A call to service

It’s an idyllic sight, the thin slip of water lacing and threading its way through a maze of mountain coves, always searching for a way out but never seeming to find one. Fontana Lake looks at home here, a silent echo to the soaring peaks, the horizon awash in blues where the lake, mountains and sky interlock like praying hands. 

But nature never intended this lake. A man-made dam buttresses Fontana in place, its water, like so many other mountain lakes, filling the landscape’s crevasses.

Fontana Dam is the granddaddy of them all. The largest dam in the eastern U.S., it stretches half a mile and looms 480 feet tall.

“The building of Fontana Dam is an epic story that is both intensely local and personal, but also one with national and international implications during World War II,” said Pam Meister, curator for the Mountain Heritage Center at Western Carolina University. The Mountain Heritage Center will unveil a major exhibit on Fontana dam in early summer of 2014. With Fontana as a backdrop, the exhibit will chronicle the life of early settlers—and how the dam’s arrival forever altered their physical and cultural landscape.

Fontana Dam was a cog in the American war machine.

The massive concrete bulwark—rock-solid, impenetrable, and unrivaled—proved a powerful image. It was an engineering marvel, a testament to the country’s strength and determination, and a symbol of what man could build when united for a higher cause.

A campaign to summon thousands of workers to the remote and rugged reaches of the Smoky Mountains to build what would be the world’s fourth tallest dam at that time appealed to the patriotic duty of a nation at war. 

“We need workers NOT shirkers,” proclaimed one billboard recruiting a Fontana labor force.

Lured by the promise of jobs during scarce times, workers showed up in droves—as many as 5,000 by some counts from 48 states worked seven days a week around the clock. 

“We were told it was going to be for electricity to Alcoa Aluminum for the airplanes, which they needed for the war,” recalled Harvey Welch, 87, who worked at the dam when he was 17. “We didn’t know that eventually, why part of that electricity went to Oak Ridge—for the atomic bomb.”

Not far away, the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tenn., was sprouting up, fabricated from scratch seemingly overnight, much like the bustling company town erected to house dam workers and their families at Fontana. Cadres of scientists toiled under a cloak of silence, enriching uranium needed for the atomic bomb.

Fontana Dam was able to provide for Oak Ridge’s insatiable appetite for electricity. But, like the Manhattan Project itself, Fontana Dam’s true purpose was kept secret until the war’s end. 

Building the dam meant flooding the land—30 miles of the Little Tennessee River Valley through Swain and Graham counties. The water swallowed fields and farmhouses, one-room schools and country churches, post offices and general stores. Whole communities slipped away, forever lost in a watery tomb at the bottom of the cold, dark, deep water. 

“These people gave up their culture, not just their land and homes. Their culture was demolished,” said Judy Andrews Carpenter, who traces her lineage back seven generations in Graham County—including ancestors on both sides who lived under what’s now Fontana Lake. 

Families had pens of livestock and chickens, root cellars lined with canned goods and potato bins, and lean-to shacks stacked with firewood. Fields were planted with crops supposed to last them through the winter. Families faced a particularly tough decision when it came to old graves—to exhume their loved ones and move them to a new cemetery on higher ground, or leave them buried. Buildings were taken apart, hauled off and reassembled. Sawn wood and nails were worth too much back then to waste. Old-timers can still point out houses that came from what is now under the lake. They remember what they used to be, can still see the houses where they once sat—memories that serve as constant reminder of a place that no longer exists. The government paid people for the homes and land they lost, but money could not buy what was left behind. The exodus, while painful, was borne nobly. 

“Most of the people didn’t protest. People were patriotic back then, and it was certainly pitched as part of the war effort,” said Lance Holland, a retired lake tour guide at Fontana Village and movie location scout in the N.C. Smokies. “If they could do something to help the war effort, they’d do it.”

Keith Crisp, 82, recalled the stoic acceptance of the dam that stole his boyhood home.

“We didn’t argue ag’in it,” Crisp said. “We needed it. We were having a war.”

Crisp’s father, born in 1895, had fought in World War I. He understood war meant sacrifices, at home and abroad. 

“If this dam had not been built and these people had not made that sacrifice, the war would not have ended when it did,” Carpenter said. 

For Gene Rainey, born in 1928, the coming of the dam was a welcome diversion for a rural Appalachian boy raised on a more or less subsistence lifestyle.

“We hardly ever went to the store. We raised what we ate,” Rainey said. “I didn’t know they made bread in a loaf ‘til I was 17 years old.”

Few people had cars to get to the remote work site, so they simply lined the main road waiting to hitch a ride, piling on any car going that way for 10 cents a lift. Rainey would sometimes wait by the road, and talk the driver into letting him ride down to the work site and back.

Workers traveled an hour or more on snaking gravel roads, standing on the running boards or sitting on the fender—even straddling the big, humped headlights typical of that era. One man from nearby Bryson City, N.C., got a bus and went into business “haulin’ them work ants,” Rainey said.

The influx of workers spilled beyond the borders of the company town and camp barracks.

“They slept in their cars all up and down the creek,” Rainey recalled. “Some would stretch tents and take baths in the creek.”

Rainey’s mother took in boarders working on the dam. For $5 a week, she gave them a bed plus and three meals a day—a hot breakfast and supper and a packed lunch. One boarder gave Rainey’s mother $14 to buy the boy his first pair of glasses.

As the years wore on, however, those who lost their land and heritage to Fontana Dam became hardened, even bitter about what they lost. Rainey saw a growing resentment toward the government fester and boil during the intervening decades.

“All the old people hated the government by the time they died,” he said.

While the communities beneath Fontana and along its now isolated shores may seem lost forever, in some ways, they actually may have been saved. Fontana was locked in a time capsule, spared the slow evolution of society. Its memory has survived uncorrupted from one generation to the next, suspended eternally just like it was on the last day that the last person moved out.

Walt Larimore, author of historical fiction set in the logging boomtown of Proctor pre-Fontana, wagers that must be one of the things that intrigued him about the place.

“I think part of it was the echoes and ghosts,” Larimore said.

After the lake came, those who remained did the best they could with the resulting changes. Carpenter’s grandfather, Oliver Bradshaw, built rental cabins, bought a fleet of boats and put a sign by the road to capitalize on the new breed of lake tourists that began arriving after the war.

For three decades, Lance Holland plied the new tourist trade as a lake tour guide for Fontana Village Resort. His tours always imparted the lake’s impressive size—450 feet deep and 30 miles long. This bit of trivia perplexed one woman from Kansas. 

“She asked, ‘What did they do with all that dirt when they dug out the lake?’ I said, ‘Well ma’am, what do you think they built all these mountains out of?’” Holland recounted.

There’s few men alive who know as much about Fontana as Holland. Holland spent years talking to old-timers while they were still alive, learning about life before the dam and how it all changed with the coming of the lake. He knows the lake in a literal sense—a map of its crooks and coves, its snaking arms and twisting shoreline etched in his memory from 30 years of running tours with Fontana Village Resort. 

And when it comes to Fontana history, Holland wrote the book—literally.

“When I led the trips across the lake, quite a few people would say, ‘you should write a book about this,’ so I did,” Holland said. It’s simply named “Fontana: A Pocket History of Appalachia.” 

The unique story of Fontana is gaining recognition, thanks in part to Carpenter tirelessly talking it up. With the mission of preserving and sharing the heritage, she has formed an organization called Proctor Revival, named for the biggest of the Fontana towns before the dam came.

“We must give credit where credit is due,” she said. “If it weren’t for these people’s contribution, WWII would not have ended when it did.”

Chip Carringer of Robbinsville, N.C., suspects the dam saved his father’s life. The Japanese captured Carringer’s father, Wayne, during the war. Assuming he was dead, the military presented his parents with a flag, and a service was held. Wayne actually was being held in a prison camp where conditions were so brutal he weighed only 75 pounds when the atomic bombs were dropped, forcing Japan to surrender. 

Tragically, Wayne’s brother back home was killed working on Fontana Dam when a crane backed over him. He gave his own life building a dam to help rescue his brother from prison camp. 

“You hope that something you did there along the line had a part in it,” said Harvey Welch, who worked at the dam site as a teenager 70 years ago. “So many people don’t know the part that Fontana dam played in bringing that war to an end.” 

Raising more than a dam

With a population of about 30, the tiny town of Fontana Dam is but a spec on a map. It’s a far cry from the days of dam construction, when more than 5,000 people lived at Fontana during the wartime push for power.

To support and house the army of dam workers, the government built a bustling town from whole cloth, with a hospital, two schools, stores, a movie theater, pool hall, cafeteria, and hundreds of living quarters and dormitories. There was also infrastructure to erect: streets, phone and power lines, water and sewer lines, and a water treatment plant.

“They built a whole village in a matter of months,” said Jeannie Stewart, general manager of Fontana Village Resort, whose grandparents were among the dam workers. “They knew to get people here to work they had to provide what people needed.”

A ready-made town meant even more jobs to fill.

“They had schools, so they needed school teachers. They had a hospital, so they needed nurses,” Stewart said. It even had a police force—all run by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the government utility that built the dam.

“Just about anyone who is from here has a Fontana story in their family,” Stewart said.

Harvey Welch was 15 when his dad moved their family of five to the Fontana complex in early 1942. It was an exciting time, he recalled.

“We were going to be working on something important for the war effort,” said Welch, now 87, who is among a dwindling number of so-called “dam kids.”

After a childhood in the flatlands of Missouri, simply being in the mountains was exhilarating in itself, Welch said.

“I was up there in those hills all the time. The first day we got to Fontana and drove up in front of the house where we were going to stay, they took off into the house and I took off up the mountain,” Welch said. “I spent many, many, many hours and many, many, many nights up in the mountains.”

Thanks to an after-school job delivering the Knoxville News and Sentinel in the camp barracks—a separate section of the village for men without families—Welch saved up enough money to buy a ground cloth and sleeping bag for his overnight forays into the hills.

Fontana was a fabulous stomping ground for kids. There were square dances and movie nights, pool and ping-pong, and plenty of friends. Baseball was huge at Fontana—there was a litany of baseball teams, with two leagues no less.

The dam was ever-present and inescapable, looming over every aspect of life at Fontana, however.

The rock for the dam was quarried from the side of a mountain next to the dam. It was crushed, mixed into concrete and then carried on conveyor belts, tracks, trestles, cables and pulleys to the section of dam being poured. But first, the rock had to be blasted away from the mountain, and the earth-rattling dynamite charges were just a routine reminder of the work at hand.

Welch said the kids would sometimes gather on a hill above the dam site to watch the blasting or simply get a view of the dam going up.

“Watching this was really, really, really interesting,” Welch said.

His final year, Welch got a part-time job after school as a gopher, running parts and supplies and messages around the dam construction site. Welch also unloaded railroad cars, which rumbled in and out of Fontana constantly with supplies. From dynamite for blasting to 300-pound tires for quarry dump trucks, the supply chain for the massive dam was never ending. 

Of course, a manual labor job of that scale came with inherent danger. The exact count of how many died or were injured is a matter of debate. Welch said his dad witnessed one worker die.

“He was working on the face of the dam when a guy working up above on the trestle fell. He said, ‘I could hear the wind whistling through his britches as he went’,” Welch said.

Welch and others relive the memories, good and bad, during annual reunions of “The Dam Kids” held at Fontana Village Resort since the 1980s.

“Some of these stories have been told 3 or 4,000 times,” Welch quipped. “It, of course, has dropped off and dropped off as everybody has gotten older and we have lost people.”

Down from some 150 dam kids at reunions in the 1980s, there were fewer than 40 at the one this spring. 

Visiting Fontana

The scenery: The Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Nantahala National Forest surround almost all of Fontana Lake. “There’s no houses, no roads, no telephone lines, just natural beauty,” said Jonathan Peoples, recreation director for Fontana Village Resort. The lake has two nesting pairs of bald eagles, plus the regular wildlife known to the Smokies, Peoples said.

The lake: It’s 29 miles long but has an astounding 238 miles of shoreline due to its many snaking coves. There are no designated swimming beaches, as the steep shore makes it hard to access the water’s edge, but anywhere one can make his or her way to the water, one can swim. There are two marinas on the lake, which rent everything from fishing boats to kayaks. (Fontana Marina, 828.498.2129. Almond Boat Dock, 828.488.6423.)

The trails: There are literally hundreds of miles of trails radiating from the Fontana area. The Appalachian Trail even crosses over the top of the dam en route through the region. The most unique hiking experience is to venture into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park along the north shore of the lake—the most remote of the Smokies’ backcountry, it’s the largest roadless area in the Eastern United States. Hike in from trailheads at the east or west end of the lake, or better yet, take a boat shuttle across the lake and then pick up a trail.

The dam: A tourist attraction in itself, the dam has been a destination since its construction. The Tennessee Valley Authority has a visitor center with exhibits and a video chronicling the construction of the dam.

The history: Remnants of life before the dam riddle the north shore of the lake in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, from old houses and cemeteries to the site of lumber kilns and copper mine entrances leading deep into the earth. History tours traversing the lake by boat and then hiking to key historical sites depart from Fontana Village Marina. Meanwhile, a drive through Fontana Village reveals the story of the government village for dam workers that sprang up in the middle of nowhere. 

The resort: When the dam was finished in 1944 and workers emptied out, Fontana Village Resort moved in, converting the one-time work camp into a vacation destination. Tennessee Valley Authority, the federally-run utility company that built Fontana, leases the property to a private company that runs the resort.

Three-bedroom cabins on the 400-acre resort rent for about $200 a night in peak season. There are also hotel rooms in the main lodge. 

At first blush, it seems like any other resort. There’s a pool, dining facilities, live music and entertainment, putt-putt and tennis. But look closer, and the backbone of the dam worker’s village shows through. The 120 cabins are the original houses once lived in by dam workers and their families, although they are just a handful compared to the several hundred homes there once were.

The resort still pays homage to its company town roots in its activity line-up. Guests are enlisted in pick-up softball games, roped in to weekend square dances or regaled with doses of history during an evening “ghost tour” of the village.

Housing war effort workers

As the operations grew at the Manhattan Project site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the community also grew, and more houses were needed to accommodate workers and their families. The Tennessee Valley Authority made available drawings of one-story single family prefabricated units that were used for families who moved in to help construct Fontana Dam. These units, called Flat Tops, were transported in 8-foot by 24-foot sections and assembled on site. Though the design was simple, the quality was considered top notch for both the units and the furniture inside them. One of Oak Ridge’s original Flat Top houses is on display at the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge. The house, a type B-1, two-bedroom unit formerly located at 68 Outer Drive, has 576 square feet of living space for its kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, and single bathroom. The AMSE is continuing efforts to preserve the Flat Top house through fundraising and solicitation of items to furnish the house. To donate or learn more, email flattop@amse.org or call 865.574.8453.