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xtruss · 6 months ago

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The Tragic Backstory Of One Of The Most Haunted Roads In America

Generations Continue to Grapple with Ghostly Tales Along the Incomplete "Road to Nowhere" and Its Dead-end Tunnel in North Carolina.

— By Sara Murphy | May 30, 2024

Lakeview Drive in North Carolina, popularly known as the “Road to Nowhere,” was meant to connect areas affected by Fontana Dam’s construction. However, due to environmental concerns and budgetary constraints, the road project was never completed beyond a 6.5-mile road that leads to a dead end tunnel. Photograph By David Haas

High above Fontana Lake on the North Carolina side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park lies the Road to Nowhere: a winding 6.5-mile pass that dead ends at a 1200-foot tunnel accessible only by foot. If you walk it at night, the wind blows cold, voices carry, and the darkness seems to last forever. The park and nearby town Bryson City market the as a tourist attraction, and locals like Eligiah Thornton grew up hearing chilling tales of supernatural danger. There’s “a weird shadow over the place,” he says.

The sign “Welcome to the Road to Nowhere—a broken promise! 1943-?” reflects the disappointment felt by locals when the government failed to finish the road, which was originally planned in 1943 but remains incomplete. Photograph By David Haas

But what’s truly haunting is the tunnel’s unsettling history. In the 1940s, to facilitate the construction of Fontana Lake and Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) assured approximately 200 Appalachia families that they would construct a road to enable them to visit their ancestral cemeteries in exchange for relocating their homes. However, in 1969, the government halted construction due to concerns about potential acid runoff from exposed rocks.

Although the National Park Service eventually agreed to compensate Swain County with $52 million instead of completing the road in 2010, this financial settlement has not resolved the ongoing issue: providing these families assistance accessing the 26 cemeteries now situated miles away from the lakeshore, accessible only via steep and poorly maintained trails.

“The promise was not a financial settlement. The promise was to build the road,” says Karen Marcus, a psychologist in her 60s who has five generations of ancestors across multiple gravesites. “The promise will never be kept.”

A History Buried Underwater

The Road to Nowhere families were the last of 50,000 people across six Southern Appalachian states forced to relocate so the TVA could build 15 hydroelectric dams from 1933 to 1943. While the company claims this decade of construction “transform[ed] the poverty-stricken, often-flooded Valley into a modern, electrified, and developed slice of America,” the reality of life in the Fontana Basin was far from the stereotype of the isolated, uneducated, impoverished mountain dweller.

Fontana Dam, located in western North Carolina on the Little Tennessee River, was constructed as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) project during World War II, primarily to provide electricity for wartime production efforts. Completed in 1944, Fontana Dam stands as the tallest dam in the eastern United States, with a height of 480 feet. Photograph By David Haas

“This was an industrial area,” says Daniel S. Pierce, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Asheville.

As railroads began winding through the rugged terrain in the late 1880s, logging and mining companies followed closely behind, giving rise to thriving towns such as Proctor, Bushnell, and Judson—all of which were flooded and destroyed when the Fontana Dam, the largest east of the Mississippi River, was created in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack to power a nearby aluminum plant.

While most families impacted saw their towns buried underwater, the homes of the 200 families on what’s now called the North Shore sat above the watermark. But their only access road to their family cemeteries, did not. Instead of moving these families’ loved ones, the TVA promised to build a new road so Decoration Days, an annual Appalachian tradition, which folklorist Alan Jabbour described as “an act of respect for the dead that reaffirms one’s bonds with those who have gone before,” could continue.

“You couldn’t have found a better people—mountain people—to be understand[ing of] the war effort and want to contribute,” says Leeunah Woods, whose mother, Helen Cable Vance, grew up there.

According to Lance Hardin, who studied the dam’s impact on these families, the TVA took advantage of this generosity of spirit, paying property owners an average of $38 per acre—less than most relocated families received.

As a result, land ownership among North Shore residents dropped by a quarter, and home ownership fell by nearly half. “A lot of the available, small farms were gone, and so a lot of them really struggled to find something nearby that could be a replacement to what they were losing,” says Hardin.

Pierce says that’s a key reason why the cemeteries hold such profound importance for these families: “They’ve lost their homes, they’ve lost their businesses, they lost their schools—you know, all the markers of community. But here’s what’s left.”

Keeping Tradition Alive

As years passed and no road appeared, families would make their own way to their cemeteries for Decoration Days. In the 1960s, “us boys would go fishing, and the men would go to the cemeteries and clean them off,” says Henry Chambers, chairman of the North Shore Cemetery Association. “Just being able to come over here was special.”

In 1977, after over 650 people attended a reunion the year prior for the nation’s Bicentennial, Helen Vance and her kin created the North Shore Cemetery Association to advocate for the road to be finished and, in the meantime, get government help to access their cemeteries. Since 1984, park rangers have ferried families across Fontana Lake and maintained trails for these annual visits from April to October. Chambers estimates the yearly costs, from travel costs to repairing graves damaged by weather and wild animals, to be about $8,000.

To attend a Decoration Day is to understand how connected these families are to their shared history and what they call the “homeplace.” They clean the tombstones and decorate the graves with colorful cloth flowers. After the group sings “Amazing Grace,” Marcus reads a self-penned reflection before leading a prayer. Then it’s time for a potluck, when the stories flow long and winding as the creeks that rush nearby.

Lillian Hyatt shared her scrapbook with articles profiling her great-grandmother Sarah Palestine “Tiney” Kirkland, a midwife who delivered 627 babies and designed many home chimneys. Frank March, an amateur historian from Tennessee, recalled the day 83-year-old Joe Cable, Sr. said that the sheet metal March found on his family’s old chimney was the fender of his brother’s bicycle. “He was so excited to be back there,” March says.

“The park wants everybody to believe the Smokies is wilderness. [But] it has never been wilderness,” Chambers says. Together and independently, he and March have mapped over 2700 sites—including homes, churches, schools, and mills—across the park’s 522,000 acres to prove their point.

As for the Road to Nowhere’s reputation, the North Shore families don’t put much store in it. “There’s no ghostly whatever,” says Woods. “It’s just an eerie feeling in that long of a tunnel to walk.”

With its cold concrete and graffitied stone, the Road to Nowhere is a dead place, not a place of the dead. The dead rest in the cemeteries that honor the generations of Appalachians who called this land their home.

“They need to come and see it,” says 94-year-old Carrie Laney when asked what people should know about the Decoration Days. “They’ll come back if they do.”

#History | Culture #Tragic Backstory #Most Haunted Road #Cultural Conservation #Traditions #History Preservation #Burial Customs #Burial Grounds #Memorials

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laufire · 4 years ago

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Hi I'm the anon who sent in stuff about the saltzman twins & hope stuff. I didn't really think too much about the twins parraeling damon and stefan until you said so and I wanted to ask what you thought of the parrels between the sibling sets of josie/lizzie , stefan/damon, Elijah/klaus. (DISCLAIMER I do hate damon and wish him a fiery death because of what he did to caroline but I love how she outlived him and ultimately had way more power over him. Part 1

Also lets not pretend that damon liked being human he probably spent 5 minutes with elena as a human and then went vampire blood hunting because it just felt wrong when he became human). Because the front of those pairings originally all presented themselves as the good/more moral sibiling whereas the later gets told how reckless/dangerous they are (remembering all the lizzie/kai stuff that got thrown around after her episode in the pilot (legacies fandom strikes again). part 2

Also the later tend to be the this is what I want I am going to get it. I feel like they tried to break out of this pattern earlier in legacies with josie because when they tried to explore this in tvd/TO it was when Stefan had his ripper arc/losing narrative power and when Vincent started calling out eligiah (best moment of the plec verse). So I have a few questions about these dynamic: do you think that plec intended for this pattern of siblings to occur? part 3

I agree on your comparisons and that this is definitely a recurring pattern for Plec. With these things, it’s always difficult to assess how much of it was intentional and how much due to writers being writers lol (and I have to admit I haven’t followed interviews lately). We all have archetypes and tropes and dynamics we’re drawn to, and it’s easy to spot that in a writer’s body of work. I’d be inclined to say it wasn’t entirely intentional simply because that’s always the impression I’ve gotten from Plec? She seems to work on intuition and gut feeling a lot (which, btw, I think it’s part of the reason I’m so ~drawn to her ‘verses lol, the way this ~flows idk? But that’s another story).

(LOL at Damon as a human lmfao. The question is, would he hate it as much as Stefan actually did, despite all his preaching about humanity’s beauty~~? Inquiring minds want to know xDD)

Secondly: how do you think this will impact the twins future? Because I can’t really see josie becoming a hybrid of some kind however I can see lizzie becoming a hybrid/heretic. Idk if that’s because of the bond with hope that I can see this or if I want to see them becoming immortal girlfriend just like the klaroline future that we never got to see of them travelling the world. part 4

And it would fit in with hope’s series long arc about gaining a family. part 5

I’m going to admit that I’m far, far more reticent to speculate about the Plecverse than ANY other canon lmao. Especially on the long term, I can do it within a few episodes xDD. The stakes just feel higher!! I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the ending made some kind of callback to KC, given how the rest of the show has shaped up, but I can’t even begin to ponder about what characters it’s most likely to use to do so, tbh.

Also I read what you said about writers lighting and all I could think about was shadowhunters and legacies. Shadowhunters for the whole seelie court scene looked alright but its like they put all their effort into set design and wanted to get it done asap and also with a lot of malec scenes in comparison to rizzy where they had them in the dark but under a street lamp so it felt like they were the only ones in existence and was very intimate. part 6

so it felt like they were the only ones in existence and was very intimate. Verses in legacies the jade and josie kiss like you couldn’t ever see it.

Yesssss, that Rizzy scene is a perfect example of how creators use lightning lmao. Like, “oh, it had to happen at night/in a sketchy room/whatever” is just an EXCUSE, IMO. If they want it to be well-lit, it will be well-lit, that’s for sure.

Another one is the Memori gifset I just posted (even taking into account that I edited it and enhanced it, ofc). They’re in the desert, at night, supposedly illuminated by this big ass moon in a way that is clearly NOT HOW NIGHTS WORK ANYWHERE LMFAO. And if you contrast it with basically any other night scene of the show where they didn’t have the luxury of artificial light (and some that did!), the difference is so plain. They wanted this scene to be as well-lit as possible, so there it is.

IMO, the pattern of which shippy get or don’t get good lightning is so consistent with their writing (with how much investment and of which kind you can intuit in it), that it should be talked about more often, idk. I see endless complaints about lightning in kissing scenes (Donna and Harvey in Suits, Flint and Thomas in Black Sails, Christina and Ruby in Lovecraft Country, Cami and Klaus in The Originals, etc.), but rarely if ever do I see the leap of, “wait, but what does this say about the creative process going into this? Did they not want to show this? Did they not want to see this, even on some subconcious level?”.

I obviously don’t have a nice budget for a tv show (I wish), but when I extrapolate this to writing decisions... one of my OCs has an abusive ex, and even in a few flashbacks I’ve written that take place while they’re an item, I can’t bring myself to write so much as a kiss between them, let alone anything else. I physically cannot do it. So, you know. Writing is a self-indulgent exercise, and it pays off to analyze it as such, sometimes.

I did not realise how long this was gonna be so thanks for reading it all the way through. Currently I have covid so I am going down through narrative metas to keep myself sane. Hope you are staying safe. Part 7/8 (I don't even know anymore how many parts I have sent XD).

I hope you get better, anon. Feel free to come to my inbox to talk anytime! And if you want, you can sign with something (some nickname or initial etc.), so I know right away it’s you?

#replies #talking to the void #my thoughts #the writing tm #plecverse thoughts #legacies #plecverse #Anonymous

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