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“Last Stand at Fork Creek” documents property battle against Tellico Dam Project

Linda Braden thedailytimes.com

Carolyn Ritchey has vivid, precious memories of the Jackson community, located between Vonore in Monroe County and Loudon in Loudon County. Situated along the western edge of Jackson Bend, the now nonexistent farming community contained a school, three churches, a flour and grist mill, a blacksmith shop and an old-time country store.

Ritchey’s parents, Ben and Jean Ritchey, purchased their 119-acre farm in 1950 in the community on Fork Creek Road. Fork Creek formed the eastern boundary of the fertile farm; beyond that point, Fork Creek intersected Clear Creek and flowed for about a quarter of a mile before joining the Little Tennessee River at Jackson Bend. The farm, which was situated on a small plateau about a mile above the Little Tennessee River, was home to the family of six, including Ritchey, her sisters Sally and Mary Ann, brother Randy, and their parents. She describes their life as “simple, predictable, uncomplicated and most of all, peaceful.”

That is, until the Tennessee Valley Authority asked for congressional appropriations to begin the Tellico Dam Project in 1965. Farmers, including the Ritcheys, and landowners opposed the project and organized and formed the Association for the Preservation of the Little Tennessee River. Their fight throughout the 1960s and 1970s to save their farms, homes and communities was in vain. The Tellico Dam was constructed and the waters of Tellico Lake — as well as new housing and industrial developments — took their place.

Carolyn Ritchey recounts the story of the struggle between the displaced residents and TVA and state and national politicians during this time in her book, "Last Stand at Fork Creek: A Farm Family Fights to Save Their Land, Community and the Little Tennessee River," which contains 333 pages of information, including more than 30 pages of source citations, divided into 20 chapters. The information was gleaned from the copious files of Jean Ritchey: letters to and from officials, newspaper clippings and personal correspondence with others affected by the project as well as more than 200 photos of the properties and communities as they appeared before being razed, of the people who lost their homes and of protests in Washington, D.C., and throughout the East Tennessee region. Perhaps most poignant are the photos in Chapter 18, entitled “Bulldozed.”

The date was Nov. 27, 1979. The Ritcheys’ property had been condemned under eminent domain and the family had been evicted 11 days earlier, but on this day, while the rest of the family members were at their respective jobs, Jean Ritchey had been running errands and then drove past their former home and saw demolition beginning. As Carolyn Ritchey writes in the book, “She hurriedly drove the truck on up to the Rogers place, grabbed a couple of instamatic cameras, and flew back ‘home’ to take pictures. Before she returned, the few men maneuvering the machinery had wreaked havoc, and the only home we’d ever known was just a massive pile of rubble.” The house, both barns and all of the remaining outbuildings “were bulldozed, splintered and buried in a humongous grave.” The Ritchey house was the last one to be demolished for the Tellico Dam Project, Ritchey said.

Ritchey said all that remains of the farm her family loved so much is a limestone rock which now is visible from a cul-de-sac, surrounded by homes. “There’s a house built right on top of the grave,” where the house and outbuildings were buried, she said. “All of this is no more. It’s not under water; it’s housing.”

As background, Ritchey said TVA wanted their property for the Tellico Dam Project even though the property was on a plateau miles from the dam and would not be covered by the lake waters. “They took 38,000 acres just for the Tellico Project, 16,000 for the reservoir, and 22,000 was extra because the Tellico Dam could not get funding on its own merits,” she said. “In order to get money from Congress to fund the dam, they had to come up with this cost/benefit ratio where selling this 22,000 extra acres would make the cost/benefit ratio to where Congress would say, ‘OK, we’ll give you the money.’ We landed in that 22,000 acres. It was controversial, it was complicated, overlapping 20 years, all of the 1960s and all of the ‘70s. It was a tragic time if you were involved and you lived in the middle of it.

“There were like 692 tracts taken in this 38,000-acre span, 348 farm families,” Ritchey said. “Fifty-eight families were condemned.” If the landowner turned down TVA’s offer, as Ritchey’s father did, Ritchey said, “You had to hire a lawyer and an independent appraiser and spend months and months at a courthouse getting all the qualifications, which is a long story. I’ve got it documented in the book.”

Giving farmers a voice

Ritchey said she never intended to write a book. Instead, she approached her mother, then in her late 80s, about writing the book. “I told her, Mama, somebody told us if you have a story and you want it told the way it truly happened, you’d better be the one to tell it because it will never be told the right way. You lived it, you saw it, you write it. I tried to tell her that. But Mama always made up her own mind and there was no convincing her. She said, ‘I’m done. You write it.’”

The purpose in writing this book is to give the farmers who lost their land a voice.

“I want people to know that a farmer, a landowner, made their living on the land, raised their family, had the highs and lows of good crops and bad crops, what they did and what they had to go through in order to try to work with the government and the legal system to do everything that came their way in order to keep it,” Ritchey said. “I think it will probably be the only book ever written to document the farmer’s story because I’m 68 years old now. I was 24 when I left the place, so for anyone to remember the river itself, they’re going to have to be in their early 50s to remember the place. I think as time goes by, people are going to go, what was this like before? And they’re not going to know.

“I want to carry on what Mama and Daddy started. I don’t want this story to die and now it won’t die because it is recorded and it is accurate … I don’t want this history lost. There were farmers that worked hard, that lived and were contributing members to society.

“It’s a sad story but the story has to be told.”