Along the banks of the Clinch and Powell rivers, the passage of the TVA act brought a level of distress and disruption to the citizenry unseen since the American Civil War.

In the years following the war, the role of the federal government had been mostly limited to the election cycle, military conscription for the First World War, and the delivery of mail that for some families included pensions for Union Veterans. Suddenly families who had lived together and buried their dead in the same tight-knit communities for generations were being told that they must move in advance of a rising flood to be contained behind a giant dam below the forks of the river.

The year was 1934 and the nation was in the midst of the Great Depression. Farmers who owned their own land, as most did in the area to be flooded by the impoundment of Norris Reservoir, enjoyed a level of stability and security than urbanized industrial workers did not.

Many families had lived on and worked the same land for generations. Homes that had housed multiple generations of the same family such as the Harrison Heatherly house at what is now known as Heatherly's Point were common.

With an unemployment rate of over 21%, 1934 was not at all a good time for men and sometimes women who had worked the land all their lives with limited transferable skills to enter the labor market. Industry wasn't hiring. Neither were retail outlets.

Rather than herds of livestock that have become commonplace following the Second World War, reservoir area farmers raised mostly crops to sell and consume.

Livestock might consist of work stock, such as mules or horses, a milk cow, pigs, a flock of chickens, and perhaps a handful of geese or guinea fowl. Almost a part of the family were dogs that stood guard over the home place and sometimes helped in the hunting of wild game. Also, almost a part of the family, cats who protected food supplies from rodents, were a necessity.

Complicating matters farmers had to make the move between the time crops were taken in in the fall and spring planting.

Orchards, which take years to mature, could not be relocated. Multiple trips were required to move household items and farm implements because what few trucks were owned by local farmers usually had small beds.

Even if the initial compensation offered by TVA had represented fair market value for the land, the value of property would have skyrocketed because the demand for suitable farmland would suddenly increase dramatically with so many families desperately looking to relocate.

Never had there been such a demand for so much farmland at one time in East Tennessee. Sometimes the farmland that families were able to secure under extreme duress did not include a dwelling house or even outbuildings. Dwelling houses and outbuildings had to be disassembled and then resembled as best they could. In the meantime, furniture, household goods, farm implements, and the winter's food supply whether dried or canned in glass jars could not be left out in the open. Blaine and Ethel Albright moved into a one room temporary home on Christmas Day in 1935. Their daughter Nell compiled and published the book Walnut Grove and Memories in hopes of refuting misconceptions that continue to be parroted about the reservoir area people.

Flooding was not a problem for Campbell County farmers along the Clinch and Powell Rivers. If anything, occasional flooding enriched the soil of the fertile bottom lands. TVA put some of East Tennessee's best farmland under water. Neither were most people desperately poor. My mother was born at what is now Spangler Point on July 26, 1925 in a better house than most area residents live in today.

Medical care was readily available near the forks of the river, where two physicians, Dr. Silas Walker and Dr. James Willoughby, made their homes. Both were apothecary doctors who filled their own prescriptions. Dr. Willoughby delivered both of my parents. Obviously, Walker and Willoughby were well able to provide for the medical care of the community as Dr. Walker doubled as a substitute teacher at the Walnut Grove School. One of his daughters, Lucille Walker Easterly wrote for The LaFollette Press for years and continued to publish the paper after the death of her husband editor/publisher Guy Easterly. Mrs. Easterly's childhood home at Walnut Grove, a Victorian mansion with a second-floor balcony, would have held its own in any of LaFollette's better neighborhoods.

In 1934, electricity was not in as short supply here in East Tennessee as some might often assume. A coal fired steam plant on Sixth and Washington avenues in Knoxville produced enough electrical power to light a city, run a street-rail system, and operate several large textile mills. Obviously, the shortage was not one of electricity but lines and poles upon which to deliver it to rural areas. Even in the city of Knoxville, many people living in the poorest sections of town along the banks of the Tennessee River and First Creek did not have electricity.

Eighty years after the turbines first began to turn at Norris Dam coal continues to keep the lights on throughout East Tennessee. Though lacking electrical power, communities such as Mossy Springs and Walnut Grove depopulated by TVA had telephone service before “the move”.

Some of those affected by the move attempted to capture their feelings in verse. In a lament Leonard White, a Union County School boy wrote:

From this valley we soon will be leaving
How we'll miss our friends and home!
For they say that water will cover
The place we love to roam.

There's the ages old fathers and mothers
who have spent many years here in toil.
They have reared up happy children
on the products of Clinch River soil.

But their happy days here soon will be over.
They must seek to find higher ground.
But with this wide world before us
Where can such a happy home be found?

Striking a similar note Walnut Grove resident Nellie Irwin wrote:

To others this place is not sacred
not the dearest in all the land.
But to us its the only place on earth
Where folks do care and understand.

When the last curtain has passed away;
When each picture is removed from the wall;
When each ragged old relic is loaded and gone;
That's when--”Twill be so sad to look on it all.

There has been a decree in all of this;
But when we leave home ties with regret;
TVA must allow us our memories;
For 't'will be impossible for us to forget.

That memory will give us our home back,
It will give us our childhood day;
It will give us our friends and neighbors;
as they were before TVA.

I have found that the connection that reservoir area families continue feel to the land continues to be both astounding and baffling to the outside world. It isn't that we hope to return there and live, but that future use will honor the sacrifice of those who survived the move. Some did not. Mossy Springs resident John Berry hung himself in his corn-crib after selling the farm that he had promised his father that he would tend. Numerous parties including my grandfather's sister Minnie Stephens Underwood were sued by TVA under the federal government's power of eminent domain. The movie Wild River was inspired in part by my grandparent's neighbor Mattie Randolph's resistance to TVA.

The countryside didn't suddenly become electrified as the turbines began to turn at Norris Dam. In many cases, it took years to run wires to rural homes. More than a decade and a World War had passed before one of the boys came home from extended military duty in China and wired the Stephens home-place. In the 1960s, water continued to be heated in a large teakettle and a hand-pump brought water into the kitchen from a cistern in the yard. A dipper bucket set by the sink. My grandmother insisted that I drink from the dipper. Suddenly, years later it makes sense. Having raised a large family, she knew that there was no need to wash a glass each time someone took a drink.

In regard to the dead, TVA did provide grave relocations for those buried in cemeteries that would be flooded or difficult to reach because existing roads would be flooded when the lake was filled. Unlike the National Park Service and Tennessee State Parks, TVA has not provided continuing maintenance to cemeteries in depopulated communities.

I am a second-generation child of “the move” as Norris Reservoir area families described the end of the pre-TVA era. Many children of the move, who share memories of the forced relocation of reservoir area families, are still living and should be considered to be reliable sources as more than simply witnesses to history. They lived it.