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 Kate Simmons Kate Simmons1 was born in 1913 in Sneedville, Tennessee. Soon after her birth, Mrs. Simmons’s family moved to a farm near New Market, in neighboring Jefferson County. Jefferson County offered rich, river bottom farmland , and her family engaged in general farming, growing subsistence crops for family use and raising tobacco, truck crops, and livestock for the market. The middle of eleven children, Kate Simmons recalled that she had always enjoyed life on the farm. After a few years working in a local hospital and then as a cook for a Jefferson County family, Kate married Mack Simmons and moved into his family home. There, Mack Simmons continued to farm with his father, and Mrs. Simmons did the traditional work of a farm woman alongside her mother-in-law. The couple had two children, a son and a daughter. A few years after the Simmons’s marriage, the Tennessee Valley Authority began acquiring land in Jefferson County for its Cherokee Dam project. Part of the Simmons farm fell within TVA’s “taking” line; the family decided to sell the entire farm.2 Mack and Kate Simmons decided to look for their own land elsewhere. The couple purchased about fifteen hundred acres of prime land on the Little Tennessee River in Loudon County and moved there with their two children and with Mack’s brother, Sam, in the early 1940s. The farm the Simmons family purchased was known in Loudon County as the old Davis farm or Riverview. The Davises had been slave-owning planters in the antebellum years. The property included a log house that had been expanded and improved over the years. Mrs. Simmons’s daughter remembered a huge dining room and a parlor with aqua plaster walls. As they had in Jefferson County, the Simmonses engaged in general farming at first. They grew and sold watermelons, raised sheep and sheared them for wool, and grew peas that they sold to canneries in east Tennessee. They also raised tobacco and a few cows. After a number of years, they began to specialize in dairy farming, and eventually the Simmonses built a large commercial dairy farming operation in Loudon County. They raised and educated two children, and their son, Jim, joined the family dairy.3 Kate Simmons 111 Mrs. Simmons was active in the local Farm Bureau and in home demonstration work. She engaged in many crafts activities she learned through home demonstration work. In September 1954, Mrs. Simmons’s Loudon County farm home was featured in the homemaker’s column in Progressive Farmer as a model farm home. The article featured many of the inexpensive home improvements she had made using ideas garnered from home demonstration work and from the pages of Progressive Farmer.4 Ironically, the Simmonses also lost the Loudon County farm to TVA. Fort Loudon Dam had been built on the Loudon County section of the Tennessee River in the 1940s. In the 1970s, the federal agency began acquiring land for another dam in the county, this one on the Little Tennessee River, a tributary of the Tennessee. The latter project was known as Tellico Dam. The project’s aim was to make the Little Tennessee navigable further upriver and to provide recreational development in the region. Tellico Dam proved to be far more controversial than earlier TVA projects, in part because flood control and the generation of hydroelectric power were not goals for the project and in part because the agency condemned and purchased entire farms, not just the portion of the land which fell below the water line as they had done in earlier projects. Mrs. Simmons complained bitterly that much of the best farmland was covered up by water or taken for fancy housing developments. She noted that Tellico Lake only covered about half of her family’s acreage, yet TVA took all the land and later sold it for pricey residential developments. As she put it, “There was no need for them to take all this land down here. Now they sell a little old yard for a hundred thousand dollars.”5 By this time, Mack Simmons had died. Kate Simmons’s son took the proceeds from the Tellico sale and bought an eleven-hundred-acre river bottom farm in Newport, Tennessee, where he still dairy farms with one of his sons. Kate Simmons bought a ten-acre property in southern Loudon County. The property contained a lovely old farmhouse, which she filled with the Victorian antiques she had collected...

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