When the TVA Came to Town
/By Marianne Leek
“All the members of the body, though many, are one body.”
1 Corinthians 12:1
The Chatuge Dam in Clay County, North Carolina, went into operation in February of 1942, flooding 7,000 acres astraddle the border of North Georgia and Western North Carolina. I have always imagined that, in the years following, the people who were displaced would, from time to time, make a pilgrimage to the shores of Lake Chatuge to stare into the distance, toward where their homes once stood.
If you wind around old Highway 64 and head southeast toward the old Elf schoolhouse and the High Bridge, just north of the Georgia state line, you might catch a sunset as it sinks in the western sky behind the Blue Ridge Mountains. It always casts a warm glow over the place where Muriel Doyle Blankenship grew up.
Muriel Doyle Blankenship
Muriel had never seen a photograph of her childhood home until I showed up at her house this August with one I had found. Her tiny frame bent over the kitchen table, and she ran a palsied hand over the picture and began to talk.
“This roof,” she said. “This was my house. This roof has cracks in it. If it snowed, the snow fell through the cracks.” She paused, then added, “It was a blessing, though.”
I asked why that was a blessing.
“Because we had a roof over our heads,” she said. “That’s all we had.” She kept studying the picture, then said, almost as an afterthought, “This house we lived in … I can’t get over this house. Lord, what a mess. It ain’t hardly a house.”
Thus began my conversation with Muriel Blankenship. She talked for over an hour about the Tennessee Valley Authority, family, education, and survival. Like many Appalachian women who grew up during the Great Depression, she testified that even in hard times on hard ground, there was a lot of beauty in her family’s ordinary, daily life.
In the 77 years since its creation, Lake Chatuge has since become a beacon of recreation and tourism, bringing in significant annual revenue for local businesses and communities. Nestled in a valley in the Appalachian mountains, it is one of the most picturesque bodies of water in the Southeast, a crown jewel in the TVA’s lake system.
President Franklin Roosevelt established the TVA to boost the Southern economy by bringing electricity to the rural South. The Chatuge Dam would make energy, prevent flooding, and provide a source of fresh drinking water. It also came at a hefty historical cost.
For the TVA, removing families proved the most difficult task. Muriel Blankenship’s family was no different. Their primary concern was survival, aided in no small part by the small rural community in which they lived, the kindness of the neighbors who regularly proffered the Doyle family with odd jobs and food.
In the months before the family’s December 1941 relocation, a TVA representative visited Muriel’s mother, Beatrice Viola Doyle, seven times. After his first home visit, he wrote that he did “not know how this family manages to exist.”
Muriel Doyle Blankenship was 14 years old when her family left the Elf community of Clay County, two months before the lake subsumed it. When I interviewed her this summer, she was 92 years old, the last surviving child of her generation.
Apart from scholars, few people know the TVA kept detailed records of the homes they bought and the families forced to leave them. For most of those families, selling, rebuilding, and starting over would be difficult. In the mountains of southern Appalachia in 1941, most people lived well below the poverty level. Beatrice Doyle raised her children — nine in all — in a four-room, dirt-floor homestead that measured less than 700 square feet. With no indoor plumbing or running water, the home was built around a fresh-water well in the kitchen, while an outhouse served its purpose just to the right of the front porch. With only two bedrooms and nine children, they slept four to a bed, with their mother and oldest sister Rosie occupying a dilapidated sofa in what served as the home’s living room.
The progress TVA promised was met with both enthusiasm and resistance. Residents were forced to sell their property for pennies on the dollar and abandon their homes. The United States government paid the Doyle family $405 for its family home. After meeting the Doyle family, the representative for the TVA wrote that while the family is “willing to cooperate in every way possible … they are rather frightened at the prospect” of removal and relocation.
Muriel told me that the children didn’t know much about the TVA, although she remembered the visits. Her mother, she said, “didn’t tell us kids much about it.”
I asked how she felt about having to leave her home.
“You know, as kids, you couldn’t help but be excited about it,” she said. The family was apprehensive about the unknown, but to the youngest children, relocation felt like an adventure.
Because the survival of the Doyle family hinged on the inner workings of this small Appalachian community, the TVA recognized that “the removal of those connections which contribute to the income of this family will be difficult to replace in a new location.”
Muriel told me how she and her siblings — and other families in Elf — got by in 1941.
“Say you was fixin’ to throw your dress away,” she said. “Well, there’s a lot of people who would go to the dump and get some of the things you throw’d away that they could use.” She said finding room in their home to store their clothes and other things wasn’t difficult, because they never accumulated much.
I asked Muriel how her mother Beatrice Viola Doyle took care of nine children on her own.
“We took care of ourselves,” she quickly replied. She explained they survived on the goodwill of their neighbors, who would regularly call on the children to help with gardening, harvesting, and chores.
“We’d pick apples for ’em,” she said. “We’d help ’em. They’d let us know when to come. We’d dig taters … whatever they needed.” She said her mother would “get us up before daylight if we was to do something like that.”
She told me that owning a hog was essential to an Appalachian family’s survival. Her own family didn’t own or butcher hogs; she and her siblings would help when it came time for a neighbor to butcher a hog and process the meat.
“I’m proud we done it on our own,” she said. “That’s something to be proud of. We didn’t take no money from no one that we didn’t earn.”
The records show another TVA concern was education. The worker who visited the Doyle home wrote that “keeping the children in school must be difficult.”
I asked Muriel about her education. She said she attended the Elf school until it burned down, then she went to Hayesville’s main school. Muriel was proud to be a first-generation high school graduate, preceded only by her older sister, Rosie. She said she loved school, especially studying science. Her advice to young people of this generation?
“Stay away from sex and alcohol — there’s plenty of time for all that. Get your education. Finish school.”
Her own proudest accomplishments, she said, were her 57-year marriage to Joe Blankenship, whom she met at an in-home Bible study and married shortly after graduating from high school, and raising their four children.
Seventy-seven years after leaving Elf, Muriel’s stance on the TVA was fairly neutral. She said she knew many people who worked for TVA for a living. She said TVA people became part of the communities where they worked, hiring locals to help build dams and flood the land. In fact, when her sister Rosie married, her husband successfully sought employment with the TVA. Still, for a time after they wed, Rosie and her husband lived with Beatrice Doyle and all Rosie’s siblings, so they could contribute financially to the entire family’s well-being.
I asked Muriel if, as a young girl in Elf, she could have imagined what a lake like Chatuge might look like. She said she couldn’t have. But she did remember her sister Rosie and her brother-in-law bringing her and her siblings to see the lake for the first time.
I asked Muriel what she did the first time she saw it.
“I jumped right in!”
~~~
That’s the picture of Muriel Blankenship I like to keep in my head today. Two months and three days after our visit, she passed away.
While I listened to her recall her childhood, I was reminded, oddly enough, of a Russian short story: “What Men Live By,” Leo Tolstoy, 1885. Tolstoy wrote about the angel Michael, sent to Earth by God to find the answers to three questions: What dwells in man? What is not given to man? And what do men live by? Through his interactions with the mortals, Michael discovers this: “God does not wish men to live apart, and therefore he does not reveal to them what each one needs for himself, but he wishes them to live united and therefore reveals to each of them what is necessary for all. I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live.”
Muriel Blankenship knew the essence of life is the interdependence and interconnectedness of human beings, that the most powerful force yoking together all people is, quite simply, love. During the Great Depression in southern Appalachia, Muriel lived, survived, and eventually thrived because of mountain people’s love for and dependence upon one another.
When Muriel saw the photograph of her childhood home, what she focused on struck me: the juxtaposition of the dilapidated roof, and the flowers that grew just outside. She remembered immediately the struggle inherent in the crooked, uneven, planks that barely protected her and her family from the elements. But she also pointed to a small garden of flowers growing outside the bedroom windows.
“Them’s hollyhocks,” Muriel said. “They were beautiful. Viola liked to look out of them winders and see them flowers.”
Viola was one of the youngest Doyle daughters. Diptheria killed her at age 7. But in Muriel’s mind, Viola eternally stood on that porch, looking out at them hollyhocks, ordinary as could be but extraordinarily beautiful, flourishing in hard times. Like the Doyle children themselves.
Before I left that day in August, I asked her if I could take her photograph.
“I guess you can if you want to.”
I asked her to smile. She sassily replied, “You go ahead and smile for me,” then stood stoically, waiting for me to click the shutter.
The shanty houses that once stood on the shores of Lake Chatuge as sentries of a forgotten culture have been replaced with million-dollar homes, many of which serve as second residences or weekend retreats for people not from around here. And sometimes I wonder, when they ride on pontoon boats on summer evenings, if they ever think of the lost communities that lie deep below the surface of the water.
It reminds me of something Ron Rash describes at the end of his novel One Foot in Eden. A deputy recalls the story’s events as he floats on the surface of a man-made lake in a small town in Oconee County, South Carolina, the water clear enough for him to see the recently abandoned community at the bottom. He quietly muses that perhaps “this is the way God sees the world.”
Marianne Leek lives in Hayesville, North Carolina, and dedicates this story, in love, to the memory of Muriel Doyle Blankenship.