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32 Chapter 2 The Path of Least Resistance As northbound Appalachian Trail hikers cross the Fontana Dam, passing by Fontana Lake before entering the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, they walk over the drowned remains of several forest towns—Fontana, Bushnell, Japan, Forney, Judson, Almond. To provide electricity and resources for war efforts in the early 1940s, and to make a new national park in the 1930s, federal agents destroyed these communities and erased evidence of human habitation. By 1943, Proctor, one of the main settlements in the area, had been reduced to derelict heaps of rotting lumber destined to be burned by federal officials. One local resident recalled “standing on the graveyard hill in Possum Hollow and watching the Franklin store and warehouse being put to the torch by the TVA. We children found this very exciting, not realizing that a town and a way of life were dying.”1 The torched Franklin store was owned by the great-grandparents of our closest trail companion, Michael “5-String” Hawkins. Hawkins’s grandparents grew up and courted along Hazel Creek—one of the tributaries on the north side of Fontana Lake that was cut off when the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) created Fontana Dam and Fontana Lake. As we walked parts of the AT together on our respective through-hikes in 2007, first in the barely budding forests of North Carolina, and then catching up again in the height of summer in Maine, Hawkins explained how different members of his grandparents’ community reacted to the government’s well-intentioned efforts to build the massive dam in order to bring power to the people of the Great Smoky Mountains and recreational opportunities to members of an increasingly industrialized, urban-based society. Some families eagerly accepted the government’s offers to purchase their land, while others resisted and fought bitterly to protect their access and rights to land. Fontana Dam. As AT hikers cross the Fontana Dam, they travel over the submerged remains of several forest communities. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the National Park Service removed mountain residents in order to bring electrical power and recreational opportunities to the American public. These broad federal actions sometimes made local residents wary of early trail-building efforts, even though the first generation of AT volunteers had no official authority. Courtesy of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. 34 The Path of Least Resistance The Fontana Dam and other TVA projects in the region were part of a broader federal response to the severe economic challenges facing rural communities in the 1920s and in the 1930s, when the Great Depression exacerbated hard times in America’s hinterlands—particularly in the Southern Appalachians. In both northern and southern parts of the Appalachian Mountains, the government had been working with citizen partners to create public forest and recreation areas for several decades, and the large-scale plans for land reform embodied in president Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs built upon these earlier conservation efforts. Increasing pressures on thin mountain soils and a stagnant agricultural economy made many rural families receptive to large-scale land reforms in the early twentieth century. When government planners came to purchase land for new national forests, parks, and dam projects, many welcomed the economic relief and the opportunity to start anew. At the same time, however, many people resisted the government’s efforts and expressed their desire to maintain local autonomy and self-determination. Mountain residents were often wary of the autocratic approach that federal planners often used to achieve grand plans for social reform in the Appalachians and of the low prices the government offered in exchange for their family homesteads.2 The stories that took shape in the late 1920s and 1930s about how federal land managers and their ambitious projects affected rural communities have had a long-lasting effect on people’s relationship with the federal government , and, by extension, with the Appalachian Trail. The early development of the AT unfolded alongside the movement to bring federal dams and national parks to the eastern hinterlands. In some ways, early construction of the trail mirrored these broader federal initiatives. As volunteers associated with the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC) began working to establish a thin footpath across the Appalachian Mountains, federal officials were also out in the woods surveying conditions for national parks and planning for large-scale land reforms that would blossom through Roosevelt ’s New Deal programs. Like federal projects at that time, the...

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