If you ever get a chance, watch an old movie (1960) called Wild River.
It's an Elia Kazan film, starring a young and beautiful Lee Remick as the local girl and Montgomery Clift as a young TVA man who comes to convince the family that it's time to move off of their island farm because the dam's going to get built and the river's going to cover it.
Jo Van Fleet as the family matriarch is amazing.
One of the things the TVA did to drive a wedge between the locals was to hire black workers to build the dams, while refusing to hire local whites. In an area where everyone was equally poor, but self-sufficient and mistrustful of outsiders from Washington, it caused a lot of problems that linger to this day.
It's filmed in black and white to reflect the time of the story. It's long been one of my all-time favorite movies.
TVA built a new dam on the Little Tennessee river near Lenior City...It was to be a recreational boon to the area...They were to keep wooded shorelines and wildlife areas all along the new lake, Tellico...
Then along came the TRDA (Tennessee Resources Development Agency) In some way, they gained rights to buy property along the lake from TVA. Suddenly, farms were being purchased and some were forced to sell because of lake encroachment. (one family had to be evicted by Federal Marshals from the 147 acre farm that had been in the family since the early 1800’s) They were paid a set amount and told the lake would back up on their farm. It did....it covered THREE acres...The remaining 142 acres was sold by the TRDA for a HUGE profit...
Unfortunately I could not find it on Netflix. Will look elsewhere later.
That was a great movie!
“In the pines, in the pines,
Where the sun never shines,
And you shiver when the cold wind blows”
Never cared much for Montgomery Clift, though.
They would have a few locals working on those dams. My uncle worked on the Fontana dam. But his uncle had some political clout in Monroe County, so maybe that helped. Many of those dams were built in the era of the Great Depression and even before the depression, the economics were not great in that region.