The hike was billed as a four-mile “walk” through part of the Smoky Mountains. But that estimate came from David Monteith, a commissioner in Swain County, N.C., and, more to the point, an activist whose cause rises to the level of fierce obsession. Likable and loquacious, Monteith shrugs off obstacles in minimalist terms, and describes benefits with sanctifying embellishment.
My Global Positioning System, which clearly had a better grasp of reality than Monteith, told me that by the end of the day, I’d trekked eight-and-a-half miles. All of it was in two directions: Up and down. By the denouement, “down” was proving more deadly — especially to my knees — than the merely fatigue-inducing “up.”
But, hey, I made it.
Monteith led a group of about 20 to the North Shore of Lake Fontana, a 10,000-acre reservoir along the southern border of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.
A very spry Hugh Jenkins, at 85, was by far the oldest of the explorers. Early on a hug-yourself-and-stamp-your-feet-it’s-so-cool May morning, as we waited for a pontoon boat to carry us across Lake Fontana, Jenkins told his story. In his modest parable was the kernel of a dispute that has heated tempers among ornery western North Carolinians for 62 years.
It’s a conflict where both sides are right, each in their own way, and no one is a villain — except the federal government, but that goes without saying. On the one side are salt-of-the-earth mountain people who feel their history has been ripped from them. Their opponents are environmentalists, worthy tree-huggers who want to preserve an irreplaceable treasure.
“I joined up with the Army in ’40,” Jenkins told me. He spoke in mountain twang, the beguiling accent that, to my Miami-bred ears, resembles a soft brogue with a liberal dash of Tabasco. “Street” translates as “strait,” “over here” as “o-hee-yah.”
Jenkins was the only one of the hikers with enough sense to wear a cap with earflaps. I was envious. “I ended up in New Guinea,” he said. “When I came home …” He shook his head, and his son, Jim, picked up the slack:
“Our family is from all around here. Jenkins is a well-known name.” Later that day, we’d cross a path marked as the “Jenkins Ridge Trail.” Jim would tell me, “Yep, our kinfolk.”
“Everything was gone,” Hugh resumed. “It had all changed when I came home from the war.”
The instrument of change was the Fontana Dam, 480 feet of steel and concrete spanning the Little Tennessee River. Two days before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. House approved funding for the dam, and two days after the Japanese attack, the Senate concurred. Construction began in 1942, and finished two years later.
At the time, the Tennessee Valley Authority was hungry for power — the electric variety. Massive generation from a chain of dams was needed for aluminum smelters in Tennessee. The power made the aluminum and the aluminum made the planes and the planes helped make the victory over the Japs and Nazis.
There were even more important reasons, the top-secret kind, for the dams. One of our companions, Earl Kirkland — another name that dots the local landscape — lowered his voice and said, “They needed the power for the atomic bomb at Oak Ridge.”
Kirkland waved towards the lake. “Boys like Mr. Jenkins here went to war, and when they came home, they found this. They had no home.”
Jenkins actually grew up outside the flood zone, in Whittier. But many of his family lived in hamlets now long gone — either washed away or rendered nearly inaccessible — because of the lake. “I didn’t know they were going to flood all of this. I came home, and all of the towns and homes I’d remembered from when I was a boy were gone.”
Monteith said people settled with the government for as little as $7 an acre for their land. Some lucky families got $20 an acre. Nothing for houses or other structures.
“These people gave up everything they had for the war effort,” Monteith said. “The government told people, ‘We’re going to build a bomb to end the war, but we’ll build you a road so you can get back to your land.’ They haven’t kept their word. It’s a contract we had with the federal government. A contract.”
That “we” is not exactly correct. None of the activists has legal standing in the dispute over the road. The parties to a 1943 agreement were the TVA, the U.S. Interior Department, Swain County and North Carolina. That deal called for building a new road, part of the Interior Department’s “Around the Park” project. From Bryson City at the eastern end of the lake, the road’s projected path winds through the North Shore and west to the dam.
About a mile of the road was constructed near the dam, as well as six miles at the other end, near Bryson City. The longer stretch ends at a 1,200-foot-long tunnel, a tunnel to nowhere for what is now a road to nowhere. What’s missing is the middle of the road, 29 to 38 miles, depending on the exact route.
Kirkland sported a red baseball hat with the legend “Build the Road.” A white Ford next to my car at our adventure’s launch site, the Cable Cove boat ramp near the dam, had a bumper sticker with the same admonition. So did a half dozen other cars and pickups at Cable Cove — and hundreds more in the towns around the lake. If you drive on the aborted highway outside Bryson City, an aging sign proclaims: “Welcome to the Road to Nowhere. A Broken Promise. 1943 – ?”
When Lake Fontana flooded the river valley, it submerged N.C. 288, a rural artery that had accessed about 44,000 acres of what is now called the North Shore. That land, which would eventually become part of the national park, cradled villages, homes, schools, churches, theaters, ice cream shops and a thriving logging industry. “Half of Swain County lived there,” Monteith told me as we sped on the half-hour voyage across gray-glass water steaming with the morning chill. “There were 14,000 people in the county then.” He paused and added, “Countin’ Cherokees.”
Monteith said Swain County now has 11,000 people. The 2003 Census estimate is 13,126, but the message still holds — the lake drove a lot of people away, 7,000 by Monteith’s estimate. Environmentalists point to government figures that show only 264 families were displaced when the lake was flooded.
Our destination that day was Hazel Creek, a frothy mountain stream where the town of Proctor, first settled in the 1850s, once thrived.
Linda Hogue, a teacher for three decades, is chairwoman of a citizens’ committee that wants to build a new road. She’s a formidable woman with a jutting chin and a schoolmarm’s no-nonsense glare when she lectures. I followed her up a hill toward where Proctor’s school once stood.
“Look-y at this,” she beamed, bending down to brush away dirt and leaves from what would turn out to be an intricate iron side of an old student desk. “I’ve found desks before, but nothing so elegant as this.” Monteith peered at the artifact, and shrugged, “And the Park Service says there’s no history on the North Shore.”
Monteith doesn’t have much love for the Park Service. He repeatedly told the trekkers about how when the rangers would find an old home, they’d burn it. Or, how they’d break jars, dishes and other household items so park visitors wouldn’t carry them out. (The rangers confirmed that years ago, abandoned houses were demolished — after owners were given the option of dismantling and moving them.)
“Trying to erase our history,” Monteith groused in a torrent of swollen words. “Trying to erase that people were ever here. And it’s not just white people I’m talking about. Wherever white people settled, Indians had settled there before. Their culture has been erased, too.”
Hogue chimed in: “They knew the lake would never back up this far. They destroyed all of this because they didn’t want people to come back. This could have been a wonderful museum.”
Proctor in its heyday was a booming one-industry town anchored by the W.M. Ritter Lumber Co. Good jobs during days when work was hard to find. Ritter moved out in 1928, but the town remained and lurched through the Depression, a little shabby but still a place to call home.
Wealthier folks lived on the south side of the creek, along Strutting Street — or, as Hogue observed, “Struttin’ because when they went for walks along the boardwalks, they strutted, if you know what I mean.” The southside boardwalk went past the town commissary and the train depot.
On the north side was Calico Street, along with a community clubhouse, a theater, the Ritter family house and, of course, the Baptist church. About all that’s left now are a pump house and a “dry kiln,” a large structure where logs were dried.
Only one home remains in Proctor, the 1928-vintage Calhoun House, a once-fine place that is falling apart.
“The park service says they can’t restore it because bats are living in it and the bats are protected,” Hogue said shaking her head in disgust.
As we trooped out of Proctor, we passed the town cemetery. A mile or so up a trail is another graveyard. Monteith told me tales about many of the 33 cemeteries on the North Shore, including a burial site in a place called Bone Valley — named not for decomposing humans but for cattle that froze there more than a century ago.
The graveyards are oh-so important. More than 1,000 people are buried in them, and their descendants are among the strongest advocates for building the road. Hogue, Monteith and their compatriots organize regular visits to the cemeteries, pilgrimages whose unstated mission is to assert a spiritual claim to the land.
“We have baptisms, too,” Monteith declared, pointing at Hazel Creek. “Right down there is a baptizing hole.”
About three hours south of North Shore, in the South Carolina village of Walhalla, lives Monteith’s and Hogue’s nemesis, Ted Snyder. A former national president of the Sierra Club, the lawyer has passion to match that of the pro-road folks.
“It irritates me so much to hear those people say they’ve been wronged,” Snyder said. “That’s just all made up. They haven’t been wronged. Not one person was party to that agreement. The promise was made to Swain County.”
And promises can be broken. Or, at least, altered. The agreement to build a road is contingent on Congress approving the funds. If no money is allotted, the agreement is just so much paper whose only value is that of a historical footnote.
Descendants of the former residents filed a federal lawsuit to force construction of the road, and lost all the way up to the US Supreme Court, which stated in 1946 that when “serious problems” are created by public projects, “the government is not barred from making a common-sense adjustment in the interest of all the public.”
The road became another of Dixie’s lost causes — until 2000, when then-U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms and the congressman from the Bryson City area, Republican Charles Taylor, slipped $16 million into an appropriations bill for preliminary work on the North Shore road. Taylor and North Carolina’s current U.S. senators, Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr, support the road — but the backing of, at least, Burr is seen as lukewarm.
Where Monteith and Hogue rely on righteous arguments about justice and fairness, Snyder pulls out reams of research from his home’s stacked-with-literary-classics bookshelves.
“This is a 60 million-year-old forest,” he said. “When the Park Service nominated the park for the World Heritage List, it stressed that this was an example of evolution in progress. If you put a road through the North Shore, you’ll create an orphan strip, the biological process will be interrupted.”
A road would do much more, according to Snyder. It would expose porous rock containing iron pyrite. When water hits that rock, a chemical reaction occurs and sulfuric acid leaches out. “It will sterilize every stream and pond it reaches,” Snyder said, waving his hands in a don’t-do-that gesture.
North Shore’s topography is row upon row of finger ridges, and a road would require massive cuts and giant retaining walls. Snyder: “You’d see the scar from miles away.”
So, is there common ground between the “roaders” and the environmentalists? Ummm, no. But there may be a final chapter in the dispute. The Interior Department is currently conducting an environmental review of the likely impact of a road. Monteith called the study “any ploy to stop the road.” Based on the findings, one of three likely alternatives will be pursued:
¨ Extending the existing road from Bryson City another four to eight miles and building a destination, perhaps a local history center, at the end.
¨ Completing the full road. One possible route, across Fontana Dam, is already nixed. Monteith noted, “They don’t want terrorists rolling bombs down the dam.” Whatever the route, in addition to the cuts across ridge lines, it also would require as many as three bridges, each on a scale with the Brooklyn Bridge.
¨ Paying a cash settlement, estimated at $52 million, to Swain County. This is the option supported by the environmentalists, North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, four of the five Swain County commissioners (Monteith being the fifth), and many citizens. The annual interest alone on the settlement would equal about $2.6 million — just shy of what Swain Countians ante each year in property taxes.
The final arbiter is likely to be the cost of a road. Although road supporters claim an “industrial” surfaced thoroughfare could be built for less than $100 million, that’s more wishful thinking than reality. One official estimate is $374 million.
A similar highway, 20 miles of U.S. 64 near the Ocoee River gorge, had a bill of $2 billion for four lanes — thus, a two-lane North Shore road could have a tab of about a billion dollars.
Such estimates get gasps and guffaws of disbelief from Hogue and Monteith —and knowing nods from Snyder.
“It wouldn’t be near what they say it would cost,” Hogue told me. “Most of it would be on level terrain near the lake, and a lot would be on the old existing roadbeds.”
What does everyone else in the west end of North Carolina think about the road? Kyle Dixon, publisher of Bryson City’s newspaper, the Smoky Mountain Times, laughed and said he hasn’t voiced an editorial position “out of a sense of survival.”
The paper did an informal call-in survey on attitudes about the road. “It was close, but there were more for [the road] than against,” Dixon said. “Then suddenly, 2,000 people voted for the road. We knew something was up, and we pulled it.” Monteith had a slightly different spin: “The Smoky Mountain Times didn’t like the results, so they didn’t publish them until we raised hell.”
Monteith claimed all but one of 287 businesses he contacted in Swain County favor the road, and citizen support is at 71 percent (based on the newspaper poll). As I said at the beginning, obsession skews descriptions. I visited about 10 businesses in Bryson City and another half dozen on the road to Fontana Dam. Three proprietors said they’d support a road. The rest shrugged. One bed and breakfast operator sighed: “I don’t want trouble with David [Monteith]. His folks are red hot for the road. Most of us are just tired of hearing about it.”
One of Monteith’s foot soldiers, Earl Kirkland, commented during the boat ride to the North Shore that “the government and the environmentalists are just waiting for people here who care about our history to die out. And it’s happening.”
This article appears in Jun 1-7, 2005.
