Alabama trip, Day 4, Wednesday March 29, the Trace — Part 1

(Originally written for LiveJournal, 25-Apr-2006)

Staying in the camping cabin wasn’t much like camping, but it was nice.

We cleaned up, but didn’t wash our horse blankets.

However, we needed to do something about our tent situation. Staying in motels all the time would be too expensive. Myra agreed to make a quick run to Clarksburg, TN to see if she could buy another Eureka tent, or maybe even get replacement poles for ours. Or maybe some other cheap tent’s fiberglass poles would fit our tent. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be a quick run for her and she didn’t find a decent sporting goods store in all of Clarksburg. I didn’t learn about that until later in the day.

While still at the campground one of the other campers came over and wanted to talk to us about bicycling. He was from Toledo and said he travelled with horses, kayak, and bicycle. He knew of some routes with broad shoulders for riding, but they were out of the way I wanted to go. I asked about Hwy 13. After thinking about it a while, he remembered driving that route. His recollections made it sound promising to me.

Upon leaving, the first order of business was to get back up onto the ridge, where the Trace ran. Except for the one short, steep hill that I had walked, the way into the campground the previous evening had been a quick downhill run of about 5 miles. In bicycling, what goes down must come up, and now was the time.

The ride along the bottom was pleasant.

The climb back up was uneventful, except that I did manage to throw the chain off my small chainring on one downshift. The remainder of the 20-mile ride to the south end of the park was uneventful, too.

I took photos at an old iron furnace from the 1850s. An old historical marker said it had gone out of business due to a slave insurrection and lack of ore. A newer marker said it was mismanagement and an economic recession that did it, as well as a lack of ore. I like it when historical markers disagree like that. It means there is not only a story to learn about, but a meta-story, too.

But not on this trip.

One of the main features along the trace is all the signs to old cemeteries. I assumed that they were cemeteries that had been reloacated when the valleys were flooded. A lot of cemeteries meant there must have been a lot of communities that had been dislocated.

A few days ago I went looking on the web for information about the history of the Land Between the Lakes Recreational Area, and found this wikipedia article which obviously was written by someone with close ties to the area. I detect a tone of bitterness and resentment that you don’t get in most stories of the Tennessee Valley Authority: “All of this came with a large price, human as well as financial. A great number of the area residents resented immensely the condemnation of their lands, especially when it was explained to them that most of the area was not to be flooded but rather to become a park. Some felt that they were being singled out as the mostly-impoverished and poorly educated of society to be taken advantage of by their government. Several even armed themselves with shotguns, determined to stop the condemnation, but beyond perhaps a few punctured tires little actual violence ever occurred.”

I recalled a family vacation to the Mammoth Cave National Park in 1981. We had gone on a boat ride on the river, during the course of which the guide made sure we learned, in addition to information about the natural history, that there had been a lot of resentment on the part of people who lost their farms and homes to the reservoirs. That surprised me. I knew the TVA had been controversial. My hero Barry Goldwater had in his 1964 campaign recommended that it be privatized. But even then, while I agreed with his ideas, it seemed to be water under the bridge. The TVA was 30 years old and the world hadn’t come to an end. So while as a conservative I have sensitive antennae for stories of governments running roughshod over individuals, it was a bit surprising for me to learn in 1981 that the resentments were still fresh in peoples’ minds.

And then in April 2006 to find this Wikipidia article, written by someone who still seems atuned to these resentments. And to learn that the heirs of the property owners are still agitating to get their land back. Wow. That is not your standard, sanitized New Deal that made even Ronald Reagan a cheerleader for FDR.

I went to Jstor to see if there was a literature on this topic. It was interesting and chilling to read some of the articles by sociologists and government planners in the 1930s and 1940s. It must have been something in the air at the time. Stalin had his 5-year plans, and we had this. There was some recognition of the problems of forced re-location, but most of the writers thought the problems could have been handled by better planning. It comes across as condescending arrogance, even while the writers are trying really hard not to be condescending.

What was missing from the literature of the time was any sense of what happened to the affected individuals. There had been interviews with the people who were forced to leave their homes, and compilations of data on changes in land ownership, tenancy, employment, and home ownership. But I wanted to read about people as individuals, not people as collective entities.

After much looking I found two promising references:
All We Know Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919–1941. By Melissa Walker (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 341 pp.).

The reviewer says this: “Walker revisits the Tennessee Valley Authority relocation practices, to demonstrate the numerous ways the state transformed East Tennessee. Rather than simply lament the forced relocation of thousands of upcountry farm families, Walker presents a balanced account of the “mixed legacy” of the TVA project and relocation efforts. On one hand, the TVA brought new job opportunities and a better of standard of living to thousands of rural men and women. And, those farm families with some economic foundation were often able to use the proceeds from land sales to reestablish themselves elsewhere on a surer economic footing. However, Walker also notes that poorer families, and especially African American families, faced more difficulty with relocation as the loss of kin and community mutual aid networks undermined one of their most important survival tools.”

Another is this: TVA and the Dispossessed: The Resettlement of Population in the Norris Dam Area. By Michael J. McDonald; John Muldowny

The AHA reviewer says this: “Using oral-history techniiques as well as a vast array of documentary evidence and statistics, Michael J McDonald andJohn Muldowny have skillfully and judiciously analyzed these failures. They conclude that even though the numerous long-run benefits can be cited legitimately as a result of TVA operations, there should nevertheless have been a more active and aggressive planning program…[But, G]iven the circumstances described by the authors, it is extremely difficult to imagine how the adverse impact of relocation on the people of the Norris Basin could have been significantly minimized.”

It would be interesting for someone to do a comparative study of the Indian removal projects of the 1830s and the population removals from the Tennessee Valley reservoir areas. They are not the same, of course. The TVA evacuees were treated less brutally. But there are some similarities in the mindset of those who were doing these big projects, and also similarities in the effects on the societies of the dispossed peoples.

Tonight I was telling Myra about some of my web findings. She said the visitor center at the north end of the recreation area told a lot about that — it had exhibits about the relocation of the people. One of the disadvantages of travel by bicycle is I don’t have time to visit all the things she does. I wish I had seen that one.

I stopped at the visitor center on the south end, on my way out, but mostly to look for a good bicycling map for Tennessee. I had heard that such a thing existed. There wasn’t one, though, so I would have to get along with a regular highway map the rest of the day.
(fixed typos, 26-Apr. 30-jul-2007, put photos back)