Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [80]
Anything made of material that might float to the surface and clog the dam—wooden walls and roofs, tin—was demolished or hauled away. Chimneys and concrete and stone were left as is; the water could just rise over them. The three thousand families had five thousand dead who were exhumed and reinterred on higher ground. When the water rose, the best soil—the bottom soil—was inundated along with the dusty yards and the woodlands and creeks. Water crept along the ridges and flowed into the hollows, and the roads that led into the valley from then on led to calm water.
For all the TVA's original intentions, there was no real plan to fully resettle the people. Most dispersed across the county to land that was just as marginal as what they'd been forced to leave. It was probably easier on the young than on the old, who had little chance of adapting to a new community so late in their lives.
The TVA did build a town about twenty miles from Knoxville. Norris, Tennessee, was influenced by the garden city movement of late-nineteenth-century England, which attempted to humanize the industrial city by promulgating the creation of modest, walkable, self-contained towns enfolded in protective greenery. In Norris, every fully electrified cedar-shingled house had a porch facing its neighbor and was within walking distance of stores, churches, the post office, and other services. The town was ringed with woodlands. Those who lived there, it was imagined, would have extensive opportunity to study agriculture, the arts, and trades.
But like the TVA itself, the vision of Norris was one thing, the reality another. The first buildings constructed served as dam workers' dormitories, and the homes that were built later were occupied by professionals involved in dam construction. Norris never housed the dispossessed. Almost no local families—neither former landowners nor tenant farmers—settled in Norris, and no blacks were allowed. "From all this, the Negro ... is to be absolutely excluded," wrote Cranston Clayton.
He cannot even live on the outskirts of the town in his customary hovel.... Southern towns will at least allow their out-caste population to live in dirt and shacks down by the creek or the railroad track. But the government does worse. It absolutely excludes them. This blow is all the more disheartening because it is delivered by the United States government. The Negro looks to the government as his best if not his only friend.... Federal Courts have been about the only agency by which Negroes felt they could protect themselves as American citizens.... Norris is built on government property. The project is nationally supported and therefore ought to be somewhat independent of local prejudices.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) undertook repeated investigations of the TVA, charging that it engaged in discrimination in the hiring and housing of blacks. When the NAACP published its findings, the TVA answered the charges by insisting that it could not find enough skilled black labor to fill the positions. The discrimination in Norris was never rectified. In the end, it would become a bedroom community for Knoxville.
As for electrification of the area surrounding the Norris Dam, many of the relocated were reluctant or unable to electrify their homes, and most wouldn't have electricity until after World War II. "A malaria-ridden, poverty-stricken, one-crop population farming burnt-out land can't buy electricity," wrote Buckles, "nor can it buy the products of factories."
The Rural Electrification