Thankful for the French Broad River

The roar comes up through the rhododendron. Down the slick loamed bank, you come to the source. The foaming water blasts over the ancient granite boulders in the East Fork Falls deep in the Headwaters State Park in Transylvania County. These are the places where rivers are born. The Eastern Continental Divide runs along the ridge. In the next holler, the streams head south and east toward the Savannah River and the Atlantic, but here the waters are destined westward. 

In early spring, catkins hang trembling from a river birch sapling. Falling into the rushing water, a single catkin will float and follow the 218 miles of the French Broad River, a unique waterway that wends its way in almost all directions of the compass, pass the highest mountains on the Eastern United States, on its way ultimately toward the Tennessee River, the Mississippi and finally into the Gulf of Mexico. 

The river confounds us with its direction, upsetting our assumed ideas that north is up and somehow higher than south or downward. The French Broad proper starts near Rosman as the four forks of its headwaters converge to begin its journey, past Brevard, North Carolina, and through the heart of Asheville, on up through Marshall and Hot Springs before turning toward Tennessee. 

The French Broad meets its sister rivers, the Pigeon and Nolichucky, outside of Newport, in an area once known as the Forks of the River. The Tennessee Valley Authority impounded the river into the Douglas Lake. From the dam, the French Broad meanders south to meet the Holston River outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, officially becoming the Tennessee River, which in turn will be another tributary of the Mississippi.

The French Broad is considered one of the world’s oldest, along with the New River—also in North Carolina—and the Nile in Egypt, but no scientist can say with certainty how old these riverbeds actually are. Dinosaurs likely drank from its banks eons ago. The French Broad is millions of years old, older even than the ancient mountains that rise around here, including Mt. Mitchell and the Black Mountains, the highest peaks in the east. 

In these waters swim creatures found nowhere else: hellbenders, those giant salamanders that the Cherokee called waterdogs; endangered freshwater mussels Appalachian Elktoe and Tennessee heelsplitter; rock-licking fish like American Brook Lamprey; and mountain lobsters like French Broad Crayfish. 

These rich waters beckon to hungry birds. Herons wade the banks, while Canada geese perch on rocks midstream, preening their oily feathers before launching into graceful flight, honking their way up river. Hawks perch in the tall trees, eyeing the fields for prey. Occasionally you may catch sight of the bald eagle, the symbol of the entire nation. 

The French Broad found its name in more recent history. On the maps drawn by English settlers, they’re a series of Broad Rivers they crossed moving westward. The particular name referred to the boundary of lands claimed by the French. It’s more of an urban myth that the river was named after any loose female living here, but rivers are bound to draw people and their stories. 

Wilma Dykeman knew that a region’s people were reflected in the waters of the river of their land. She chronicled that human and hydrologic history in her classic 1955 study “The French Broad,” including a controversial chapter “Who Killed the French Broad?” 

Years before Rachel Carson’s environmental milestone “Silent Spring” or the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, Dykeman prophetically warned of what polluted waters do to rivers and people.

Dykeman wrote of an industrial time when huge factories straight-piped their industrial wastes into a bubbly witches brew. The French Broad lay neglected, carrying away wastes from farmers’ fields and factories, as the railroad tracks paralleled its flow past tobacco warehouses and junkyards. 

“People ask ‘how do all those tires get into the river?’ We have a whole lot of junkyards.” The answer is simple: “The River used to be a place to get rid of all the stuff you didn’t want,” said Hartwell Carson. 

When Carson moved to Asheville 15 years ago, he still found that friends would shake their heads when he asked them to go rafting or paddling the river. “You’re crazy.”

As the French Broad Riverkeeper, Carson helps guard the water quality of our best backyard recreational asset. Today, the factories that Dykeman warned about along the river way are shuttered. The once polluted waters are much cleaner. 

But popularity brings new challenges as the once neglected river may be becoming overly loved and used. “We do see additional trash from recreation. We pick up a lot of beer cans, flip flops and coolers. Some days in the summer, you can about walk across the river on the inner tubes,” Carson said. 

Challenges remain to keep the water clean as development threatened to fill the flood plain. Pavement replacing that riparian marshes hastens runoff as heavier rains and climate change bring increased flooding. Greenways offer protection against the runoff as well as places for people to walk and commune with the river. 

Where paddlers skim by in polyurethane kayaks and families float inflatable tubes around the bend of Asheville’s French Broad River Park today, Cherokee ancestors may have raced dug-out canoes crafted from felled poplar trees a thousand years ago.

They called their town Atokiaskiyi, “Where they raced.”

In Cherokee ritual, the river is the Long Man, “Yu-nwi Gunahita,” a giant with his head in the foothills of the mountains and his foot far down in the lowland, pressing always, resistless and without stop. The streams that feed the French Broad are his Chattering Children. Families of traditional Cherokee used to fast and go down to the water’s edge, their feet just touching the fast current. They would say their prayers and plunge into that cleansing water.

“The Cherokees said, ‘We have set our names upon your waters and you cannot wash them out.’” Dykeman wrote. “They were right—the Nolichucky and the Swannanoa and the Estatoe—but they might also have said, for all of us, ‘We have lived our lives along your rivers and you cannot wash the memory of us out.’”

One of Carson’s favorite parts of the river comes at nearly its northernmost point, at the cliffs of Paint Rock above Hot Springs. Once a stage coach line, the gravel road follows a broad stretch to the river between picturesque pastures and the slow cars of the Southern Railroad on the far bank. The river picks up rapids and crests of whitewater, bending around the mountains to the west, rushing toward Tennessee and a southerly turn on the other side of the state line.

On the bluffs that rise above the river, the rocks show patches of blue and ocher, mysterious pictographs painted by ancient daredevils who climbed the cliffs and clung on for dear life to leave their messages for all time. No one can decipher what those indigenous people sought to communicate.

Scrambling up a trail to the top, you still get the sweep of time and the river, views that visitors have been seeking for thousands of years. 

Too many have defaced the area with graffiti, swearing eternal teenage love or the fact they were here in garish spray paints. But not all the notes are so narcissistic. 

On one rock, someone left a grateful message: ‘Thank you, World.’

The stretch of French Broad in Cocke County, Tennessee, is rated a moderate to moderately difficult stretch of river by American Whitewater, a national river conservation organization. However, water sports are popular along the entire stretch of this old river.

From the Headwaters State Park to the greenways in Asheville, from Paint Rock to the River Walk at Knoxville, Tennessee, human visitors stop and stroll and climb and reflect on the peaceful, persistent flow of waters old as our world.

It’s the same message the Cherokee held dear and passed on to all of us. 

Thank you, River. 

Clean Up WNC’s waterways

The French Broad is cleaner than before, but many of Western North Carolina streams fail to meet basic water quality standards, especially after heavy rainstorms.  MountainTrue, the environmental nonprofit, is  creating a plan to tackle the issues that most affect river health, starting with E. coli bacteria pollution and agricultural runoff. Your voice can help change the way local governments and regulatory agencies operate, get more funding allocated to help solve the problems, and win the support of local government and the legislature in Raleigh. 

For information about the I Love Rivers Action Plan, visit mountaintrue.org/waters/french-broad-riverkeeper/.