The Dispossession of the "Back of Beyond": TVA's Fontana Project and the North Shore Communities

Hardin, Lance

ABSTRACT: In 1941 the Tennessee Valley Authority (“TVA”) announced plans to build a dam in the Fontana region of the Little Tennessee River Valley, primarily in Swain County, North Carolina. The project was prioritized as a World War II imperative and TVA personnel immediately began notifying residents expected to be displaced by the construction of the dam and the resulting reservoir. The availability of replacement land was limited in part due to the recent relocations necessitated by the creation of nearby Great Smoky Mountain National Park (“GSMNP”). When the Fontana Project was completed the federal government owned more than 80% of Swain County land. TVA involvement had been rumored for several years and local leaders had initially resisted TVA involvement, preferring that any dam be constructed by a private utility, in part to preserve property tax revenues. Yet within a few years these local leaders increasingly recruited TVA involvement, even to the detriment of their own county’s citizens dispossessed by the TVA’s expanded project. Expectations of economic growth and tourism industry revenues drove much of the local leaders’ enthusiasm, yet in hindsight that desire to recruit TVA can be considered misplaced. TVA realized that the Fontana Reservoir would flood NC Highway 288, the only road providing access for 200 families on the land above the high water line of the reservoir and bordering GSMNP. This 44,000 acre tract of land was to be effectively “stranded” by the rising water, and to avoid incurring a liability to reroute the access road, TVA instead entered into a four-way agreement with Swain County, the state of North Carolina, and the National Park Service under which TVA condemned this additional tract, aka “the North Shore,” and transferred the property to GSMNP, thereby eliminating the need for the access road. A disparate group of North Shore property-owners fought the TVA’s condemnation process, winning decisively at both the federal District Court and Appeals Court before losing in an unanimous decision by a Supreme Court that included seven appointees of President Franklin Roosevelt. TVA was charged with assisting displaced populations with relocation, but by the time of the Fontana Project such assistance was delegated to other agencies. TVA published results specific to the Fontana Project with the assertion that, contrary to all other reservoir projects, the populations displaced by this project were actually better-off, as measured by post-project levels of farm and home ownership. Using the actual individual cards completed for each family dispossessed by the TVA, the paper analyzes the results to determine the extent that these “atypical results” were driven by transient labor that came into the area to work on the project, and, once the effects of transient labor resettlements are removed, the actual results for the existing pre-project populations were unfortunately not atypical at all.