up at a Kiwanis Club meeting with an idea so foolish it was brilliant. He said, more or less: our roads out here are so bad we might as well cross the mountain the old way — in covered wagons. Let's do it, and let's make sure everybody's watching.
And by heaven, they did. On the fourth of July, nineteen fifty-eight, sixty-seven covered wagons and better than three hundred riders on horseback set out from Tellico Plains and hauled themselves up and over that mountain, retracing the old pioneer route all the way to Murphy, North Carolina. It was a spectacle — newspapers, newsreels, crowds — a bunch of stubborn mountain people staging an eighteen-hundreds wagon crossing to embarrass the government into the twentieth century. And it worked. They ran it every year, the attention built, and the money finally came.
So the next time somebody tells you that you can't fight city hall, you tell them about a little town that hitched up sixty-seven wagons and shamed a hundred-million-dollar road right out of the mountainside. This magnificent piece of engineering under your tires? It was born from covered wagons and pure mountain stubbornness. I love that with my whole heart.
Photo: Fernand Lungren · Public domain
