electricity-producing plants. Now the corporation’s brightest young engineers and planners, surmising that the agency’s mission had shifted from growth to maintenance, were pursuing careers elsewhere. Looking to rekindle the agency’s spirit and dynamism, Wagner cast his eye on the last flowing water in eastern Tennessee that TVA had not already dammed—at the juncture of the Big and Little Tennessee rivers. The Tellico Dam would have no generators and would actually be quite small; with uncharacteristic candor, Wagner once told a reporter that “any power or flood control benefit would be insignificant.” What’s more, internal TVA cost accounting showed that the dam would lose 40 to 50 cents for every dollar spent. So why build the dam? Wagner and his staff came up with two reasons. First, they hypothesized that use of the reservoir for boating and fishing would generate more than $1 million a year. They ignored or purged economists at the TVA who objected that it was wrong to count as a net benefit recreation diverted from existing reservoirs, and equally wrong to ignore the potential economic benefit of developing tourism for recreation on the flowing river. Second, harking back to the agency’s economic development role during the Depression, Wagner and his staff conjectured that building a model industrial city of 50,000 people on the banks of a Tellico reservoir would create 25,000 jobs. The city would be built on the land then occupied by more than 300 family farms. At first the agency found a likely partner in this undertaking. The Boeing Company, facing stiff competition in its airplane markets, was looking for new lines of business and agreed to join with TVA to design the town and lobby Congress for the $800 million that TVA thought would be needed to build it. Why site an industrial city on a backwater in the Smokies? Anticipating the question, Wagner’s protégé, Mike Foster, came up with the “Foster Hypothesis,” which asserted that industry would inevitably come to any site where three modes of transportation were available: rail, highway, and barge channel. The Tellico Dam project was adjacent to a railroad line and two interstate highways. To justify the model city, which in turn justified the dam, a barge channel would be dug. Dissident agency economists as well as the Army Corps of Engineers pointed out the absence of any evidence for the validity of Foster’s claims. They, too, were brushed aside. The project, having been named, took on a life of its own, fed by bureaucratic momentum. Thus TVA proceeded to condemn and clear 60 square miles of private land, almost two-thirds of which would be for uses other than the reservoir itself—primarily the model town. The more than 300 farming families would be forced to abandon some of the richest agricultural soils in the nation so that the agency 20
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could press development claims for its hypothetical city. The agricultural economies of the valley and small surrounding towns would be eliminated. To keep the scale of these farmland condemnations as invisible as possible, Wagner decreed that no publicly released TVA map of the project would fully show the 23,600 acres that would be put to non-reservoir uses. The communities displaced by the Tellico Dam project had been farming the valley since the 1830s, when federal armies evicted the Cherokee from the region. Many families were of the same Scotch-Irish stock as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Sam Houston grew up near the river and lived for a while there with the Cherokee. As pioneers, these families had moved south and westward, following the chain of the Appalachian Mountains to stay ahead of the townbuilding pressures coming from the east. When they saw the rich soils and fish-filled waters of the Little Tennessee Valley, some decided to settle there and push on no more. What would be submerged by the reservoir would also be a tragic loss. The 33-mile undammed stretch of the Little Tennessee (or Little T, as the locals called it) was an ecological treasure, preserving a barely known cross section of hundreds of forms of life that had evolved in and along the river over the course of 200 million years. An article in Field & Stream magazine had described the river with awe: cool and clear, shallow but wide and majestic in its flow, the biggest and finest trout water east of Montana. The fish fed on mayflies and caddisflies, which hatched in the current and fluttered up through the mist like a snowfall in reverse. Burial mounds and other archaeological sites bore traces of 10,000-year-old settlements and centuries-old Cherokee communities. Traditional medicine men—the descendants of Sequoyah—still came to the Little Tennessee’s banks to gather herbs. Once the dam and its earthen dikes were operational, walling off the main channel of the river, the waters of the Little T would slowly back up 33 miles, all the way to the Smokies. The result would be a serpentine impoundment, murky with algae and averaging less than 20 feet in depth. Mud and water would drown the rich meadowlands along
“The Act had some teeth added to it last year,” Hank said, “so an endangered fish might be able to block Tellico Dam. Do you think that’s enough for a 10-page paper?”