For What It’s Worth

Occasionally someone would stop Elmer Newby in a store and ask him why in the world he’d help the government run people off their land. Elmer always clenched his teeth and stiffened his shoulders. His cheeks turned red. “Hell, I didn’t decide this. That was some fool in Washington,” he told them. Elmer hated that folks had no choice about leaving, but he had to make a living. Every morning as he headed out to appraise property, he reminded himself that he had a family to support. A job to do.

Elmer started his real estate appraisal business after he returned from the war in Europe and attended college on the GI Bill. In the early years he struggled to keep the business afloat. He got his real estate license and sold a few houses when the bank account grew lean, but he preferred appraising land to showing houses. He was good with numbers. Coming up with the fair market value on a piece of property required figuring parcel size, square footage of structures, and finding the value of comparable tracts. Comparables were crucial to the calculation. The goal was to be as objective as possible because, in Elmer’s mind and according to the standards of his profession, objectivity led to fairness for both the buyer and the seller.

During one long stretch without much work, Elmer decided he might need to close his business and take a job with a weekly paycheck. He knew Judy worried about the rent and whether they could afford things for the kids. He could get a route selling life insurance policies for Joe Flynn’s agency or selling clothing for the suit factory. About the time he was ready to call it quits, he heard talk about another federal dam project, this time on the Cumberland River. The dam and the resulting massive reservoir required the government’s acquisition of thousands of acres. Each parcel would be appraised to determine fair market value and a purchase price. Elmer felt like he’d struck gold.

His business took off. He appraised all sorts of property— houses, businesses, schools, tilled farmland—most of which would be under water or along the new higher shoreline when the lake filled. Entire towns were taken through the power of eminent domain. People lost homes and farms that had been in their families for generations. Old-growth forests were leveled. The sight of a mountain-sized stack of downed trees had caused Elmer to grieve for days, but that was the way of progress, even if it hurt to see. When the dam was finished, Lake Barkley would fill and flood the land, forever altering the place. There would be no going back.

The Barkley Dam project changed Elmer, too. For the first time in his life, he had money. He hadn’t inherited a copper from his people, but now he had money. He and Judy took the kids to Florida for a summer vacation. They built a modern ranch-style home with a brick façade, by far the best house he had ever lived in. Elmer wanted his children to have a better life than he had known growing up. His own father had a hard time holding a job—he was bad to drink—which meant the family moved often to find work. From one rental house to another, one school to the next, they kept moving, never calling any one place home. Elmer didn’t want that for his kids. He wanted them to know where they belonged. When he and Judy built the house, he knew exactly how much it cost, each two-by-four and every window, even down to the price of a brick or a roof shingle, and he had earned every cent needed to build it.

But he grew anxious as the last few Barkley tracts were acquired. The appraisal work would dry up with the dam’s completion. He thought his business was sufficiently established, but he hated the thought of losing everything he’d worked for.

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