GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK, N.C. (AP) Every spring, dozens of descendants of Samuel and Clarissa Cable gather to ride a pontoon boat across Fontana Lake, gliding hundreds of feet above creeksides and hollows that now exist only in the memories of the oldest among them.
For nearly 60 years, a boat ride or a steep hike have been the only way to reach cemeteries and homesites cut off when the mountain valley was flooded as part of a World War II-era hydroelectric project to power the defense industry.
When residents sold their land and moved, the federal government promised them a road along the man-made lake’s north shore, but only built seven miles of it before stopping in 1970. The dead-end spur, which stops just west of Bryson City has become known as the “Road to Nowhere.”
Now, the long-running debate over the project may be nearing a resolution.
Three years ago, Congress budgeted $16 million to resume construction. And the National Park Service, which long opposed finishing the road for environmental and cost reasons, is preparing an impact study scheduled to be finished by 2005.
“It’s a promise, and they should live up to their promise,” Cable descendant Bryan Aldridge said as he stood among scores of red-dirt mounds in the family’s remote cemetery.
But others, including Swain County’s Board of Commissioners, prefer a cash settlement in which the north shore would remain roadless, but the county would be compensated for the loss of N.C. 288, the road that once ran through the area.
Commissioners earlier this year passed a measure saying the county would be willing to accept $52 million from the federal government to finally put the controversy to rest.
“There’s a very good possibility, I think, at the end of the day that the decision will be not to build the road,” said Bob Miller, spokesman for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “But there’s a need for some healing with Swain County. There’s more than a little animosity with the park service for letting this issue go as long as it has.’
Miller said finishing the remaining 30 miles of the road as a two-lane, blacktop highway would cost an estimated $120 million to $150 million.
Such a road would bring cars into what is currently the largest tract of roadless land in the eastern United States.
The park service does not dispute that it has a responsibility to the north shore descendants or that they were promised a road.
On 16 Sundays between April and October, the service pays to transport north shore families to various cemeteries, where they clean graves, leave flowers and hold memorial services. Such “decoration days” are common throughout Appalachia, but few require such effort and organization.
“This cemetery is our heritage,” said Helen Cable Vance, a founder and leader of the North Shore Cemetery Association.
Cables had lived in this area since the early 1800s, but by the early 1940s, World War II was on and the government needed to generate electricity to put the huge aluminum plants in Alcoa, TN, to military use and establish a top-secret weapons lab at Oak Ridge, TN.
Land was purchased for Fontana Dam, the lake it would create and, on its north shore, a 44,000-acre expansion of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
In the 1943 agreement signed by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and North Carolina Gov. J. Melville Broughton, the government promised to build a north shore road with “a dustless surface not less than 20 feet in width” as a replacement for N.C. 288.
However, the contract made no mention of the road’s purpose being to provide cemetery access. It also specified that the road would be built “as soon as funds are made available for that purpose by Congress.” Some lawyers say that latter provision makes it impossible to force the government to build the road.
Along with U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor, who helped get the $16 million appropriated for the road three years ago, Swain County Commissioner David Monteith has been the most outspoken political supporter of finishing the Road to Nowhere.
He scoffs at claims that the road would cost $150 million and that the area is roadless. More than 1,000 people lived here before the dam, and the area was criss-crossed by mountain roads, he said.
“I’m a firm believer that this will happen,’” Monteith said at the Cable Cemetery decoration. “We’re further along than we’ve been for a long time.”
