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The Tragic Backstory of One of the Roads

2025-01-10 16:46  views:77  source:小键人15070962    

High above Fontana Lake on the North Carolina side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park
lies the Road toNowhere: a winding 6.5-mile pass that dead ends at a 1200-foot tunnel acce
ssible only by foot. In the 1940s, to facilitate the construction of Fontana Lake and Dam,
the Tennessee Valley Authority(TVA) assured approximately 200 Appalachia families that th
ey would construct a road to enable them to visit their ancestral cemeteries in exchange f
or relocating their homes. Although the National Park Service eventually agreed to compens
ate Swain County with $52 million instead of completing the road in 2010, this financial s
ettlement has not resolved the ongoing issue: providing these families assistance accessin
g the 26 cemeteries now situated miles away from the lakeshore, accessible only via steep
and poorly maintained trails."The promise was not a financial settlement. The promise was
to build the road," says Karen Marcus, a psychologist in her 60s who has five generations
of ancestors across multiple gravesites.While the company claims this decade of constructi
on "transformed the poverty-stricken, often-flooded Valley into a modern, electrified, and
developed slice of America," the reality of life in the Fontana Basin was far from the st
ereotype of the isolated, uneducated, impoverished mountain dweller."This was an industria
l area," says Daniel S. Pierce, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, A
sheville.As railroads began winding through the rugged terrain in the late 1880s, logging
and mining companies followed closely behind, giving rise to thriving towns such as Procto
r, Bushnell, and Judson—all of which were flooded and destroyed when the Fontana Dam, the
largest east of the Mississippi River, was created in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack
to power a nearby aluminum plant.Instead of moving these families' loved ones, the TVA pro
mised to build a new road so Decoration Days, an annual Appalachian tradition, which folkl
orist Alan Jabbour described as "an act of respect for the dead that reaffirms one's bonds
with those who have gone before," could continue.



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