Remember It Well

Fore Note: Found this on Facebook the other day, It's an article from the New York Times from 1979. It's about the last families to be evicted from their land by TVA for the Tellico Dam Project.

LOUDON, Tenn., Nov. 13 (AP) — The Government overcame the last obstacles to its plans for the Tellico Dam today as Federal marshals evicted the last two of341 farmers whose land was taken for the 38,000‐acre project under rights of eminent domain.

“It looks like this is about the end of it,” T. Burel Moser, a mailman, said as three carloads of marshals escorted him out of the white frame house where he was born 46 years ago.

Earlier today the Tennessee Valley Authority filed writs asking the marshals to enforce court orders that had transferred ownership of Mr. Moser's five‐acre property to the Government in 1971.

“I could have gone to jail but I would have lost my job and everything else,” Mr. Moser said. “But I still feel the same way about it that I did 10 years ago — to hell with the T.V.A.”

On the opposite bank of the Little Tennessee River, in an area that will soon become a 16,000‐acre lake, Nellie McCall had already packed her belongings when the marshals arrived shortly after 8 A.M.

“I haven't got too long here so it doesn't make any difference,” the 75‐year‐old widow said. “It's awful that this thing has happened, but I'm resigned to it now.”

Crying, she clutched the arm of her daughter as they began walking away from the 90‐acre farm that her husband purchased in 1939. Mrs. McCall said she did not know where she would live.

The other holdout, Benjamin Ritchey and his family, left yesterday after their attorney said that all appeals had been exhausted.

All three families had refused Government checks totaling $216,000 that were mailed to them when the land was condemned.

The money was deposited with a Federal court in Knoxville, and officials said last month that it was still available to the families if they asked for it.

A T.V.A spokesman said that the agency, a Federal corporate utility created in 1933 to develop all the resources of the Tennessee River basin, had set no date for closing the dam's gates to begin impounding a lake 25 miles southwest of Knoxville. But the gates are expected to be closed soon.

The landowners were apparently the last obstacle to the dam, which was begun in 1966 to help bring jobs to three counties by creating lakeshore sites for industry and by opening the Little Tennessee River to barge traffic.

The two year delay came when courts ruled that the lake would illegally destroy the home of the snail darter, an endangered species of fish found seven miles upstream from the dam in 1973.

The Cherokee Indians also tried to stop the project, contending that the lake would inundate their ancestors’ graves and the old Cherokee city of Tenasi, from which the state is said to derive its name.

The Indians’ plea for an injunction to prevent the authority from closing the gates was rejected yesterday by Associate Justice William Brennan of the Supreme Court. A similar request was rejected last week by Associate Justice Potter Stewart and the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.