Fore Note: This story is a follow up in the Timberlake/Tellico Village story from last Monday's Look Back. So many stories from the era. 

Forgotten People of the Tellico Dam Fight 

By Wendell Rawls Jr. Special to The New York Times Nov. 11, 1979

GREENBACK, Tenn., Nov. 10-Fire dances in her lake ice eyes when, she talks about it, and she twists one gnarled 75-year-old hand into the other.

“How would you like it if somebody was trying to steal your land?” she asks in a voice as firm as her grip. “When you'd worked all your life for your home and then an agency of the United States Government, of all things, comes along and takes it away from you and puts you on welfare?"

Nellie Roe Chambers McCall has locked into battle with the Tennessee Valley Authority. It is a classic confrontation that has so many precedents in the past 45 years that it is almost a cliché, but it is one of the ignored aspects of the controversial Tellico Dam project that finally overwhelmed the snail darter, that endangered three inch fish, then took on the Cherokee Indians.

Right of Eminent Domain

T.V.A. has claimed her 90 acre farm and the land of 390 others, under rights of eminent domain. But Mrs. McCall refuses to accept the payment offered to her and refuses to move.

The deadline for her and two other landowners to accept the T.V.A. offer was last night. Now she can be evicted from her home by Federal marshals. “It's a land grab,” she says fiercely. “It's just a land grab.” “The lake would take about an acre and a half,” she says, “and I offered to give that to them for nothing, but they said everybody had to go.”

She and some others have to go be- cause their land is wanted for recrea- tional and industrial development.

Across the Great Smoky Mountains, which can be seen from her farm in ris- ing lavender miles, the Cherokees are also battling the T.V.A., but in Federal court.

Yesterday, the Indians lost another effort to save their ancestral city of Chota and their sacred burial grounds. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals re- fused to grant an injunction that would halt completion of the dam, and Su- preme Court Justice Potter Stewart denied an immediate appeal, which sent the Indians to Justice William Brennan. A court spokesman said Jus- tice Brennan would not rule on their plea before Monday.

The Indians feel as bitter toward the T.V.A. as Mrs. McCall does, and some of them speak of prophecies from “the old men.”

Goliath George, a wrinkled 78-year- old who speaks only Cherokee, said in an affidavit that he remembered listen- ing as a small boy to the medicine man who “would talk to my people from atop a hickory stump, notched so he could climb up on top and look out over the valley.”

‘Looking Through Wall of Tears’

“He talked about what would happen in four or maybe five generations,” Mr. George recalled. “He said the valley would be covered with water — our forefathers would be on the bottom of the valley looking up through a wall of glass. Tears rolled down his cheeks when he said that one day the people would once again be put to the test of holding on to that which is sacred or giving up forever another part of their lives.”

At Chota and several other sites, including the old Cherokee city of Tenasi, from which the state is said to have derived its name, archeologists have been digging feverishly to save Cherokee artifacts.

In the process, they have uncovered evidence of human occupation of the region as far back as the Early Archaic Era, circa 7500 B.C. But the Tellico Dam is virtually complete now, and the ancestral Indian grounds and the digs will be inundated when the the flood gates come down.

16,000 Acres Under Water

While the water will not flood most of Nellie McCall's farm, or all of the land of Benjamin Ritchey and T. Burel Moser, the other two holdouts, it will cover about 16,000 acres of the best farmland in three counties. And T.V.A. claimed another 22,000 acres that will surround the lake for industrial and recreational development.

David Freeman, chairman of the T.V.A., explains that the land along the lake will be more valuable because of its waterfront position. the “TVA made it more valuable,” he says. “Why shouldn't T.V.A. get the benefit from selling the land for a plant that will bring more jobs to the area?”

Mr. Freeman says his sympathies lie with the people who lost their land and left smiling through their tears “rather than those last ones, who are presenting themselves as latter‐day martyrs.”

Those Who Are Left

Those who have suffered most from Tellico seem to be those who live in the immediate area, including many whose land was unaffected.

“There used to be five grocery stores located in Vonore,” said Benjamin Snider, owner of the biggest. “Now there are two, and this is the only one of the original five. There were five gas stations and four garages and three or four barber shops and nine schools; now there are two gas stations and no garages and one or two barber shops and four schools in the county.”

When 340 families are uprooted from an area and forced to move away, be says, the local businessman loses and the county tax structure is eroded and the school system crumbles.

“The endangered species wasn't the snail darter,” he adds, puffing on pipe. “It is the small businessman, the people who live here, and nobody cared about us.”

Price Disparity Described

He describes Nellie McCall's deceased husband, Ma, as a “gut busting farmer” who did his own work, then watched the “land men” come. “I don't know what the T.V.A. said to him,” Mr. Snyder says, “but I know they scared people to death around here to get them to sell their farms. They threatened to sic the I.R.S. on them and have them audited every year.

“They paid some people with political pull $3,000 an acre for knob land you can barely get a tractor over, and then paid another small fanner $200 and $300 an acre for really nice land. It wasn't fair, that's for sure.”

Mrs. McCall and her husband bought their farm almost 50 years ago with Government loan and a promise to pay back $250 a year for 40 years.

As she fingers through a picture album, pointing to Asa and a favorite cow here, and Asa and hail damaged tobacco there, she recalls that they paid off the loan in nine years. The farm sent a daughter to college and kept the family fed.

Now, her husband is dead, as are two of her farming brothers and a sister, all “grieved to death” in the past five years over the loss of their farms to the dam project, she says.

The T.V.A. has offered her $76,000 for her 90 acres, and she says that Government representatives have looked for similar place for her to relocate for the same amount and cannot find one. “I don't know what I'm going to do,” she says, sna hand to the snow

atop her head an eye to approaching headlights outside her window. “Is that somebody coming?” “No,” replies a woman companion. “They won't come and put you out in the rain.”

“You don't know them,” Mrs. McCall says. “You can't trust them. You can't trust somebody that'll steal your land and then tell you it's for your own good. They're like a yaller dog.”