The Waterlord:

Gus Isom and the Tennessee Valley Authority

Shawn Kimbro and Lisa Day

To many generations of Appalachian residents, the word “development” is nearly a curse. It’s often used to justify radically changing residents’ daily lives and their property to the point of displacement from lands where multiple generations of one family have raised their children, planted their gardens, and managed their livestock in an independent, self-sustaining manner. In the early 1930s when federal officials in Tennessee spoke the word “development” in close proximity with “general welfare of the citizens,”^[1] it signaled widespread loss while it also brought greater access to utilities. As a result, waterways changed course, dams and reservoirs appeared, access to utilities improved, and residents moved their homes and communities to dry land. Among the many displaced families, the Gordon Isom family of Hawkins County, Tennessee, shifted their sense of home as they re-settled into other counties, and Gus Isom made a new livelihood for himself as a waterman in east Tennessee.^[2] 

The New Deal

When the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) formed, its main goal was to provide hydroelectric power to state residents along with flood control of the Tennessee River. The creation of the TVA in 1933 as a key pillar of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal had been well reported in all the local newspapers. The TVA’s stated mission was to improve flood control, open the rivers to navigation, provide recreation, and generate inexpensive electricity for people living in the Tennessee Valley and surrounding regions. However, development brought sacrifice: TVA infrastructure eventually displaced over 14,000 rural Appalachian families, acquired over 1.3 million acres of land, and altered the course of almost every major stream in the Tennessee River watershed.^[3] Many residents of the impoverished region welcomed the economic opportunities the agency promised to bring. The government bought land “at a price deemed fair and reasonable” from displaced residents, many of whom did not have the modern conveniences of electricity (98%) and indoor plumbing (41%),^[4] but to paraphrase Woody Guthrie, this land was their land. For many, it was the land where their formerly enslaved grandparents had toiled, and even though east Tennessee's unforgiving, over-cultivated soil had nearly broken their backs, they felt a deep connection to it.

Construction on Norris Dam began in 1936,^[5] and when recruiters fanned out across the region seeking laborers, they did not assign work equitably in socioeconomic and racial factors. Most of the best jobs went to White workers, while some Black men signed on to haul stone, cut brush, and perform other strenuous manual labor. More prosperous landowners were likely to supplement the TVA’s purchase price with their savings to acquire land somewhere else, but poor farmers and sharecroppers were forced out of agriculture and into low-skill industrial work in the cities.^[6] Moreover, the TVA’s relocation staff exhibited the institutionalized discrimination that affected so much of the New Deal: all of them were White. In the height of the Jim Crow era, these workers did not assist Black families in relocation or refer them to other agencies that could have provided assistance.^[7] While the Great Migration of Black individuals and families in rural Appalachia to urban areas had been occurring since 1910, largely due to the closure of coal mines, Black Tennesseeans’ migration to cities (mostly Nashville and Atlanta) happened mostly in the 1930s and 1940s in response to TVA displacement.^[8] 

In the 1940s not long after impoundment of the Holston River by a TVA dam, Cherokee Lake flooded more than 30,000 acres, including small communities and fertile riverine farmland. Living humans weren’t the only ones being displaced. The TVA records indicate that they “investigated” 69,000 graves in 1933 and eventually relocated 20,000 of them.^[9] As with many Black cemeteries, many of the graves were unmarked and most likely missed in the relocation process.^[10] Only a handful of newspapers like the Chattanooga Daily Times reported the difficulties in the TVA relocation of cemeteries:

A rather unusual problem involved in the flooding of some of the authority’s reservoirs is that of the removal of graves and cemeteries from the flooded areas. In most of the reservoirs on the main river this problem was fairly simple, since the only cemeteries flooded were small isolated ones bordering on the reservoir edge and containing only a few graves which could be easily moved to adjacent cemeteries slightly higher up: 425 graves were moved from fifty-one cemeteries in the Chickamauga reservoir.

In a reservoir such as Norris, however, the problem was greatly complicated by the fact that most of the cemeteries had been placed in the lower levels adjacent to the river, so that large numbers of them were considerably below the reservoir level. This not only increased the amount of work involved in making relocations but also made it more difficult to find other cemeteries in the immediate vicinity where relocations could be made. The 5,226 graves moved from the Norris reservoir is [sic] reported to be the largest program of its kind ever undertaken.^[11]  

Curiously, the Chattanooga newspaper article is 24 paragraphs of crowded text; the unemphatic paragraphs regarding the cemetery removal are the eighteenth and nineteenth paragraphs, and the content is buried in a subsection titled “Effect on Utilities.”  While the Chickamauga reservoir near Chattanooga necessitated the removal of 425 graves from 51 cemeteries as well as “small isolated” cemeteries, the Norris reservoir alone resulted in the relocation of over 5,000 graves that caused far more difficulty in finding as well as moving elsewhere in southeast Tennessee.

The Isoms of East Tennessee

Much has been written about the economic opportunities that spread through the region with the installation of the TVA, but less has been said about the over 15,000 individuals who were displaced and relocated by the creation of the lakes,^[12] including the Isom Family. The Isoms offer a keen 19th century example of American history formed by the institution of slavery. In 1847 in Gate City, Virginia, located in the tri-state area with Tennessee and Kentucky, an enslaved woman known only as Janie had thirteen children with Gideon Ison, a White property owner. While family history long held that Ison never sold any of their children, more recent evidence in court records has shown that on March 1, 1865, Gate City, Virginia, the estate of Gideon Ison made a bill for hire of five “Negro boys” for amounts ranging from $99 to $54 and one woman named Jenny for one dollar on March 1, 1865, to be paid on March 1, 1866.^[13] Also, at least one son (also named Gordon Ison) acquired land in the Sunrise community in Knox County, Tennessee, well known as an area where formerly enslaved individuals and families settled.^[14] 

Court records in 1870 show that Kelson Isom (known as “Kelso”) married Laura Whiteside and settled along the Holston River in nearby Hawkins County. Their eldest son, Gordon Isom (1871-1954), amassed over 200 acres, raising hogs and farming the land by the time the TVA came around and relocated his family to the other side of the river.^[15] According to William Isom II (president of Black in Appalachia Project), family lore tells that Gordon Isom acquired the land around the turn of the century when a wealthy family deeded him thirty acres of a much larger tract in return for the tenant work he had previously done and for consideration of future labor. Genealogical records of property ownership, however, indicate that Gideon and Mollie “Doll” Isom purchased the 218+ acre farm for $6,000 on November 6, 1930.^[16] 

The sixth son of Gordon Isom, Augustus “Gus” Isom (1909-1989), considered going to Morristown when TVA recruiters came in 1933 to sign up workers for the nearby Norris Dam project, but he was responsible for most of the work on the farm and needed to stay with his family. Still, the promise of steady work and good wages drew many of his friends and neighbors to clear the entire Clinch River Valley as part of TVA’s first massive construction project. In recollections shared with Shawn Kimbro, Gus couldn’t remember when he first heard that the land where his family farm was located in the Holston River Valley would be flooded to create Cherokee Lake. He wasn’t too worried at first because his land was nearly 30 miles upstream from Jefferson City, where the new Cherokee Dam was to be built. His optimism was short lived, as his father was soon notified that the Isom farm would be taken along with the land of nearly all their neighbors. Some of his neighbors tried to fight the federal government’s notice of land possession by eminent domain, but it was immediately apparent that resistance was a lost cause.^[17] In 1939, Isom’s modest 30-acre farm belonged to the TVA, and no longer able to work his land, he took a job helping to build the dam that would eventually flood his family homestead.

TVA based its offers to landowners on an obscure classification system that assigned values to categories ranging from alluvial river bottom to steep hillside. Gus Isom’s farm was classified to be “hillside,” even though many of the neighboring farms received better classifications and more compensation. Landowners could contest the value and category, but that process required hiring a lawyer that many families couldn’t afford. An all-White board, appointed by the TVA to allocate relocation assistance, provided better services to White families while leaving Black families to fend largely for themselves. Exemplifying this difference in treatment, the New Deal included funding for a Norris Model Community for relocated residents; however, this model deliberately excluded Black families. Moreover, Black and White workers at the dams had a separate pay scale, and Black workers were often hired only for low-paying menial and temporary jobs. Conditions at TVA sites such as Pickwick Dam, Wheeler Dam, and Wilson Dam were even more racially disparate in their housing and amenities. As historical evidence has indicated, the TVA amassed “one of the worst records on race compared to other New Deal initiatives.”^[18] 

The Isoms took the check for their land and moved to nearby Knox County, where Gus and his father took jobs as laborers in a furniture factory.^[19] As construction began on Cherokee Dam in the summer of 1940, a call went out for workers. This time, free of commitments to the family farm, Gus applied, and on his draft registration card in June 1941, he lists Cherokee Dam as his place of employment;^[20] as the war raged, he was never called to serve.

Figure 1. Gus Isom’s draft card in 1940 indicates his employer as Cherokee Dam. National Archives and Records Administration. Courtesy of Ancestry.com.

Gus Isom’s job at the dam was to push wheelbarrows full of stone up steep scaffolding so it could be mixed with concrete. Hastened by the onset of World War II, the “crash schedule” of Cherokee Dam construction took only sixteen months to build the dam, and the gates of the new dam closed on December 5, 1941,^[21] two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The power generated by the dams was bringing electricity to many rural families who hadn’t had it before. The newly-abundant hydroelectric power was also used to build equipment and supplies for the military and to provide the energy for the atomic bomb manufacturing facility in nearby Oak Ridge.

Gus Isom left Norris Dam and found work clearing land for the high-tension power lines that were beginning to crisscross the region. Not long into this line-worker job, Gus heard about a new TVA project near Rogersville that needed laborers. The work—to stock Cherokee Lake with fish—sounded easier than clearing brush, so he signed on. With his lived experience as an angler and his hard work, Gus was soon promoted to foreman. Since he knew the features of the original riverbed, he helped decide where to release the fish, usually near river bottom features like shoals and deeper holes. He stocked fish until 1949, when TVA turned all fisheries management services over to the newly formed Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency (TWRA). Recognizing an opportunity, he applied for commercial trotline tags and began fishing for channel and blue catfish. With a comprehensive understanding of the familiar underwater contours and structures, he became one of the most successful and best known fishermen in the Tennessee Valley. Gus felt at home on the lake and came to enjoy the seasonal fluctuations in water level as the lakes receded in the winter and filled back up in the summer.

Near the end of his time with TVA, Gus Isom began building a boat, patterned after his memories of his dad’s boat building when they lived on the river. Since lumber was plentiful from all the forests that were cleared to make the lakes, he chose to construct his boat from white oak because he considered oak to be more durable and easier to shape than other native hardwoods. Upon completion, his boat was a little over 16 feet long and about 5 feet wide, with a square and slightly upturned bow and a reinforced stern. He carved the sides a little higher than most jon boats to handle the high waves whipped up by frequent thunderstorms that rolled through the valley, and he painted his boat forest green so it would blend in with the weeds and trees if he needed to hide it along the lake bank. Isom fits into the long tradition of Black men who earn a living through fishing, including men with enslaved ancestors. Reflecting on the large number of Black commercial fishermen who made a living in the Chesapeake Bay during the postbellum decades, Megan Waldrep indicates that “there is no doubt that America’s commercial fishing industry is rooted in slavery…. [The] slave trade sought artisans, farmers, and fishers from Africa for their specific knowledge in sustaining living to sell and buy them for those distinct skills. From then on, generations of enslaved people worked on farms and plantations, perfecting the trade, only to hand over the harvest for others to profit.” Christine Keiner adds: “one of the attractions of commercial fishing relates to the independence long associated with life on the water,” further suggesting that “Independent fishermen developed such a specialized knowledge base that they found the prospect of having to take up other work alarming.”^[22] Yet, even with such expertise, Black fishermen have counted on the challenges of the occupation: “the ability to adapt to rapidly changing climatic and economic conditions was and remains vital to making a living” as a commercial fisherman.”^[23] According to Vincent Leggett, waterman and author of Blacks of the Chesapeake Bay, many “watermen”–anglers who make a living from fishing, boat-building, sailmaking, crab picking and fish fileting, owners of seafood processing plants, or owners of seafood restaurants–come from a legacy of working on the waterways for a living, and sometimes this legacy isn’t restricted to the traditional form of father to son.^[24] 

The Intertwined Stories of Gus Isom and Shawn Kimbro

        The following autoethnography tells how co-author Shawn Kimbro met Gus Isom and learned how to fish and, along the way, learned first-hand about the many effects of the TVA on east Tennessee families, waterways, and overall culture.

Before I met Gus Isom, I never made much money at the dock. The only profits came from whatever we had left after paying the lease. Our landlord—or in this case, our waterlord—was the Tennessee Valley Authority. This government agency owned all the docks at that time, or rather the water they floated on. They made only a few leases available, and sites were limited to designated areas spaced many miles apart. With TVA’s permission, leaseholders could build slips or add structures, but there were set limits on the number of boats that could be tied up at a time.^[25] Because the lease for the dock and marina store didn’t turn much profit, I needed more work.

I was seventeen when I met Gus. He was seventy. My father had leased a campground and marina near Fall Creek State Park on Cherokee Lake near Morristown, Tennessee. I think my dad liked the idea of running a boat dock more than doing it. He continued to work in his insurance business and to preach on Sundays, so it fell on me to pump gas, dock boats, and run the floating store at the marina. For convenience and out of a profound dislike for early morning awakenings, I started living there, sleeping on a cot behind the cash register in the bait shop.

My non-traditional alarm clock was the sound of muddy boots hitting the wooden gangplank as early-rising fishermen stomped in before daylight to buy minnows or night crawlers. They cursed me when the coffee wasn’t ready, but I’d start a pot while counting out their bait. We kept the minnows outside in a metal tank beneath a canvas awning, which kept out the rain but not the snakes. Having pulled a water moccasin up in a small net from a dark tank on one bleary morning, I became forever wary of dipping minnows. As the sky started to brighten, I’d look over toward the boat ramp to see Gus Isom backing down in his rusty red pickup truck, towing a homemade wooden jon boat filled with his gear, including the aging nets and lines that his wife, Alice Williams Isom, hand-tied for him in many hours of evening work in the years before she died.^[26] By the time I first saw his boat, the wood was worn and the paint was faded, but it was still tight and seaworthy even though Gus had been fishing in it for nearly thirty years. Sometimes fishing from the boat floating over the same land he once farmed, Isom told me his stories as he taught me how to fish. I believe Isom is an example of the resilience demonstrated by Appalachian residents in the face of radical changes in culture and topography, and his experience is representative of the plight of many east Tennesseans, especially the Black community. He was there every morning, rain or shine, except Sunday, when I presumed he went to church but not to my dad’s all-White congregation. I’d watch him launch his boat, pull the cord on his 15-horsepower Johnson Seahorse outboard motor, and putt-putt away from the ramp toward the main stem of the lake. A few hours later, he’d return with that weathered, flat-bottomed boat nearly overflowing with blue and channel catfish.

Gus was something of a legend on Fall Creek. In 1978, respect didn’t come easily to a Black man in the still socially segregated Tennessee, but all the fishermen admired him because he caught so many fish. I’d heard the stories and seen the faded black and white Polaroid pictures on the bait shop bulletin board: Gus holding a 50-pound blue catfish and another of him struggling to hold up a paddlefish that had to weigh 100 pounds or more. Every angler–especially me–on Cherokee Lake recognized Gus as the lord of the catfish.

Gus Isom was a waterman, as they’d call him in other parts of the country. He sold fish to a few private customers and fish frys, but most of his catch went to local markets. What he couldn’t sell, he donated to churches or to the nearby orphanage. His best customers were IGA Markets; these grocery stores weren’t huge, but they were conveniently located in smaller communities where they didn’t have to compete with the national supermarket chains. They were known for selling quality meat, including the freshest fish in the region. For that part of their reputation, I figured Gus was single-handedly responsible.

Figure 2. Gus Isom, wearing his trademark overalls, holding two catfish, and standing behind a black truck that looked like the red model he drove when Shawn Kimbro met him. Photo courtesy of William Isom II, March 11, 2024.

One morning I summoned up the courage to walk over to the boat ramp and talk to Gus. He was quiet but not unfriendly. I stammered something about the weather, and he nodded. Now at a loss for words, I blurted out, “Will you teach me how to catch catfish?” He looked down at his calloused hands, then back at me, and asked if I knew what I was getting into. “I’ll supply the bait,” I added, even though I knew my dad would never agree to that.

Gus laughed at me as he launched his boat and took me completely by surprise when he said, “Get in.”

“I can’t go today,” I backtracked. “I’m the only one minding the dock.”

“You got to fish when the fish bite,” he said as he pushed off from the red clay bank.

Walking back to the dock, I came up with a plan for the next morning. Lorne, a friend from home, had asked about working at the dock. I had to figure out how to pay him and to convince him to work in the mornings. Although he was too young to obtain a driver’s license, he could drive a boat, so I offered him free gas and use of a rental skiff in exchange for covering the early shift. To sweeten the deal, I said he could use the boat on his off days.

Before first light, I knew Gus would be fishing, and I dug out my mildewed rain gear and headed for the ramp. I was waiting in the darkness when he pulled up. Without saying a word, he handed me the rope tied to the front of his boat and backed the trailer into the water. I was pumped with excitement when I pulled the boat up onto the clay. I was going fishing with a legend. That was the first of many days on the water with Gus that summer, and despite my aversion to getting up early, I never missed a trip.

Gus’s method of catching the most fish was to set trotlines on Cherokee Lake. A trotline consists of a heavy main line with loops tied on about every three feet, and after the line is stretched, a lighter drop line called a snood is tied to each loop with a large J-hook attached. The line must be very tight in order to spring back and set the hook when a fish bites, and the line must be stretched with a big rock or some other kind of anchor on each end. Gus’s anchors always weighed fifty pounds or more, so dropping those rocks wasn’t easy. He insisted they be heavy so he could run the lines in the wind without causing slack. He attached plastic milk jugs along the line every thirty feet or so to keep the line off the lake bottom. The length of line from the floating jug to the main line determined the depth of the line. Gus usually ran three lines with 100 hooks each; he would sometimes run more before holiday weekends or when he had large orders to fill.

Commercial fishing involves a process that most people don’t realize, and Gus gave me the discipline that I didn’t know I needed. The first task every morning was to catch bait, and Gus used a nylon cast net to catch shad that formed large groups of fish on the lake’s surface. These prolific forage fish gathered in schools by the thousands and rose to the surface, their heads poking just above the water. These were easier to catch early because the angle of sunlight on the water made it possible to sneak up on them. If they sensed us nearby, they’d bolt, so Gus taught me to throw the net as far as I could while making sure it opened into a big circle. I got pretty good at cast netting, but I could never throw like Gus. He could usually catch a couple hundred of the slimy, silvery shad with one massive heave.

We put the shad into a pail we called “the gut bucket.” My job was to cut them up into bite-size chunks as bait for larger fish: mostly in half, the bigger ones in thirds. Once we baited all the lines, we started the motor and ran toward the floating milk jugs that marked the trotlines. As we neared the trotlines, those jugs started bobbing, sometimes even going under the water. A welcome sight, a bobbing jug signaled that the trotline was loaded with fish. Gus, sitting in the front of the boat, would take off the fish and untangle the twisted drop lines. As he moved from hook to hook by pulling the boat along the tight line, I sat in the back, rebaiting the hooks and occasionally bailing water from the boat–not because it leaked but because it would fill with water and slime dripping from the catfish. It was messy, tedious, and time consuming. “Honest work,” Gus called it.

After a couple of weeks of running the lines with Gus, I was the lucky audience for some of his stories. One morning, he pointed toward a crumbling concrete grain silo that was protruding above the lake’s surface. I never understood why TVA tore down the houses, blew out the bridges, and cut down all the trees but left the grain silos like abandoned lighthouses. It’s the same in all the lakes.^[27]

“You see that silo over there?” Gus pointed. “That was near my daddy’s farm.”

“You lived here?” I asked.

“Sure did,” he replied, pointing downward. “We farmed this land.”

Over the course of the summer, I heard more stories of Gus’s life in the river valley before TVA flooded it. He told me about his childhood chores on the farm, including how he chopped firewood and milked cows every morning before walking across Poor Valley Creek on a log footbridge to school.When he grew strong enough to work on the farm full time, he stopped going to school. During the coldest winters, the river froze, and he walked to visit his cousins who lived on the Russellville side.In the summer, a mule-drawn wagon  took his family to the all-Black revival services near Clinch Mountain. Although his family was spread out, they remained tight-knit. When Decoration Day rolled around on the fourth Sunday in May, his family and all of his aunts, uncles, and cousins would return to the family cemetery to mow, rake leaves, lay flowers on the graves, and have “dinner on the grounds,” a long Appalachian tradition.^[28] Memorializing his ancestors became even more somber due to his memory of how TVA relocated the graves of his family and others when they built the lakes.

I fished with Gus through the whole summer of 1979, when I left to go to college. The next summer, I applied to TWRA for my own commercial license. When it arrived, along with ten shiny aluminum trotline tags with my name and address on them, I was on top of the world. In my mind, I had made the transition to adulthood. I had a trade–a genuine profession: I was a commercial fisherman. I couldn’t wait to show my tags to Gus. He wasn’t disappointed that he lost his summer help, but he let me know in no uncertain terms that I should put my lines well away from where he was fishing. I nodded in a gentleman’s agreement and shook his hand. A couple of years later, I joined the Army and stopped fishing commercially. To this day, I regret that I lost touch with Gus.

Long-Term Changes in the Valley

In 1933, Knoxville-born Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee wrote, “It is the valley that is newly TVA’s to have and to hold, for better or for worse.”^[29] Today, most would agree that the marriage of TVA to the people and lands of the Tennessee Valley has been beneficial. Arguably, the dams were responsible for moving many people from a wide swath of the rural South away from subsistence farming and toward modern industrialization, but the organization keeps over 10,000 people employed. Also, 29 of the 46 dams on the Tennessee River and its feeder streams generate hydroelectricity and provide power to customers in seven states, including almost all of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia. It is the largest government-owned power supplier in the U.S., and its energy grid reaches as far south as Jackson, Mississippi, and as far north as Bowling Green, Kentucky. The agency now provides service to more than ten million individual customers and businesses, along with many large industrial operations and federal installations like the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Economic and employment opportunities in the once impoverished region have significantly improved.^[30]

The TVA lakes and surrounding public lands are a recreational haven for boaters, waterskiers, anglers, hunters, hikers, bird and wildlife watchers, and anyone who enjoys being on the water. With TVA came improved roadways and access points in the Appalachian Commons, and researchers in outdoor recreation have determined the enormous benefits: for example, people who visit eastern Kentucky spend nearly 50% of their time fishing—and they also spend money.^[31] They bring “millions of dollars into rural areas in Central Appalachia.”^[32] In Tennessee, not long after the construction of the Norris Reservoir, the TVA recorded around 57,000 fishing trips.^[33] Since then, the numbers have only increased. In 2017, the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture found that recreation on the lakes provided an annual economic benefit of nearly $12 billion to the region, and since there are approximately 11,000 miles of shoreline, each mile was generating a value of over $1 million.^[34] Similarly, a report in 2022 by the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation found that 4.3 million people spent over eleven billion dollars while engaging in angling (19%), hunting (9%), or wildlife watching (71%) in Kentucky alone.^[35] Indeed, the profits from outdoor recreation in central Appalachia–including hiking, climbing, mountain biking, along with wildlife recreation–as well as the tourism dollars associated with these activities, are far surpassing the economic benefits of coal and are focusing on environmental protection rather than extraction.^[36]

In its 2022 report to the federal government, the TVA claims that “sustainability is engrained in [its] mission,” including “clean” energy, environmental stewardship, and economic development for the region. Preservation efforts include legal action to protect the snail darter, a tiny fish species native to streams in the area, resulting in the TVA v. Hiram Hill decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the Endangered Species Act.^[37] Subsequently, Congress passed a law in 1980 exempting the project from the Act, allowing Tellico Dam to be built. The controversy, however, helped sway public opinion away from dam construction and led to the cancellation of projects in other parts of the country. Other government agencies along with whistleblowers within the organization have repeatedly called for greater oversight than its current small board of governance.

Conclusion

Gus Isom’s experience is representative of the stories of thousands of rural Appalachian families who were involuntarily displaced by the TVA as it acquired over a million acres and altered the course of almost every major stream in the Tennessee River watershed. In some cases, entire towns were submerged by the lakes. TVA’s displacement policies were structured to favor prosperous land-owning families over poorer owners and tenants. Relocation was particularly difficult for Black families since TVA provided them with little assistance; with scant compensation for their homes that had been destroyed, social networks broken, and the lands and graves of their ancestors inundated, most people had little choice but to move to impoverished, segregated neighborhoods in cities like Nashville, Knoxville, or Chattanooga.^[38] 

Not many Appalachian families who were displaced by TVA found the means to live near the lakes. Most remained in urban neighborhoods where their children and grandchildren live today. Gus Isom’s story of commercial fishing demonstrates the determination shown by those who were forced to find new livelihoods, and even though Isom could no longer work the land his family once owned, he found a way to maintain his sense of place and his attachment to the area where he grew up. He taught himself to derive sustenance from the water that flooded his farm. His resilience and legacy stand like the silos that still rise above the surface of the lakes, monuments to the flooded lands of those who gave nearly everything in the name of progress.

While the impact of TVA in the mid-20th century brought with it extensive protests from environmentalists, Indigenous groups, and local farmers, the long-term effects have begun to outweigh the fragments of memory in descendent generations. The geographic changes have made it possible for increased environmental awareness as well as outdoor recreation that appeals to locals as well as tourists from all over the world. In addition, the cultural upheaval caused by the creation of the dams has inspired many artists, including second- and third-generation Appalachian families, as stories have been passed down and songs are written and sung to memorialize the area and to document its changes. To be sure, TVA has left an indelible mark on central Appalachia, and depending on the source and the specific area of concern, the impact is an enormous boon or a mournful loss. In truth, the impact is somewhere in the middle, and it’s up to Appalachian residents to keep the organization accountable and to ensure that current and future generations learn about the history of Appalachia, its environment, and the diverse residents of this region.

Appendix

The Kimbro family musicians of east Tennessee were greatly inspired by Gus Isom and his stories about the TVA, evident in their songwriting and recordings. Shawn Kimbro’s folk/bluegrass song called “Trotline” (2001) recounts Gus Isom’s story, and a song written by Daniel Kimbro called “Loyston” (2016) concerns a community near Knoxville, Tennessee, that was flooded by the waters of Norris Lake.

Trotline

Shawn Kimbro

I grew up proud beside a stream dammed up by TVA

500 acres of bottom land, they flooded it away

The ground beneath this water Daddy worked hard all his life

But I must make my living taking fish off this trotline

The Federal man drove up one day in a big black shiny car

They said your land is planned for progress, everyone must do his part

So we packed the truck and moved to town when the water started rising

Daddy took a job in Knoxville, come next spring, he up and died.

A factory job ain’t much compared to living off the land

All I ever knew was outside work, getting by with just my hands

So, I built this old flat-bottomed boat in the spring of ’49

And I learned to make my living taking fish off this trotline

Tie your hooks and count your loops and measure out your line

Stretch it out, anchor it down, then pull your floats up tight

Cast your net and cut your bait, God I hope those catfish bite

That’s how I make my living taking fish off this trotline

In wintertime the lake goes down and I see Daddy’s farm

But all that’s left are cornerstones and the silo

What once was my inheritance, it’s now just mud and slime

So I must make my living taking fish off this trotline.^[39]

Loyston

Daniel Kimbro

The lake comes up and the lake goes down

Like the sun on my hometown

The red clay mud is hallowed ground

The lake comes up and the lake goes down

They said that the power they would generate

Would revolutionize my state

A brand-New Deal from TVA

But Loyston town was in the way

I drove up from Knoxville so to see

Men stop the river with concrete

The men worked hard in the summer heat

Lest the wall should ever leak

The name they chose was Norris Lake

And I watched the dam take shape

Gentle shoals turned to waves

Empty holes our flooded graves

The water rolled up through the hills

And washed away the soil I tilled

It washed away the house I built

Foundation rocks now sandy silt

The lake comes up and the lake goes down

Like the sun on my hometown

The red clay mud is hallowed ground

The lake comes up and the lake goes down

Old Clinch River sent below

The valley floor I’ve always known

I took my family to a brand-new home

Electric power and a telephone

But the blackest sky on a winter’s night

Is by far a warmer sight

Than that pale green glowing light

Seen from the shores of my birthright

Summertime on the Loyston Sea

But you forget what you can’t see

There’s a town that lies buried

Beneath your boats and waterskis

Out of sight and out of mind

Is the town that I left behind

Dive down deep and all you’ll find

Are broken dreams and fishing line

The lake comes up and the lake goes down

Like the sun on my hometown

The red clay mud is hallowed ground

The lake comes up and the lake goes down^[40]

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