The Girls of Atomic City (5 page)

★ ★ ★

Surveyors.
They had been East Tennessee’s harbingers of doom for at least the last two decades, longer than that if you were Cherokee. At the first sighting of a tripod or transit, alarm bells should have sounded. The last time surveyors had taken to walking the back roads of Anderson and Campbell Counties, back in the early 1930s, the massive Norris Dam soon followed, spanning the Clinch, a tributary of the Tennessee, which had long supplied families near its banks with food and more. Most locals kept a fish gig or two on hand for spearing catfish, but the Clinch had also been known for the freshwater pearls that the mussels it nourished consistently produced. Toni’s town of Clinton played a key role in that iridescent industry. Market Street was home to pearl hunters hawking the gems and shells—ideal for buttons. With pearls going for as much as $100 a pop, it was enough to send anyone wading into the nearby waters, grasping hopefully for the molluskan riches.

At 265 feet high and 1,860 feet across, the Norris Dam reshaped the region. The project was a product of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the first of its size and kind constructed by the Tennessee Valley Authority. It took three years to build. A new town was established just for the construction workers. The hydroelectric power the dam would supply would change the lives of the people living in and around East Tennessee, bringing jobs in the short run and electricity in the long.

Toni was about nine years old the first time she ever lay eyes on the dam, a favorite family destination. Benjamin Peters, a local printer, loved herding his children into the car to seek out nearby adventure. Sandwiches were packed, and Toni, Rooie, Tincy, Silver Buckles, and Dopey—nicknames only for the Peters children—would sit and gaze at the massive machinery, unearthed clay, and seemingly
tamed river, the dam feeling much like a bit on a horse just waiting to bolt. Countless bodies streamed efficiently like fire ants along a freshly poured concrete hill. She could still hear her father’s favorite call to arms:

“Honey, get the kids! We’re going to that dam site!”

The dam’s construction and the resulting flooding called for the relocation of living and dead alike: nearly 3,000 families and 5,000 graves had to be relocated. And for some, the arrival of Norris Dam was not the first time land had been taken from them, with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park having already moved some residents from their ancestors’ lands years earlier. And the water, once released from Norris Lake, was much too cool for mussels accustomed to more tepid and shallower waters. They slowly began to die out, taking their pearls with them. Clinch River pearls began to pass into memory, after making it as far as the Paris Exposition of 1900, where they lent a touch of Appalachian glitter to the “City of Light.”

But the Smokies and the Norris and the end of the pearling industry were merely setting the stage for this, yet another uprooting of life, another rerouting of history.

Around October of 1942, after surveyors weighed acreage, homes, and outbuildings, reducing lives and livelihoods to a statistical formula, the notifications came. Declarations of Taking. Notices of Condemnation. Requests to Vacate. News came in varying forms, no one any easier to digest than another. Always there was the feeling of being sucker-punched, leaving you breathless, doubled over, gasping for options. In some cases children were sent home from school to deliver the bad news: The government said they had to find a new place to live. Other families came home from work or back from the fields to find the notices tacked up to their doors or trees, stating abruptly that the land belonged to the United States of America and was going to be used to establish something called the Kingston Demolition Range. Other families received the gut-wrenching news via mail or messenger—a knock at the door jarring them from the already taxing daily reality of raising food and children. The name “Kingston Demolition Range” was itself a form of motivation. One woman
reported being told that staying in her home would be risky, as they might well be dropping bombs in the area.

The amount of time given to families to vacate their homes ranged widely. The lucky ones got as much as six weeks, maybe more. Others had to be packed up in two or three weeks. Parlee Raby of Oliver Springs received this notice from the Land Acquisition Section of the Corps of Engineers for the Kingston Demolition Range, dated November 11, 1942:

The War Department intends to take possession of your farm December 1, 1942. It will be necessary for you to move, not later than that date.

In order to pay you quickly, the money for your property will be placed into the United States Court at Knoxville, Tennessee.

The Court will permit you to withdraw a substantial part of this money without waiting. This may be done without imparing [sic] your right to contest the value fixed on your property by the War Department.

It is expected that your money will be put in court within ten days, and as soon as you are notified, it is suggested you get in touch with the United States Attorney to find how much can be drawn.

Your fullest co-operation will be a material aid to the War Effort.

Very truly yours,

Fred Morgan

Project Manager

After the notifications came the negotiators from the Corps of Engineers Land Acquisition Section, who set property prices based on the earlier assessments. Reimbursements were hardly fair from a strict land-value point of view, even less so if stress and strain were taken into consideration. The shock and loss of individual homes was difficult enough, especially for residents getting on in years, but this was the loss of schools, churches, family farms, shops, and long-traveled stretches of familiar road. The Taking encompassed large tracts of land and small farms, ramshackle hovels, and expansive
homesteads, hills with memories, crops, and orchards. A man named Van Gilder lost 1,000 acres. The Brummitt family was promised $900 for 40 acres and did not receive all of it. The Irwin family was offered $10,500 for their Gamble Valley farm, which included a large antebellum home, a five-room framed house, two tenant houses, barns, outbuildings, crops, and equipment. The amount offered could not buy
half
of what was “bought” from them. Entire communities and the ways of life that infused them were to be wiped away in a matter of weeks. For some residents of East Tennessee, this was the
third
time they were evicted from their lands—both the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Norris Dam having already claimed their share years earlier.

To estimate those displaced, the number of parcels was multiplied by average family size, give or take a few. There were in the neighborhood of 800 parcels, putting the estimation at around 1,000 families and 3,000 people.

But the real number of the displaced may have been much higher. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers living in outbuildings and on the lands of others didn’t figure prominently into the calculations, making it harder to estimate the true number of displaced residents. They were to be as overlooked and undervalued as the land itself and the history that infused it for centuries.

The majority of evicted families accepted the terms offered them on the spot. Officials had strongly suggested that each additional day that they held out reduced the chance that they would see any money at all. There were those who protested and organized meetings, and some even saw the amounts paid them by the government increased a bit. But they had to move all the same.

It was not that they didn’t support the war effort. These were patriotic people, some of whom could trace their families back to the founding of the United States, whose ancestors had fought in the American Revolution. Some were Scots-Irish and Dutch who had made their way south seeking better climate and more arable lands. They had survived the Great Depression. Maybe just barely, but they had survived it. War was a time of sacrifice for all. But their country
was asking more of them than just some rusty coffeepots for a scrap-metal drive. It was asking for their homes, their lands, and their livelihoods. It wasn’t just the structures, but the sum of all the work, love, and life they’d known. They would have to hand over secret hiding places passed down among children, onetime saplings that now towered over their homes, dozens of cemeteries in churches and backyards commemorating lives past, children lost to fever, men lost to other wars in other times.

It was even harder for those who had, from a strictly monetary point of view, “less” to lose. Many had no cars or trucks to move what meager possessions they had. Some owned one pair of shoes, others none at all. The government offered no money to move, and if residents used the money they were going to receive for their homes, what would they live off? How could they eat? This wasn’t industrial-scale big tobacco or cotton farming. This was subsistence, put-food-on-the-table farming. These people weren’t asking for anything much; they only wanted to feed their kids, work their land, and then one day be buried beneath it alongside their spouses, parents, and grandparents.

As the Taking continued through the end of 1942 and into 1943, the 83,000 acres that the Land Acquisition Section had originally scouted for Site X was, in the end, closer to 56,000 acres or about 92 square miles, stretching roughly 17 miles long and averaging 7 miles wide. That number would eventually swell to approximately 59,000 acres, growing out of the Cumberland Foothills, punctuated by ridges like the Pine and the Chestnut. The Site was cradled on three sides by the Clinch River. Roughly 180 structures were spared, and were put to various uses before, during, and after the completion of Site X, from housing to storage.

Toni’s aunt Lillie and uncle Wiley lost their home and peach orchard. Nearby Roane County had been the peach capital of the United States in the 1920s and into the ’30s, until severe cold destroyed the crops almost irreparably. But that little peach orchard meant something deep and real to Toni and her entire extended family beyond property and income. The orchard meant summer to
Toni—the smell, the taste, the fuzzy, sticky feel of high summer. It meant standing alongside her brothers and sisters, a roadside crew, helping Aunt Lillie and Uncle Wiley pick the juicy golden fruits. You wanted to get them just right. You couldn’t pick them too late and too soft, because you wanted them to last, to keep their shape and flavor in the heat of the sun and to stay perky and firm enough for pie. But you didn’t want to pick them too soon and too hard, either. You had to let the sugars develop, let the flesh of the fruit yield just enough to unleash a syrupy-sweet-tangy trickle from the first juicy bite, sending the success of a season’s worth of sun and rain flowing down your chin.

The gang of Peters children would pluck them, eat them, can them, and often sell them. After picking, Toni and Dopey would sort the peaches according to quality and line the sorted bushels along a small stretch of Clinton Highway. Their handmade sign advertised their offerings: one dollar a bushel for “good” peaches, 75 cents a bushel for “not quite as nice,” 50 cents for “poor” peaches, and finally, at the bottom of the bushel, downright “bad” peaches offered to passersby for 25 cents a bushel. But even the bad ones were still worth snagging; they were fine for a batch of peach butter. Those summer morning breakfasts were filled with sliced peaches soaking in sugar and milk.

These sweltering ambrosial mornings were a gift offered up freely by a land that had long responded in fruit and grain to the care Aunt Lillie and Uncle Wiley gave. But no more. Toni’s aunt Lillie and uncle Wiley moved to a nearby farm to stay with relatives and figure things out. They were lucky to have their people nearby. For Toni, the peachy days of high summer were gone.

★ ★ ★

They say the Prophet had seen it coming.

A popular story goes that an old man of the mountains by the name of John Hendrix had had visions before, but this one was bigger, more elaborate. He was around 50 at the time and had come from the woods near his home in the vicinity of Scarboro and Robertsville, where he had slept forty nights on the forest floor—as a voice
had instructed him to do. When he finally emerged from the woods, he shared his vision with anyone who would listen.

“Bear Creek Valley some day will be filled with great buildings and factories and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be,” he said to those gathered at the local store, where he often shared his visions. Most just humored him. This one was so rich in detail, though. The life-worn man of the earth went on to talk of a city built on Black Oak Ridge, of railroad spurs, and of countless people and machines.

“I’ve seen it,” he said. “It’s coming . . .”

John Hendrix died in 1903. Now almost 40 years later, few had seen it coming.

Construction began on Site X in late 1942, the detritus of rapidly uprooted lives still scattered over the ground, reminders of what was. Fences of abandoned farms lay tangled and splintered; cattle roamed free, disoriented. Construction workers and scavengers made their way through vacated lands, finding books, photos, shoes, pans, tools, and more lying abandoned in the dust. Sacrificed memories, casualties of the war.

Prices on
available
land—now a scarcer and more valuable commodity—took off for the rafters, inflating beyond most folks’ fiscal grasp. The evicted had to compete with new workers arriving to the area in droves, drawn from other regions in the South by news of upcoming construction jobs at this big, new site. So many locals soon found themselves applying for work at the project that had evicted them in the first place. Reduced to renters and wage earners, these displaced people would work at Site X, on lands they once held as their own.