How amazed the pioneer dwellers of the Blue Ridge would be if they could stalk down the mountain side and take a look at what Uncle Sam has been doing the past eight years! Strange words too would fall upon their ears, modern-made to suit modern things. What with good roads and autos, hotels have sprung up thick as mushrooms; so have motels. There’s the Zooseum, combining living curiosities and relics. Pleaz Mosley got together in a corner of his farm a lot of Indian relics, petrified oddities, and a few rare varmints, a five-legged calf and a one-eyed ’possum, and housed them in a shack down by the new road that cut through his bottom land and drew sightseers day after day.
“But Pleaz’s Zooseum can’t hold a candle to the curiosities down in the Holston and Tennessee River country,” his neighbors say. “Looks like they just naturally turned loose the briny deep in that country. When they started in on the job old Grandpap up and spoke his mind. Said he, ‘Sich carryings on is destructuous of the Master’s handiwork and I don’t countenance it.’ He’d set there by his log fire in his house all his endurin’ life. The fire had never went out on that hearth since he was borned and he told the goverment he didn’t aim the embers should die down whilst he lived. Well, sir, to pacify the old man they up and moved him, house, log fire and all, up higher in the mountains and him a-settin’ right there by the fire all the time. Now he can look down to them mighty waters and them public works with his door open and never jolt his chair away from the hearth.”
If Daniel Boone could retrace his steps along the Holston and Tennessee Rivers perhaps he would gape, too flabbergasted to utter a word. Or he might ask in dismay, “What’s become of my elbow room?” The country he once roamed with gun and dog has been transformed into a mighty flooded area to make way for the world’s largest project of its kind. At first much was said back and forth about the Tennessee Valley Authority. Some viewed it with a dubious eye, called it names—a New Deal experiment, a merchant of electricity, a threat to private ownership of business, or again merely a new series of letters in alphabetical government, the TVA. To isolated mountain folk who came to look as time went on, it was the plum biggest public works they had ever set eyes on.
Eight years after it was begun—by the middle of 1941—with war threatening the civilized world, the TVA has become a defense arm.
Uncle Sam at once cast his discerning eye down Tennessee way and his National Defense Advisory Committee designated the TVA as one of its defense industries, and an appropriation of $79,800,000 was granted the Authority, and a call from the defense power program went out for TVA “to add to its system of ten multi-purpose dams the Cherokee Power Dam on the Holston River, to build another near the Watts Bar Dam and to advance work on the Fort Loudoun Dam on the Tennessee River.”
“About the only things unchanged are the caves under the earth and the forests, I reckon,” an old mountaineer observes. “They won’t never dig away them Great Smoky Mountains, I’m satisfied, though they’ve got a roadway on the very top from Newfound Gap Highway to Clingman’s Dome. And they’ve got what’s left of the Cherokees scrouged off to theirselves in Qualla Indian Reservation.”
Wise and far-seeing men have looked to the preservation of much of nature’s beauty through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which embraces Little Pigeon Gorge, and Chimney Tops, which command a breathtaking view of the surrounding country.
“My grandfather journeyed miles on foot over these mountains,” a young man told me one day when I tarried at the Mountaineer’s Museum in Gatlinburg on U. S. Highway 71. “Look over yonder is Le Conte, the Grand-pappy of Old Smoky Mountain as we say here in Tennessee.” He turned about in the other direction. “And off there the rushing waters of Little Pigeon turn an old-time mill wheel.”
Leaving the alluring sights of Little Pigeon I turned the nose of my antiquated car toward U. S. Highway 25E to visit Cudo’s Cave. It is electrically lighted and bright as day. A cave that appears to be an endless chain of rooms. Within are all manner of rock formations, a Palace, a great Pipe Organ, even a reproduction of Capitol Dome not made by mortal hand; Petrified Forests, Cascades that seem to be covered with ice, and a Pyramid said to be eighty-five million years old. And in the midst of these ageless wonders the names of Civil War soldiers carved on the stone walls.