Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [79]
The building of an extensive system of dams meant that many towns, settlements, and farms along the rivers would be drowned. For the first of these dams, the Norris Dam—built just below the confluence of the Clinch and Powell rivers in eastern Tennessee—the TVA purchased, often by eminent domain, roughly 240 square miles of land in five counties. The valleys were steep, the forests cutover, the fields eroded and depleted by generations of intensive farming. The young had departed years earlier, moving to the cities to find work, because even in the sparsely populated hills, there were too many people for the land to comfortably support. But as the Depression had deepened, these emigrants had trickled back home, and their return had put even more pressure on the land.
Families had lived here for generations, residing in small, isolated communities of farmers and tenant farmers, crossroads stores and churches. Some had never traveled as far as Knoxville. The farmers, mostly self-sufficient, produced a little extra—eggs, butter, vegetables—to barter at the local store for coffee, salt, flour, and plowpoints. Such stores would be "full even without customers," Eleanor Buckles wrote,
with boxes and bins and barrels and the home-made furniture, baskets, weaving and carving and fox skins brought in for barter, all crowded together. Boxes of shoes and sacks of feed and bolts of cloth overflowed from the shelves and cluttered the floor. In the rear stood the barber-chair circled by boxes and barrels for seating.... The gasoline lamp in the center of the ceiling shed a glaring white light and patterned the walls with the shadows of chains and harness hanging from the dusty beams.
The people had created an irreplaceable system of interdependence among their independent selves. They helped each other care for the sick and rang the death bell for their neighbors.
And since there wasn't no communication, people'd hear that bell, oh, for miles around. The way they rang the death bell was different from any other. They'd pull the cord—the rope—down and hold it for a few seconds and then let it go back instead of letting it ring the natural ring. Everybody'd recognize the death bell, and they knew there was somebody in the community who was dead. Of course the whole community would come in and prepare food and help and do anything that was needed to be done for the family.
More than three thousand families were forced to leave their land in the Norris basin. The TVA offered "market value" for the properties, but no one felt it was enough—and in truth it wouldn't be: the community would be scattered; the world they moved to would be nothing but strange. Most, in the end, went only with the greatest reluctance. John Rice Irwin, who was a child when the Norris basin was flooded, remembered:
I guess they felt that they were doing it for the benefit of their area.... And they especially felt this later on, I believe, when they saw what TVA had accomplished. I think it was somewhat similar to a person going into the army, in the past, you know. They didn't want to go, they dreaded to go, and it was disruptive, but at the same time they felt some obligations.... It's very difficult to describe the attachments that they had for their land, their emotional involvement, and the fact they were going to have to leave all that and come somewhere else. It wasn't just that they had spent their lives there, you know, but as far back as their grandparents could remember.
Before the reservoir was filled, more outsiders than ever arrived—engineers, relocators, writers, photographers. Lewis Hine