Chapter 22: The New Deal in the Mountains — TVA, the CCC, and Federal Transformation

"The government man came up the creek and said they was going to put in electricity. My grandmother cried. She thought he meant the lightning." — Oral history interview, Norris Basin Oral History Project, University of Tennessee, 1978

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Analyze the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as the most ambitious regional development project in American history, identifying both its transformative achievements and its costs to displaced communities
2. Describe how the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) reshaped the physical landscape of Appalachia through infrastructure, trail-building, and conservation projects
3. Explain how rural electrification transformed daily life in mountain communities — economically, socially, and culturally
4. Evaluate the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Shenandoah National Park as acts of both conservation and displacement
5. Assess the contradictions of the New Deal in Appalachia — programs that simultaneously improved lives and imposed outside values, disrupted communities, and served federal interests

The Day the Government Arrived

In the spring of 1933, the mountains of Appalachia were in crisis — but that was not new. The mountains had been in crisis for a generation. What was new was that the federal government had decided, for reasons of its own, to do something about it.

The Great Depression had devastated the nation, but in Appalachia, the devastation landed on ground that was already broken. The coal industry, as we saw in Part IV, had spent three decades extracting wealth from the mountains while leaving the people who lived there with company towns, scrip wages, black lung, and exhausted land. The timber industry had stripped the hillsides bare. The subsistence economy that had sustained mountain families for generations was eroding under the combined pressures of population growth, soil depletion, and the enclosure of formerly common lands by corporate interests. When the stock market collapsed in 1929 and coal demand plummeted, the already precarious economy of the mountains simply fell apart.

Into this landscape came Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal — the most sweeping program of federal intervention in American life that the country had ever seen. And nowhere in America was the New Deal's ambition larger, its reach deeper, or its contradictions sharper than in the mountains of Appalachia.

This chapter tells the story of what happened when the federal government arrived in the mountains — not as an invading army, though some who lived through it used that language, but as something more complicated: a force that built roads, dammed rivers, strung electric lines, eradicated malaria, created national parks, and reshaped the physical and social landscape of an entire region. It also displaced thousands of families from land they had occupied for generations. It imposed outside experts' visions of what mountain life should look like. It treated Appalachian people as problems to be solved rather than citizens to be consulted. And it set the pattern — the complex, contradictory pattern of federal intervention that would define the relationship between Appalachia and Washington for the rest of the twentieth century.

The New Deal in the mountains was both salvation and imposition. Understanding how it was both, simultaneously, is essential to understanding everything that came after.

The Tennessee Valley Authority: The Boldest Experiment

An Idea Bigger Than Any Single Dam

On May 18, 1933, President Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, creating what remains the most ambitious experiment in regional development in American history. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was not merely a dam-building project, although it built dams — sixteen of them in its first two decades, transforming the Tennessee River system from one of the most flood-prone waterways in the eastern United States into a chain of controlled reservoirs. It was not merely a power company, although it became the largest public power provider in the nation. It was, in the minds of its architects, nothing less than an attempt to plan and modernize an entire region — to lift millions of people out of poverty through the coordinated application of science, engineering, and federal authority.

The Tennessee Valley, which stretches from the mountains of southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee through northern Alabama and Mississippi, was in 1933 one of the poorest regions in the poorest part of America. Average annual income in the Valley was $639 — less than half the national average. Only two percent of farms had electricity. Malaria was endemic in the lowland areas where the river flooded annually, creating standing water that bred the Anopheles mosquito. Soil erosion, accelerated by decades of poor farming practices and reckless logging, was stripping the hillsides of topsoil and silting the rivers. Flooding was catastrophic and regular — the Tennessee River and its tributaries overflowed their banks with devastating frequency, destroying crops, drowning livestock, and periodically inundating riverside towns.

TVA was designed to address all of these problems simultaneously, through an approach its first chairman, Arthur E. Morgan, called "unified development" — the idea that a region's problems were interconnected and had to be solved together. You could not control floods without building dams. You could not build dams without generating electricity. You could not distribute electricity without building transmission lines. You could not improve agriculture without controlling erosion. You could not control erosion without reforesting the stripped hillsides. You could not reforest without demonstrating new techniques to skeptical farmers. Each piece connected to every other piece. TVA was supposed to be the institution that connected them all.

The TVA's three-member board reflected the ambition and the tensions of the enterprise. Arthur Morgan, an engineer and utopian idealist, wanted TVA to be a laboratory for social reform — not just building infrastructure but reshaping the culture of the Valley, creating model communities, promoting cooperative enterprise, and demonstrating a new kind of relationship between government, industry, and the people. Harcourt Morgan (no relation), an agricultural scientist and president of the University of Tennessee, wanted TVA to focus on practical agricultural improvement, working through existing institutions and respecting local power structures. David Lilienthal, the youngest board member at thirty-three, was a lawyer and New Deal liberal who wanted TVA to focus on cheap public power as the engine of economic development, taking on the private utility companies that he saw as exploiting consumers.

These three visions — utopian reform, pragmatic agriculture, and public power — coexisted uneasily within TVA from the beginning. The tensions among them would shape the agency's development and determine which of its promises were kept and which were abandoned.

What TVA Actually Built

The dams came first. They were enormous — monuments of concrete and engineering that reshaped the physical landscape of the Tennessee Valley more dramatically than any human project since the Cherokee removal.

Norris Dam, completed in 1936 on the Clinch River in Anderson County, Tennessee, was TVA's first project and its showpiece. Named after Senator George Norris of Nebraska, the progressive Republican who had championed public power for years, the dam rose 265 feet from the riverbed and created a reservoir — Norris Lake — that stretched seventy-three miles up the Clinch River Valley. It was designed to control flooding, generate hydroelectric power, and demonstrate that public power could provide electricity to rural communities at rates far below what the private utilities charged.

After Norris came the others, in rapid succession: Wheeler Dam on the Tennessee River in Alabama (1936). Pickwick Landing Dam on the Tennessee in Tennessee (1938). Guntersville, Chickamauga, Watts Bar, Fort Loudoun — by 1944, TVA had transformed the Tennessee River into a chain of reservoirs, a staircase of dams that controlled the river from its headwaters in the mountains to its confluence with the Ohio. The floods that had plagued the Valley for centuries were tamed. In January 1942, when a flood that would have been the largest in recorded history surged down the Tennessee River system, TVA's dams held. The city of Chattanooga, which had been devastated by floods in 1867, 1875, and 1917, stayed dry.

The hydroelectric power generated by the dams was, in economic terms, the most transformative element. TVA sold electricity at wholesale rates to local cooperatives and municipal utilities, which distributed it to homes, farms, and businesses. The rates were dramatically lower than those charged by the private utility companies that had previously monopolized the region's power supply — a fact that delighted consumers and infuriated the utilities, which saw TVA as government-subsidized competition that would destroy their businesses. The private utilities, led by Commonwealth & Southern Corporation and its president Wendell Willkie, fought TVA in the courts for years, arguing that the federal government had no constitutional authority to compete with private enterprise. They lost, eventually, but the legal battles delayed TVA's expansion and forced compromises that limited its reach.

Malaria Eradication

Among TVA's lesser-known achievements — and one of its most consequential — was its role in eradicating malaria from the Tennessee Valley.

In the early 1930s, malaria was still endemic in the lowland areas of the Valley, particularly in the regions where the river flooded regularly and created standing pools of water that served as breeding grounds for the Anopheles mosquito. Malaria sickened hundreds of thousands of people annually across the southeastern United States, and the Tennessee Valley was a hotspot. The disease sapped the energy of entire communities — people chronically weakened by recurring bouts of fever, chills, and anemia could not work effectively, could not farm productively, and could not lift themselves out of poverty.

TVA's approach to malaria was characteristically comprehensive. The agency drained swamps, controlled water levels in its reservoirs to prevent the formation of mosquito-breeding pools, sprayed insecticides, and distributed antimalarial medication. The public health division of TVA worked with local health departments and the U.S. Public Health Service in what amounted to a coordinated regional campaign against the disease. By the 1940s, malaria had been essentially eliminated from the Tennessee Valley — a public health achievement that freed hundreds of thousands of people from a debilitating chronic disease and removed one of the fundamental obstacles to economic development in the region.

This is an achievement that is rarely celebrated in the popular narrative of TVA, which tends to focus on dams and electricity. But for the families who had lived with malaria for generations — who had lost work days, lost children, lost years of productive life to the recurring fevers — the eradication of the disease was arguably the most important thing TVA ever did.

Agricultural Modernization

TVA's agricultural programs were designed to transform the subsistence farming that predominated in much of the Valley into modern, productive agriculture. The agency operated a fertilizer manufacturing facility at Muscle Shoals, Alabama — originally built during World War I to produce munitions but converted by TVA to produce phosphate fertilizers. These fertilizers were distributed to demonstration farms throughout the Valley, where TVA agricultural agents worked with local farmers to show the benefits of modern soil management, crop rotation, and terracing to prevent erosion.

The demonstration farm program was a cooperative extension model on a massive scale — TVA agents working alongside farmers in their own fields, showing rather than telling. The program was effective: crop yields improved, soil erosion decreased, and farm income rose in the areas where TVA's agricultural programs were most active. But the program also carried assumptions about what "good farming" looked like — assumptions that originated in universities and government agencies rather than in the generations of accumulated knowledge that mountain farmers had developed. The progressive farming techniques promoted by TVA agents sometimes clashed with practices that subsistence farmers had found effective in the specific conditions of their particular hollows and ridges.

Not all farmers welcomed the government's guidance. Some saw it as condescension — outsiders who had never farmed a mountain hillside telling lifelong farmers how to farm. Others recognized the value of new techniques but resented the implication that their traditional methods were backward. The tension between outside expertise and local knowledge — a tension that runs through the entire history of Appalachian development — was present in TVA's agricultural programs from the beginning.

Rural Electrification: The Light That Changed Everything

Before the Light

To understand what rural electrification meant, you have to understand what life was like without it.

In the early 1930s, only about ten percent of American farms had electricity. In the mountains of Appalachia, the figure was far lower — in many counties, virtually zero. The private utility companies that supplied electricity to cities and towns had made a simple calculation: it was not profitable to string power lines up mountain hollows to serve scattered farmsteads. The cost of building and maintaining the lines exceeded the revenue that a handful of rural customers would generate. The utilities served the markets that paid, and the mountains did not pay enough.

The result was a divide that shaped every aspect of daily life. In the cities and towns at the base of the mountains, electricity powered lights, refrigerators, washing machines, radios, and the emerging world of twentieth-century convenience. In the hollows above, families lived as their grandparents had lived — by the light of kerosene lamps, drawing water by hand from wells and springs, preserving food by drying, salting, and canning, washing clothes by hand in cast-iron kettles, ironing with heavy flatirons heated on woodstoves. Women — because it was overwhelmingly women who performed the domestic labor that electricity would eventually transform — spent hours each day on tasks that electricity could accomplish in minutes.

The kerosene lamp was the symbol of this divide. It provided a dim, flickering light that strained the eyes and blackened the ceiling with soot. It consumed kerosene that had to be purchased, representing a continual cash drain on families with little cash to spare. And it was dangerous — a tipped lamp could set a wooden cabin ablaze in minutes, and kerosene lamp fires were a regular cause of death and destruction in mountain communities.

The REA and the Co-ops

The Rural Electrification Administration (REA), established by executive order in 1935 and made permanent by the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, was the federal response to this divide. The REA did not build power lines directly. Instead, it provided low-interest loans to rural electric cooperatives — locally organized, member-owned entities that would build the lines, purchase wholesale power (often from TVA), and distribute electricity to their member-owners at cost.

The cooperative model was both practical and ideological. Practically, it solved the problem that the private utilities refused to solve: getting electricity to rural areas where profit-motivated companies would not invest. Ideologically, it embodied the New Deal's faith in grassroots democracy — the belief that people could organize themselves to provide essential services when the market failed to do so.

Across the mountains, rural electric cooperatives organized with remarkable speed. Farmers who had never participated in any formal organization signed up as charter members, contributed small membership fees, and attended meetings in schoolhouses and churches to plan the routes of the power lines that would transform their lives. The cooperatives hired linemen — often local men who learned the trade on the job — to string the lines up hollows and across ridges, through terrain that the private utilities had deemed too difficult and too expensive to serve.

The work was physically punishing. Power poles had to be carried by hand into areas where no road existed. Lines had to be strung across ravines, up steep slopes, and through dense forest. The linemen worked in all weather, in all seasons, often far from any help if an accident occurred. The physical infrastructure of rural electrification in the mountains was built with the same kind of labor that built the railroads and the mines — hard, dangerous, and essential.

When the Light Came On

The arrival of electricity in a mountain community was, by every account, a transformative event. The oral histories are remarkably consistent: people remember the exact day the power came on. They remember who was there. They remember what they felt.

Primary Source Excerpt — Mae Campbell, Avery County, North Carolina (1979): "They turned on the electricity on a Tuesday. I remember because I had just done the washing on Monday, the old way, with the kettle and the washboard, and I said to my husband, 'That is the last time I wash clothes that way as long as I live.' And it was. We got a wringer washer within the month. I stood and watched those clothes go through the rollers and I cried. I don't know if you can understand that. I cried because I was so relieved. Twenty years of washing clothes by hand, and it was over."

From the Appalachian Heritage Oral History Collection, Appalachian State University.

The changes were immediate and profound. Electric lights replaced kerosene lamps, extending the useful hours of the day and ending the eye strain and fire hazard of open-flame illumination. Refrigerators replaced springhouses and root cellars, transforming food preservation and reducing the risk of foodborne illness. Electric water pumps replaced hand-drawn wells, bringing running water into homes for the first time. Washing machines — even the basic wringer models of the 1930s and 1940s — eliminated hours of backbreaking weekly labor. Radios connected isolated communities to the outside world, bringing news, music, market reports, and weather forecasts into homes that had previously relied on word-of-mouth and infrequent mail delivery.

The impact on women's labor was particularly dramatic. Historians who have studied the effects of rural electrification estimate that the average farm woman spent between eight and twelve hours per week on laundry alone before electrification — heating water, scrubbing clothes on a washboard, wringing them by hand, heating heavy flatirons on the stove. A wringer washing machine reduced this to a fraction of the time. The cumulative effect of electric lights, running water, refrigeration, and labor-saving appliances was to liberate women from the most physically demanding aspects of domestic work and to open the possibility — for the first time — of pursuits beyond household survival.

But electrification also connected mountain communities to the broader consumer economy in ways that were not entirely benign. The same electric lines that brought light and refrigeration also brought the radio — and with the radio came advertising, national popular culture, and a standard of material consumption that mountain families had previously been insulated from. The desire for consumer goods that had been unknown became, after electrification, a felt need. The cash economy, which had already been expanding through the coal and timber industries, gained another powerful engine. The self-sufficient household economy of the mountains — always more of an ideal than a reality by the 1930s, but still a meaningful part of mountain identity — took another step toward dissolution.

The Civilian Conservation Corps: Young Men in the Mountains

The Boys in the Camps

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was, in human terms, perhaps the most popular program of the entire New Deal. Established in March 1933, just weeks after Roosevelt took office, the CCC enrolled unemployed young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five in a quasi-military program of conservation work. The enrollees — who were required to send most of their $30 monthly salary home to their families — lived in camps supervised by U.S. Army officers, wore uniforms, ate in mess halls, and worked in crews on projects ranging from reforestation to road building to fire tower construction.

In Appalachia, the CCC was omnipresent. Hundreds of camps were established across the region, from the mountains of Virginia to the ridges of northern Georgia. The enrollees, many of them local boys whose families had been devastated by the Depression, built much of the infrastructure that visitors to the Appalachian mountains use to this day.

The catalogue of CCC accomplishments in Appalachia is staggering:

• Trails. The CCC built or improved thousands of miles of hiking trails, including portions of the Appalachian Trail and virtually all of the trail systems in the newly created national parks and national forests. Trails that seem like natural features of the landscape were, in fact, engineered and constructed by hand — by young men with picks, shovels, and mattocks, moving rock and grading switchbacks in terrain so steep that mules could barely navigate it.

• Bridges and roads. CCC crews built hundreds of bridges and access roads throughout the Appalachian mountains, connecting previously isolated communities to the broader road network and providing access to national forest lands for both recreation and fire suppression.

• Fire towers and ranger stations. The CCC built a network of fire observation towers on mountain peaks throughout the region — structures that provided the first effective system for detecting and responding to forest fires in the Appalachian mountains.

• Erosion control. On the devastated hillsides left behind by the timber industry's clear-cutting (described in Chapter 18), CCC crews planted millions of trees, built check dams in eroding gullies, and constructed terraces to stabilize slopes that had been stripped bare.

• Park infrastructure. In the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Shenandoah National Park, CCC enrollees built campgrounds, picnic areas, comfort stations, ranger residences, and the signature stone-and-log structures that define the architectural character of these parks to this day.

The Experience of the Enrollees

For the young men who served in the CCC, the experience was often transformative. Many came from families that had been destitute — families where there was no work, no cash, and not always enough food. The CCC gave them three meals a day, a bed, medical care (many received their first dental examination in a CCC camp), and work that felt meaningful.

The enrollees were a diverse group. In the Appalachian camps, most were local — sons of miners, farmers, and millworkers from the surrounding counties. But the CCC also brought young men from cities to rural areas and from one region to another, creating a kind of cross-cultural exchange that was, for many enrollees, their first experience of a world beyond their home county. Black enrollees served in segregated camps — the CCC, like most New Deal programs, operated within the racial structures of the Jim Crow era — but the program was nonetheless one of the few New Deal agencies that enrolled significant numbers of African Americans.

The educational programs offered in CCC camps — evening classes in literacy, arithmetic, and vocational skills — were, for some enrollees, their first access to formal education. An estimated 40,000 CCC enrollees learned to read and write in camp education programs. The physical conditioning, regular meals, and medical care that the camps provided improved the health of enrollees whose childhood nutrition and healthcare had been inadequate.

But the CCC was not without its costs. The quasi-military structure — the uniforms, the formations, the hierarchy — imposed a discipline that some enrollees found oppressive. The work was physically exhausting and sometimes dangerous; injuries and occasional deaths occurred on work sites. And the program's fundamental design — enrolling young men and sending their wages home — meant that the CCC was, in effect, a mechanism for removing young men from communities where they might have been organizing, agitating, or demanding more fundamental changes to the economic structures that had impoverished them.

This last point deserves emphasis. The CCC was genuinely beneficial to its enrollees and to the physical landscape of Appalachia. But it was also a safety valve — a way to absorb the energy of millions of unemployed young men who might otherwise have become a revolutionary force. Roosevelt understood this, and the quasi-military structure of the CCC was not accidental. The program channeled potentially dangerous discontent into productive labor, earning the loyalty of the enrollees and their families while leaving the underlying economic structures of the region — the concentration of land ownership, the power of the coal and timber companies, the absence of a tax base — essentially untouched.

The National Parks: Conservation and Removal

"The Best Idea" — And What It Cost

The creation of national parks in the Appalachian mountains is often celebrated as one of the great conservation achievements of the twentieth century. And it was. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, established in 1934, protects over 500,000 acres of some of the most biologically diverse temperate forest on Earth. Shenandoah National Park, established in 1935, preserves nearly 200,000 acres of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. Together, they are visited by more than fifteen million people annually, and the Great Smokies is the most visited national park in the country.

What is less often told is that these parks were built on land that was inhabited — land where families had lived, farmed, hunted, and buried their dead for generations. The creation of the national parks required the removal of those families, and that removal was, for the people who experienced it, a devastation.

The Smokies: Willing and Unwilling Sellers

The movement to create a national park in the Great Smoky Mountains began in the 1920s, driven by a combination of conservation concern (the mountains were being devastated by industrial logging), tourism ambition (Asheville and Knoxville civic boosters saw a national park as an economic engine), and genuine love for the landscape. But unlike the great western parks — Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier — which had been carved from federal lands, the Smokies were privately owned. Creating a park meant acquiring the land, piece by piece, from the people who owned it.

Some of the land was owned by lumber companies, which had already cut the timber and were willing to sell the cutover acreage. But much of the land was owned by families — small farmers whose ancestors had settled the coves and hollows in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Communities like Cades Cove, Cataloochee, and Elkmont were not wilderness. They were places where people lived. Where churches held services. Where children walked to school. Where the dead were buried in family cemeteries that the living tended with care.

The process of acquiring this land was, in the official narrative, voluntary — the state of Tennessee and the state of North Carolina purchased the land from willing sellers with funds raised through a combination of public appropriation and private donation (John D. Rockefeller Jr. contributed $5 million, the largest single gift). And many landowners did sell willingly, particularly those who lived in communities that had been ravaged by logging and who saw the park as an opportunity to preserve what remained.

But many others did not sell willingly. They sold because they had no choice. The states exercised eminent domain — the government's power to take private property for public use, with compensation — to acquire land from owners who refused to sell. The compensation offered was often well below what the landowners considered fair. Families who had lived on their land for five or six generations were told that they must leave — that the government had decided that their home was now a national park, and that they were no longer welcome in it.

Primary Source Excerpt — Aden Carver, former resident of Cataloochee Valley, North Carolina (1975): "They said we had to sell. Said the government needed the land for a park. My daddy's daddy built that cabin. We had a hundred and sixty acres, a orchard, a spring that never went dry. They offered us $3,800 for the whole thing. My daddy said it was worth ten times that. They said take it or they'd condemn it and take it anyway. So we took it. We loaded what we could carry on a wagon and we left. I was twelve years old. I never did go back. I couldn't stand to see what they did with it."

From the Cataloochee Oral History Project, Western Carolina University.

The forced removal of mountain families from the Smokies was not a single event but a process that unfolded over more than a decade, from the mid-1920s through the late 1930s. Approximately 1,200 families — between 5,000 and 6,000 people — were displaced. Some elderly residents were allowed to remain on their land under lifetime leases, living out their days as the park grew up around them. When they died, their homes were demolished or left to decay.

The communities they left behind — the churches, the schools, the mills, the cemeteries, the network of relationships that constituted community life — were erased from the living landscape. Cades Cove was preserved as a kind of museum, its restored cabins and churches now visited by millions of tourists who admire the "pioneer" architecture without necessarily understanding that the people who built these structures were evicted from them within living memory. Cataloochee's buildings stand empty in a valley that was once home to a thriving community.

Shenandoah: A Park Built on Removal

If the displacement in the Smokies was painful, the displacement required to create Shenandoah National Park was worse — both in its execution and in the ideology that justified it.

The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where Shenandoah would be established, were home to hundreds of families living in small communities along the ridges and in the hollows of the mountain crest. These were poor communities — isolated, largely self-sufficient, with limited access to schools, medical care, or the cash economy. But they were communities — places where people had lived for generations, where they knew the land, where they belonged.

The Virginia state government, which undertook to acquire the land for the park, exercised eminent domain to remove approximately 500 families — between 2,000 and 3,000 people — from the Blue Ridge. The removals were conducted over several years in the 1930s, often with minimal notice and inadequate compensation. Families who had occupied their land for a century or more were told to leave. Those who resisted were physically removed.

What made Shenandoah particularly insidious was the ideology that accompanied the removal. State officials and park advocates justified the displacement by characterizing the mountain residents as culturally backward — as "hollow folk" who were too ignorant and too degraded to appreciate or properly manage the land they occupied. A 1933 study commissioned by the state, conducted by sociologist Mandel Sherman and journalist Thomas Henry, described the mountain residents in language that was openly contemptuous — portraying them as illiterate, inbred, and trapped in a primitive culture that had no place in the modern world.

This characterization — the mountain people as backward, as obstacles to progress, as people who did not deserve the land they lived on — was not unique to Shenandoah. It echoed the language that had been used to justify the removal of the Cherokee a century earlier (Chapter 4), and it would echo again in the War on Poverty's characterizations of Appalachian poverty a generation later (Chapter 23). The pattern is consistent: outsiders decide that the people living on a particular piece of land are not using it properly, construct a narrative that dehumanizes or diminishes them, and then take the land "for their own good" or "for the public benefit."

The displaced families of Shenandoah were resettled — mostly in the lowland areas at the base of the mountains — in a process that was bureaucratically tidy and humanly devastating. People who had known the mountains their entire lives were placed in unfamiliar communities, given small plots of land or small houses, and expected to adapt. Some did. Some never recovered. The oral histories of the Shenandoah displaced are stories of grief, disorientation, and a loss that persisted across generations.

The Blue Ridge Parkway: Whose Scenery Was It?

A Road Through Someone's Home

The Blue Ridge Parkway — the 469-mile scenic highway that winds along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina — is one of the most beloved public works projects in American history. It is the most visited unit of the National Park System, attracting more than fifteen million recreational visits per year. Its sweeping mountain vistas, wildflower meadows, and rustic overlooks have defined the popular image of the Appalachian mountains for generations of Americans.

The Parkway was a New Deal project, conceived in 1933, begun in 1935 with CCC labor, and not completed until 1987 (the Linn Cove Viaduct, the last section, was an engineering marvel in its own right). It was designed as a scenic drive — a road whose purpose was not transportation but aesthetic experience. The speed limit was kept low. Commercial vehicles were prohibited. The roadside was carefully managed to present a curated vision of mountain beauty — overlooks placed to maximize the view, meadows maintained by the Park Service, farm buildings preserved (or reconstructed) to evoke a pastoral ideal.

But whose scenery was the Parkway presenting? And at whose expense was it created?

The land for the Parkway was acquired, like the land for the national parks, through a combination of purchase and eminent domain. Hundreds of families were displaced along the route. Farms were bisected by the road, cutting farmers off from their fields, their springs, their neighbors. Communities that had been connected by mountain roads for generations found those roads severed by a federal highway that they were not allowed to use for ordinary travel. The Parkway was a road through their home that was not for them.

The scenic vision of the Parkway was also, in subtle but important ways, a fiction. The "unspoiled mountain beauty" that the Parkway presented to visitors was, in many sections, land that had been logged, farmed, and actively used by human communities for two centuries. The "wilderness" was managed. The meadows were mowed. The rustic structures that charmed visitors were either authentic buildings from which families had been removed or reconstructions built by the Park Service to evoke a version of mountain life that was more picturesque than accurate.

The Parkway's designers made deliberate choices about what to show and what to hide. The scenic vistas were carefully framed to exclude evidence of industry, poverty, or modernity. The visitor experience was designed to present a vision of Appalachia as a timeless, pastoral landscape — beautiful, empty, and available for consumption. The actual Appalachia — the one with company towns, strip mines, poverty, and people — was screened off, out of sight behind the carefully maintained tree line.

Primary Source Excerpt — Letter from R.L. Doughton to the Blue Ridge Parkway superintendent, 1938: "The people along the Parkway route are making great sacrifice in giving up their homes and land. Many of them are old people who have lived in these mountains all their lives. They do not understand why the government needs their land for a road that they will not be allowed to use. I urge that every consideration be given to these people and that the acquisitions be handled with the utmost sensitivity."

National Archives, Blue Ridge Parkway Administrative Records.

In the anchor example of Asheville, North Carolina, the Parkway was transformative. The road brought a steady stream of tourists past the city, cementing Asheville's identity as a gateway to the mountains and fueling the tourism economy that would eventually replace the sanatorium industry as the city's primary economic engine. For Asheville, the Parkway was an unambiguous benefit. But for the families along the route whose land was taken, whose communities were bisected, and whose mountain roads were closed, the Parkway was another in a long line of projects that extracted value from the mountains for the benefit of outsiders.

Subsistence Homesteads: The Government Builds Communities

Eleanor's Dream

Among the New Deal's most idealistic — and most controversial — programs in Appalachia were the subsistence homestead communities, designed to provide impoverished families with small farms, modern housing, and the means to achieve self-sufficiency. The most famous of these was Arthurdale, in Preston County, West Virginia, a project that became personally associated with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and that embodied both the promise and the limitations of New Deal social engineering.

Arthurdale was conceived after Eleanor Roosevelt visited the coal camps of the Scotts Run mining district near Morgantown, West Virginia, in August 1933. What she saw appalled her: families living in shacks without sanitation, children sick with malnutrition, miners blacklisted after the coal industry's collapse with no work, no resources, and no prospects. Roosevelt returned to Washington and persuaded the president to authorize an experimental community where these families could be resettled on small farms with modern homes, community facilities, and access to light manufacturing jobs.

The project was ambitious. The federal government purchased a 1,200-acre farm near Reedsville, West Virginia, and began construction of homesteads — each consisting of a house, a garden plot, and small acreage for farming. The homes were built with indoor plumbing, electricity, and central heating — amenities that none of the selected families had ever had. A community center, a school, a forge, and craft workshops were built. The vision was a self-sufficient community where families would grow their own food, supplement their income with craft production and light manufacturing, and live in dignity.

Arthurdale was criticized from every direction. Conservatives attacked it as socialism — the government building houses for the poor with taxpayer money. Fiscal watchdogs pointed out that the per-unit cost of the homes far exceeded the original estimates (a problem caused partly by the decision to import prefabricated houses from New England that did not fit the site's foundations, requiring expensive modifications). Racial liberals criticized the project because its residents were exclusively white — the families selected from the Scotts Run coal camps were all white, and Eleanor Roosevelt, despite her personal commitment to racial equality, did not challenge the segregation of the homestead program.

The residents themselves had mixed feelings. They were grateful for the homes — modern, warm, clean housing that was incomparably better than the coal camp shacks they had left. But they also felt the weight of being model citizens in a demonstration project, subject to visitors, journalists, and government inspectors who came to observe how the poor were being improved. The paternalism was real. The residents were expected to attend classes in homemaking, nutrition, and farming techniques — classes designed by government experts who assumed that the residents' poverty was partly a function of inadequate knowledge rather than entirely a function of an exploitative economic system.

Arthurdale survived the New Deal era but never achieved self-sufficiency. The light manufacturing ventures failed. The subsistence farming was supplemented by wage work at nearby factories. The community endured, but it did so as a residential community, not as the model of a new social order that its founders had envisioned. The federal government eventually sold the homes to the residents at bargain prices and withdrew.

Arthurdale's legacy is ambiguous. It provided decent housing to families that desperately needed it. It demonstrated that the federal government could build communities. But it also demonstrated the limits of social engineering — the difficulty of creating self-sufficient communities by government fiat, in locations where the underlying economic conditions did not support self-sufficiency. And it demonstrated the persistent tension in New Deal programs between genuine help and condescending management — between treating people as citizens deserving of support and treating them as problems requiring correction.

The Contradictions: Salvation and Imposition

Who Was Helped — and on Whose Terms

The New Deal's achievements in Appalachia were real. The dams controlled floods that had devastated communities for centuries. Rural electrification transformed daily life for millions of people. The CCC built infrastructure that serves the public to this day. Malaria was eradicated. Soil erosion was reduced. National parks preserved landscapes of extraordinary beauty. Subsistence homesteads provided decent housing to families that had been living in squalor.

But the New Deal also imposed. It imposed from above, and it imposed from outside. And the imposition was not incidental to the help — it was embedded in the structure of the programs themselves.

TVA's agricultural agents told farmers how to farm. The agents were educated, well-meaning, and often correct about the technical merits of modern farming practices. But they also carried assumptions about the backwardness of traditional mountain agriculture that were not always warranted, and they operated within a power dynamic — government expert instructing ignorant mountaineer — that replicated the colonial relationship described in Chapter 14's account of the "discovery" of Appalachia.

The national parks preserved magnificent landscapes by removing the people who lived in them. The conservation impulse was genuine, but it was executed through displacement — and that displacement was justified by characterizations of mountain people as backward, degraded, and incapable of managing their own land. The pattern was disturbingly familiar: outsiders deciding that they knew best, that the land was wasted on its current inhabitants, that removal was in everyone's interest.

The subsistence homesteads provided housing while also providing instruction in how to live — classes in nutrition, homemaking, and proper farming that assumed the residents' poverty was a problem of knowledge rather than a problem of power. The residents were helped and managed simultaneously, recipients of generosity that came packaged with condescension.

Rural electrification was perhaps the least complicated of the New Deal's Appalachian interventions — it was hard to argue against electricity — but even electrification carried the seeds of disruption, connecting isolated communities to a consumer culture that would gradually erode the self-sufficiency and independence that had defined mountain life.

The Voices of the People

How did mountain people experience the New Deal? The answer, as with most questions about Appalachia, was not singular. It depended on who you were, where you lived, and what the government was doing in your particular hollow.

For families who received electricity for the first time, the New Deal was a miracle. For families who were removed from their land to make way for a dam or a national park, it was a catastrophe. For farmers who adopted TVA's improved techniques and saw their yields increase, it was a practical benefit. For farmers who resented being told how to farm by college-educated outsiders who had never swung a hoe, it was an insult. For young men who found work and food and purpose in the CCC camps, it was a lifeline. For communities that watched their young men leave for the camps and wondered what would happen when the camps closed, it was a temporary fix for a permanent problem.

The range of responses was a function of the New Deal's own complexity. These programs were not a single thing. They were dozens of programs, administered by different agencies, staffed by different people, operating under different assumptions, in different places. The TVA engineer who designed a dam was a different person, with different values and different relationship to the land, than the REA lineman who strung a power line up a hollow or the Park Service ranger who told a family they had to leave their home.

What unified the New Deal programs, despite their diversity, was a single assumption: that the federal government knew what was best for Appalachia. The assumption was sometimes correct. It was sometimes wrong. It was always paternalistic. And it set the template for every subsequent federal intervention in the region — from the War on Poverty to the Appalachian Regional Commission to the programs of the present day.

The New Deal in the Anchor Examples

Asheville and the Blue Ridge Parkway

In Asheville, the New Deal arrived as economic salvation. The city had overextended itself during the 1920s, borrowing heavily to build infrastructure, and was nearly bankrupt when the Depression hit. New Deal programs provided employment for thousands through the CCC, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and other agencies. The Blue Ridge Parkway, whose southern terminus was near Asheville, began to draw tourists even before it was completed, seeding the tourism economy that would become central to the city's identity. The Grove Park Inn, already established as a resort destination, benefited from the infrastructure improvements. The craft revival movement, supported by New Deal arts programs, took root in the Asheville area and would eventually make the city a center for handmade craft production — a legacy that continues today.

But Asheville also experienced the contradictions. The Parkway brought tourists who saw a curated version of mountain beauty, not the reality of mountain poverty. The tourism economy created low-wage service jobs, not the industrial development that might have built a more durable middle class. And the African American community in Asheville — the neighborhood of Eagle Street and the businesses along the "Block" — was largely excluded from the tourism narrative, its contributions to mountain culture rendered invisible.

The New River Valley

In the New River Valley of southwestern Virginia, the New Deal's impact was less dramatic but still significant. CCC camps operated in the area, building trails and infrastructure in the Jefferson National Forest. Rural electrification reached the Valley's farming communities through cooperatives that organized in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Virginia Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, already established as a land-grant university, served as a conduit for TVA-style agricultural extension work, with faculty and students participating in soil conservation demonstrations and agricultural improvement programs.

The New River Valley was not within TVA's territory — the New River drains north to the Kanawha and Ohio, not south to the Tennessee — but it felt the ripple effects of TVA's transformation. The demonstration that public power could be delivered cheaply strengthened the case for rural electric cooperatives throughout the region, including those serving the New River Valley. And the CCC's conservation work in the Jefferson National Forest addressed some of the environmental damage from the timber era, though much of the hillside above the Valley had been cut so thoroughly that recovery would take decades.

Then and Now: Federal Infrastructure in the Mountains

Then: In 1933, fewer than ten percent of farms in the Appalachian mountains had electricity. Malaria was endemic in the Tennessee Valley. Flooding devastated riverside communities regularly. The hillsides were stripped by logging. The roads were primitive. The isolation was profound.

Now: Electricity is universal. Malaria is a memory. The Tennessee River system has not experienced catastrophic flooding since TVA's dams were completed. The national parks welcome millions of visitors annually. The Blue Ridge Parkway is among the most beloved scenic roads in the world. The CCC's trails, bridges, and fire towers remain in use. The physical infrastructure of the New Deal is embedded so deeply in the landscape that most people who use it do not know it was built by the federal government during the Depression.

And the communities that were displaced — the families removed from Cades Cove and Cataloochee, from the Blue Ridge hollows that became Shenandoah, from the river valleys that became TVA lakes — have no monuments. Their absence is invisible. The beauty that the parks and the Parkway present to the world is real, but it is built on a foundation of loss that the visitor is not asked to see.

Whose Story Is Missing?

• African American experiences of the New Deal in Appalachia are underrepresented. Black families in the region experienced both the benefits of New Deal programs (especially rural electrification and agricultural extension) and their exclusions (segregated CCC camps, discriminatory homestead selection, racially biased distribution of benefits). The intersection of New Deal policy and Jim Crow in the mountains deserves more attention.

• Cherokee experiences of TVA and the national parks. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose territory bordered the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, had a complex relationship with both TVA and the parks. The creation of the park affected Cherokee land and resources, and TVA's operations in eastern Tennessee impacted areas of historical Cherokee significance. These stories are rarely centered in New Deal narratives.

• Women's experiences of rural electrification — the specific, physical, daily transformation of women's labor — are captured in oral histories but deserve more systematic study. The gendered impact of New Deal programs in the mountains is a story still being told.

• The displaced families' descendants. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the families removed from the Smokies, from Shenandoah, from the TVA reservoir areas, carry stories of displacement that are part of the living history of the region. Their perspectives on conservation, development, and federal power are shaped by losses that occurred within family memory.

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

For your county portfolio, investigate the following:

1. Federal programs: Which New Deal programs operated in your county? Was there a CCC camp? An REA cooperative? A subsistence homestead? WPA projects?

2. Rural electrification: When did your county receive electricity? Which cooperative provided it? What was the impact, according to local accounts?

3. Displacement: Was anyone in your county displaced by a New Deal project — a dam, a park, a highway? If so, what were the circumstances?

4. Infrastructure: What physical infrastructure in your county dates to the New Deal era? Roads, bridges, trails, buildings, parks?

5. Living memory: Can you find oral histories or family accounts of the New Deal in your county? How do people who lived through it — or their descendants — remember the experience?

Chapter Summary

The New Deal brought the most sweeping federal intervention in Appalachian history. The Tennessee Valley Authority — the most ambitious regional development project in American history — built sixteen dams, controlled flooding, generated cheap hydroelectric power, eradicated malaria, and modernized agriculture across the Tennessee Valley. Rural electrification, through the REA and local cooperatives, transformed daily life in mountain communities, liberating women from the most physically demanding domestic labor and connecting isolated communities to the broader economy. The Civilian Conservation Corps employed hundreds of thousands of young men in conservation work, building the trails, roads, and infrastructure that still serve the Appalachian mountains today. The creation of Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah National Parks preserved magnificent landscapes but required the displacement of thousands of families who had lived on the land for generations — displacement justified by characterizations of mountain people as backward and degraded. The Blue Ridge Parkway presented a curated vision of Appalachian beauty that screened out the reality of Appalachian poverty and displacement. Subsistence homestead communities like Arthurdale provided decent housing while also imposing outside values and assumptions. The New Deal in the mountains was simultaneously transformative and paternalistic — programs that improved lives while disrupting communities, that built infrastructure while taking land, that helped people while presuming to know better than those people what they needed. This contradictory legacy set the template for every subsequent federal intervention in Appalachia.

The New Deal established the pattern of federal engagement with Appalachia — ambitious, transformative, well-intentioned, and profoundly contradictory. In the next chapter, we will see that pattern repeated on an even larger scale when, thirty years later, the federal government once again "discovered" Appalachian poverty and launched the War on Poverty to address it.