Until You Live Alone in the Land: Development, Displacement, and Environmentalism in the Rural South, 1960-1994

Home , Beaucatcher Mountain, Caroline Peyton, Emory Campbell, James Holshouser, Jamie Whitten, Jim Hunt

UNTIL YOU LIVE ALONE IN THE LAND: DEVELOPMENT, DISPLACEMENT, AND ENVIRONMENTALISM IN THE RURAL SOUTH, 1960-1994

MADISON WARD CATES

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2020

To my family for all their love and support

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Any significant undertaking requires a combination of luck and skill. The number of thoughtful, generous people who contributed to my personal and academic development leaves me grateful and undoubtedly lucky. At UF, my advisor Dr. William Link helped provide encouragement, strategic guidance, and accountability, each when I needed it most. His wealth of knowledge about the history of the South as well as his sharp editorial eye and willingness to support my career in a variety of ways proved an immeasurable blessing. I owe almost equal debts of gratitude to Dr. Lauren Pearlman. Her Modern America class challenged me to read widely, analyze incisively, and become a better historian overall. As a teaching mentor and committee member, Dr. Pearlman’s encouragement to dig deeper after reading Chapter 3 helped revive me with unexpected confidence to press on at many moments when I felt deflated and exhausted. To my other committee members—Drs. Ben Wise, Paul Ortiz, and Sevan Terzian—I give my deepest thanks for your willingness to read drafts, offer helpful questions, and support my professional development encouraged me to not forget the fundamentals of the historian’s craft and the value of passion in approaching a subject. Other faculty at UF, most notably Drs.

Steve Noll, Elizabeth Dale, Michelle Campos, Jon Sensbach, Florin Curta, Michelle Newman, and Matt Gallman, all at some point reviewed part of this project, evaluated my teaching, or just offered simple encouragement at times when I felt isolated or discouraged.

My graduate cohort here at UF has helped me improve in so many ways as a teacher and scholar. Working with AJ Donaldson and Meagan Frenzer as TAs during the memorable semester of fall 2016 not only provided me with many comical memories, but I learned so much from their approaches to teaching. I count myself fortunate to work with them and so many others including Tim Blanton, Matt Simmons, Kaitlyn Muchnok, Raja Rahim, Oren Okhovat,

and David Meltsner. Time spent with Tim, Cacey Farnsworth, and many others from the Friday basketball group never failed to help revive my flagging spirits.

I would not be at UF if not for the countless hours devoted to my career by faculty and friends at both NC State and Gardner-Webb University. In particular, Drs. Katherine Mellen

Charron, Matthew Booker, Susanna Lee, and the late Walter Jackson contributed so much to my intellectual development and my skills as a teacher. They built on the solid foundation laid by my incredible mentors at Gardner-Webb, namely Drs. Timothy Vanderburg, David K. Yelton, and Joseph S. Moore. Everything I hope to be and do as a historian is modeled of their incredible examples. Their impact on me as scholars, teachers, and mentors are unrivaled. My time at GWU provided me with lifelong friendships that sustained me at key points in my graduate career.

Visits from the Angels and McGraths, phone calls from dear friends, along with recent excursions to the McGraths’s Fernandina Beach estate offered timely reminders of how Gardner-

Webb is a place that forges unique bonds of friendship that transcend time and distance.

So many archivists, historians, and other scholars contributed to this project. In particular, my thanks go out to the staff of the various libraries I visited in North and South Carolina.

Support from the North Caroliniana Society, the Florida Division of the Colonial Dames of

America, and the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere also provided me with invaluable time to do research. To make the most of this time, I am thankful for conversations with historians like Will Bryan, Mark Hersey, and Andrew Baker along with experts in all things

North Carolina like Mike Hill, Walter Beeker, and many others who proved immensely generous with their time. Their comments helped me focus this project in so many helpful ways.

Last, but certainly not least, my life has been enriched by so many loving and incredibly wise family members over the last five-plus years. In Gainesville, our Creekside family has been

such a caring community and refuge for Carly and me. We would be less without the Burklews,

Friedmans, Lebos, Dykes, Garrens, Roths, Waits, and so many others. Thankfully, we are more because of all of you. We are so grateful to each of you for the deep wells of joy, encouragement, and hospitality all of you have shown us. Closer to home, my inexpressible, unending thanks go out to my wife Carly, my parents David and Nancy, my sister Claire, and all my extended family

(Wards, Cates, Grahams) who nurtured and encouraged my love for studying the past, but most of all, who kept me optimistic, humble, and, above all else, who remind me of what is most important. Their consistent belief in me always helped to drown out my nagging doubts. All of you encouraged my efforts, made me laugh when I needed it most, joyfully put up with my large book collections, and so much more than I have space to write about here. And, of course, walks with Bryson provided the best way to shake my writer’s block. Lastly, I give my deepest love and gratitude to Carly, in particular, for being an inexhaustible source of support and love each day of the past nearly six-plus years.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 9

ABSTRACT ...... 10

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 12

2 ERASING DECLINE: THE FRENCH BROAD RIVER, TVA, AND A RURAL SILENT MAJORITY, 1962-1973 ...... 44

Background on the Upper French Broad River Valley, 1916-1966 ...... 44 Designs on the Upper French Broad: The TVA and Economic Development in Western North Carolina, 1962-1968 ...... 49 A Rural Silent Majority: The Triumph of the Upper French Broad Defense Association, 1969-1973 ...... 63 TVA and the Changing Politics of Regional Planning ...... 81

3 A LOCAL AND NATIONAL TREASURE: THE NEW RIVER IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION, 1968-1976 ...... 91

The New River As It Was, 1945-1962 ...... 91 Place and Possibility: Rural Development in the New River Valley, 1962-1971 ...... 96 False Starts: Early Opposition to the Blue Ridge Project, 1968-1972 ...... 101 Opposition Grows at the State and National Levels, 1971-1974 ...... 111 Dam Building and the Rivers of the South in the Late Twentieth Century ...... 134

4 MOUNTAIN LAND GRAB: TENSIONS OVER LAND USE AND TOURISM IN LATE-TWENTIETH CENTURY APPALACHIA ...... 142

Land Use and Population Change in Southern Appalachia, 1929-1970 ...... 142 Retreat from Subtropical Suburbia: “Florida People” and the Remaking of Western North Carolina ...... 153 Growth and its Discontents: North Carolina and the Politics of Land Use Management ....163 Legacies of Displacement and Preservation in Southern Appalachia ...... 176

5 POVERTY AS PRESERVATIVE: LAND, HUNGER, AND BELONGING IN LOWCOUNTRY SOUTH CAROLINA, 1964-1969 ...... 183

Migration and Injustice in the Rural South, 1945-1965 ...... 183 “Heaven, Hell, or Baltimore:” Reversing the Great Migration, 1964-1970 ...... 188

Hunger and Magnolias, Hookworms and Spanish Moss: The Anti-Malnutrition Movement in Beaufort County, 1967-1969 ...... 199 “The German Invasion:” An Industrial Solution to the Poverty Problem, 1969-1970 ...... 210

6 THE LORD WILL PROVIDE IF HE IS PERMITTED: HILTON HEAD ISLAND AND THE BASF CONTROVERSY, 1969-1971 ...... 224

Background on Hilton Head’s Tourism Industry ...... 224 The Bridge and the Damage Done, 1951-1970 ...... 227 Whose Hilton Head? Race and Inequality ...... 234 Progress Without Pollution: The Anti-BASF Campaign ...... 241 Fat Cats and Shrimp Boats ...... 252 Legal Battles and Environmental Policy in Washington, 1970-1971 ...... 262

7 “WE ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES:” TOURISM AND BLACK LAND LOSS IN THE LOWCOUNTRY, 1970-1988...... 276

Fires and Feasts: The BASF Postmortem, 1970-1971...... 276 The Knife’s Edge of Ruin: Hilton Head’s First Incorporation Movement, 1970-1973 ...... 284 “A Plague Has Descended:” Race, Land, and the Second Incorporation Campaign, 1973-1983 ...... 287 “Got Land Problems?” Combating Black Land Loss in the Lowcountry ...... 296

8 CONCLUSION...... 313

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 323

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 341

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

1-1 County Map of Western North Carolina ...... 42

1-2 Map of Relevant Counties in Lowcountry South Carolina ...... 43

2-1 Map of Geographic Extent of TVA Dam Plan ...... 87

2-2 Map of Proposed TVA Dam System ...... 88

2-3 UFBDA Flier ...... 89

2-4 UFBDA Pamphlet ...... 90

3-1 Map of New River Basin ...... 138

3-2 Photo of Pasture in Ashe County ...... 139

3-3 Map of Appalachian Power Blue Ridge Project ...... 140

3-4 Map of Proposed Blue Ridge Project and National Wild and Scenic River Area for New River Valley ...... 141

5-1 Map of Communities in Beaufort County and Surrounding Counties ...... 221

5-2 Coast Guard Map of Plans for BASF Plant at Victoria Bluff ...... 222

5-3 Pro-BASF Advertisement ...... 223

6-1 Map of Hilton Head Island Plantations and Neighborhoods ...... 273

6-2 Concerned South Carolinians for a Better Environment Advertisement ...... 274

6-3 Captain Dave Arrives in Washington, D.C...... 275

7-1 Map of Ward Districts on Hilton Head Island ...... 312

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

UNTIL YOU LIVE ALONE IN THE LAND: DEVELOPMENT, DISPLACEMENT, AND ENVIRONMENTALISM IN THE RURAL SOUTH, 1960-1994

Madison Ward Cates

May 2020

Chair: William A. Link Major: History

This study employs case studies from Western North Carolina and Coastal South

Carolina to uncover how concerns over land use and land loss motivated a variety of southerners to oppose harmful industrial and residential development. Spurred on by the War on Poverty, new dam projects, industrial plants, and resort communities promised renewal for what some observers described as “rural slums.” But they also invited controversy.

By examining a series of forgotten environmental flashpoints that divided southern communities, both grassroots groups turned local issues into national debates about the meaning of sustainability and models of rural development. Namely, how could rural areas attract industrial jobs without destroying the environment? For a moment in the early 1970s, unlikely coalitions materialized. Black fishermen and white developers joined forces in coastal areas, while white farmers and environmentalists became unusual allies in the mountains. Each won key victories to preserve their areas’ cultural and natural resources. However, these interracial and interclass alliances struggled to sustain this momentum as working-class communities bore the costs of growing tourism and real estate industries. The emergence of sprawling resort communities in places like Hilton Head Island displaced generations of black landowners; while

Florida-based developers re-made areas of Western North Carolina in the image of the Sunshine

State.

Through similar experiences with communal displacement, planned industrialization, and tourism booms, these communities illustrate the cultural rehabilitation of rural communities in the South from so-called “slums” to what I term “landscapes of retreat.” These places attracted development because of their underdevelopment, which made them both sites of political contestation over the aesthetics, economics, and demographics that defined a changing, Sunbelt

South.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land. —Isaiah 5:8

“Land is the only thing in the world that counts for anything,” Gerald O’Hara declared to his daughter Scarlett in one of the opening scenes of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the

Wind. Popular portrayals of the American South depict the region’s people as land obsessed. In the 2000 film O’ Brother Where Art Thou, a fictional account of three white escaped convicts in

Depression-era Mississippi, an earnest white character of hardscrabble means named Delmar O’

Donnell tells his companions, “you ain’t no kind of man if you ain’t got land.”1 Beyond the realm of film and fiction, owning land marked more than manhood or social status. In the early twentieth century, farm families from the Mississippi Delta to the Appalachians, from the Gulf of

Mexico to the Chesapeake Bay recalled how gardens, farm animals, and even limited acreage disguised the sobering reality that they lived in poverty. “We didn’t know we were poor,” remains a familiar, nostalgic refrain in oral histories with farm children to this day.2

Yet, within two decades of the end of World War II, it became clear to many Americans that you could own or work the land and still be poor. This era brought a swift end to traditional patterns of agrarian work and rural life as machines and chemicals replaced the labor of people and animals. Farming became the enterprise of those with access to capital, leading millions of southerners, black and white, to abandon the countryside altogether. For the 1.5 million whites

1 Chapter epigraph from: Isaiah 5:8, NIV; Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 36; Joel and Ethan Coen, O’ Brother Where Art Thou (Burbank: Buena Vista Entertainment, 2000), DVD. 2 On this trend in the memories of agrarian life in the South, see: Alison Collis Greene, No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Melissa Walker, Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History (Lexington, KY: University Press, of Kentucky, 2006).

and 2 million blacks who mostly left the rural parts of the region just from 1950 to 1960, others remained and tried to scrape together a living.3 Emory Campbell—an African American man who grew up on Hilton Head Island when no bridge existed to the mainland and its population included a few hundred, mostly black residents—saw poverty and malnutrition stalk his neighbors like the grim reaper. “The only salvation for people,” he said in an interview years later, “was that they owned land.”4 If land ownership erected a barrier to keep poor southerners off the cold, howling winds of poverty, it was a slim, paper-thin one. Following the O’Hara family mantra, land remained a valuable commodity and the poverty of its owners only increased the chances that it would change hands.

By the early 1960s, the lands of the American South drew national attention for their curious mix of raw, underdeveloped splendor and crushing poverty. Land constituted both a blessing and a curse. For outside observers—like the academic-cum-activists like Robert Coles and Michael Harrington—who documented the reality of poverty in a nation of affluence the immense, natural grandeur of places like the Coastal South and Southern Appalachia further confounded the reality of social destitution. Having visited Beaufort County, South Carolina in

1968, Coles expressed dismay that poverty and hunger existed next to the “refreshing” sights, smells, and sounds of the sea.5 Meanwhile, in his landmark 1962 study The Other America,

Harrington explained how Appalachia evoked a mix of wonder and disgust. To the untrained eye of the “city traveler,” Harrington noted, “the beauty will persist…But behind all this charm,

3 This number follows a decade (the 1940s) when over 2 million people left the South, of which African Americans made up over seventy percent of migrants during those ten years. James C. Cobb, The South and America Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 55. 4 Emory Campbell, Interview by Robert Korstad, 1992-1994, Southern Rural Poverty Collection, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. 5 Robert Coles and Harry Huge, “Strom Thurmond Country,” New Republic, December 28, 1969.

nestled on the steep hills and in the plunging valleys, lies an incredible social ugliness.”6 As

Harrington’s mention of the “city traveler” demonstrates, perceptions of the countryside as poor and blighted represented one discursive lens through which non-rural America understood the rural South at the dawn of the War on Poverty, when policymakers at all levels of government tried to identify policies that would uplift underdeveloped regions of the United States.

For people like Harrington and Coles, the rural South embodied the hopes and fears of those Americans determined to remove the persistent vestiges of poverty from a nation of affluence. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the question of what qualities should define rural areas like Southern Appalachia became an issue of national importance. For Harrington writing in the early 1960s, poverty represented the primary area of concern. Such immense human misery, he and his peers reasoned, had no place both in the context of the Cold War and amid some of America’s greatest natural wonders. Many planners, politicians, and residents in the region agreed. For their part, the mission of the War on Poverty became bound up with the twin causes of industrial boosterism and reversing rural out-migration. Whether out of concern for Cold War rhetoric or depopulation, much of the rural South constituted an important proving ground for America’s ability to address human poverty and underdevelopment.

Yet, for a growing number of southerners and Americans, these impoverished areas deserved protection out of concern for their collective aesthetic, ecological, and economic appeal. When journalist Peter Matthiessen took his own journey to Appalachia, he saw things differently. Heading across the Great Smoky Mountains that straddle the border between North

Carolina and Tennessee, he did not find a wasteland of “social ugliness,” but instead commented

6 Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963), 47.

that he “had not expected that the place would be so lovely.”7 Matthiessen’s comments proved especially telling since he went to the region to see the opening of the Tellico Dam on the Little

Tennessee River, which had been justified because it would be a panacea for poverty in the

Southern Mountains.

Public works projects like dams and industrial plants tried to establish themselves throughout many of the most impoverished, rural communities of the South to aid the transition from farms to factories. However, their presence also threatened to re-shape the aesthetic character of such places. With the emergence of American environmentalism by the early 1970s, combined with the “back-to-the-land” movements of the late 1960s and a series of urban crises, rural communities became objects worthy of protection, rather than disdain or pity, for many

Americans. Beyond the mountains and across the South, rural communities continued to embrace the appeal of trying to preserve and capitalize on the charms that attracted outsiders to tour, vacation, or live in rural areas. In an age where farms disappeared and the benefits of industrial jobs seemed just beyond reach, southerners wondered if their communities could find prosperity by adopting a slogan like a fictional town from one Flannery O’Connor stories that declared:

“Beauty is our Money Crop.”8

In both the mountain and coastal Souths, the presence of both human poverty and natural wealth not only produced an avalanche of news stories, but these hauntingly beautiful landscapes attracted environmental activists, concerned politicians, and wealthy second-home builders and tourists. In the process, rural places in Western North Carolina and Lowcountry South

Carolina—the two sub-regions featured in this project—became objects of national fascination

7 Peter Matthiessen, “How to Kill a Valley,” New York Review of Books 27: 1 (January 1980): 32. 8 Flannery O’Connor, “The Partridge Festival,” in Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1946, 1971), 426.

and debate because they exposed the tensions between America’s wars on poverty and pollution.

As historians like Jefferson Cowie and Robert Dallek note, the passage of job training programs, public works programs, and some environmental safeguards combined with more well-known education and health care programs helped make the Great Society the most significant expansion of government since the New Deal.9 However, other historians like Adam Rome also point to the codification of a legal framework for environmental protection as another of this same liberal consensus’ significant accomplishments.10 By the end of the 1960s, the landscapes of rural South became a crucial proving ground for the expansion of these policy agendas.

The competing objectives of the War on Poverty and the nascent environmental movement forced black and white southerners and their allies to make difficult choices. Thus, in deciding whether to pursue job growth or the protection of the natural environment, strange political coalitions developed that tested the calcification of the New Right and New Left.

Concerns over communal displacement and land loss created openings in places like the verdant

New River Valley and the shimmering coast of South Carolina’s islands for environmental movements that transcended racial and class lines. In doing so, these movements challenged

9 It should be mentioned, of course, that Cowie sees the War on Poverty as the “exception that proves the rule” for the ways it paled in comparison to the scale and ambitions of the New Deal’s reforms and jobs programs. Although it is true that President Johnson did not seek to replicate the legislative accomplishments of his idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt, his attempt to build upon FDR’s legacy is significant here because it reinvigorated the federal government’s role as a promoter, moreso than a provider, of jobs to the poor and underemployed. In other words, the Great Society matters for its more focused efforts to uplift people and communities in poverty rather than a general relief of suffering. See: Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public Private Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 10 Adam Rome, “’Give Earth a Chance:’ The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of American History 90 (September 2003): 525-554; For other classic works on the politics of the environmental movement on a more national scale, see: Samuel P. Hays and Barbara D. Hays. Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Richard N. L. Andrews, Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2007); Chad Montrie, A People's History of Environmentalism in the United States (London: Continuum, 2011).

predominant discourses—advanced by the War on Poverty—that designated marginalized communities as “rural slums.”11

From the 1960s through the 1990s, these pitched battles signaled a subtle, but important rehabilitation of exurban communities from landscapes of “rural slums” to what I term landscapes of retreat. Retreat, in this sense, meant more than escape from something. Certainly, many affluent Americans did defend or move to these rural places as a way of leaving polluted, industrialized urban centers behind to secure a privileged place along the region’s seemingly undeveloped, sun-soaked coasts or nestled among its once-remote, windswept mountains. The rise of recreational economies in Appalachia and the Lowcountry depended on the realities of poverty, even as they obscured or even erased the most obvious, persistent stains of deep inequality. Yet, at the same time, these environmentalist coalitions formed between both rural people with deep roots and newer residents rested on an idealized cultural discourse of rural landscapes as inherently unique and valuable for their aesthetics and abundant natural wonders.

In turning local debates about development into national causes about the meaning of sustainability, these grassroots movements created a kind of “environmental moment” for the

American South. In both areas, unlikely coalitions materialized in the early 1970s. Black fishermen and white developers joined forces in the Lowcountry, while white farmers and environmentalists became unusual allies in the mountains. Each won key victories to preserve local landscapes. However, these interracial and interclass alliances struggled to sustain this momentum as working-class communities bore the costs of growing tourism economies. As the number of southerners employed in agriculture fell from 40 percent in 1945 to 5 percent in 1990,

11 For examples of the usage of this term which was most widely-used in the 1960s, see speeches by political figures and journalists, John D. Pomfret, “A Rural Slum Cuts Across South,” New York Times, March 3, 1964; Marjorie Hunter, “Appalachia is Prime Target of War on Poverty,” NYT, May 3, 1964.

tourism’s impact on the region followed an almost inverse trajectory.12 By the 1960s, tourism had grown into a billion-dollar industry in both Carolinas. Although communities in Western

North Carolina and Lowcountry South Carolina contributed to the boom in recreational industries, local economies based on tourism dollars did little to alter the region’s dominant social hierarchies.

For both areas, efforts to direct public resources toward creating industrial jobs and reduce poverty gave way to concerns about environmental destruction and preserving the natural heritage of unique landscapes. In Western North Carolina, back-to-the-landers along with wealthy retirees took up residence in ever-greater numbers in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Because they moved to rural areas to enjoy the picturesque views and open space, residents from these groups joined some longtime residents in making up the bulwark of citizens’ groups concerned about dam-building. Similarly, almost entirely white, wealthy retirees and some affluent, younger whites moved in large numbers to coastal communities in places like

Hilton Head and Kiawah Islands at the same time, displacing black populations native to these islands. Their environmental activism, like their mountain counterparts, rested on the irony that they sought to preserve the landscape they retreated to, even though in doing so, they altered the very substance and appearance of that landscape.

By the late 1970s and 1980s, as the appetite for vast industrial plants and public works projects faded, many rural communities opted to raise rooftops rather than chase smokestacks.

The growth of recreational economies based on tourism and second-home ownership during and after this environmental moment brought land loss among longstanding communities and, in

12 Donald L. Winters, “Agriculture in the Post-World War II South,” in R. Douglas Hurt, ed., The Rural South Since World War II (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 8; Richard Starnes, “Introduction” in Starnes, ed., Southern Journeys: Tourism, History & Culture in the Modern South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 6-7.

some ways, exacerbated the persistent inequalities that existed there. As Polish philosopher

Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, “tourism and vagrancy are two faces of the same coin.”13 In this case, as poor southerners abandoned rural areas along the coasts, the Black Belt, and in

Appalachia, their absences kept the land underdeveloped. And in a short time, as underdeveloped land became prime real estate, wealthy homebuyers and tourists moved into these places, even as they raised alarms that the landscape should be protected from overdevelopment that seemed to always be just looming outside their proverbial gates.

In examining the recent histories of these two landscapes, my project shows how national concerns about three different issues—poverty, environmental injustice, and land loss in rural communities—ensured that the rural South became a critical site of debate over ideas about rurality, American virtue, and the politics of environmentalism. Mostly white urbanites who encountered these communities—whether as tourists, new residents, or activists—worked with longtime ruralites to re-shape the dominant cultural imagery of the places themselves. In doing so, they joined longtime residents in mobilizing movements for environmental justice that proved unusual for the way they often transcended the boundaries of class and race. In these cases, movements for environmental justice—whether opposing dam building or chemical plants—operated out of solidarity based on shared visions of place rather than out of unequal harm based on specific social inequalities as it is understood in the normative sense.

Using evidence from government planning documents and hearings, the records of anti- development groups, and tourism promotional materials, among other sources, highlights the ways that postwar changes in the rural and urban South’s landscapes existed in a kind of constant feedback loop. As the region’s cities grew, urbanites and suburbanites looked upon the nearby

13 Zygmunt Bauman, quoted in Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015), 2.

hinterlands with renewed interest. Whether sounding alarms for the poverty of rural people or the untarnished aesthetics of the rural landscape, studying these trans-local movements of concerned citizens undermine scholarly assumptions about rural decline and metropolitan growth as existing in a simple, zero-sum relationship.

The post-1945 histories of places like the Lowcountry and Southern Appalachia defy the simple narratives about the geographic transformations of both the South and the United States.

First, this project seeks to understand the interconnections between the forces that created the metropolitan centers so often associated with the Sunbelt South and the political culture and economies of rural areas supposedly left behind. Historians have written at great length about the ways that, after World War II especially, changes in agricultural technology and the regional economy writ large created clear winners and losers, with rural areas almost always falling into the latter category. Much is known about why around 10 million southerners moved outside the region from 1900 to 1960—farm mechanization, racism, better opportunities elsewhere—but too little is known about how their absence weighed on those who remained in the rural South.14 And then even less is known about how those on the other end of rural depopulation—politicians, journalists, and city dwellers—reacted in trying to address the migratory crisis that also presented problems for urban areas gaining population.15

Influenced by the New Suburban History, studies of the post-World War II South or

Sunbelt focus on the growth of metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Houston. As

14 This figure comes from Cobb, The South and America, 55; Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Culture since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 15 This theoretical insight that migration is often the result of state policies that create linked phenomenon of both “social expulsion” and “social expansion” is best expressed in Thomas Nail’s recent work in developing a “political theory of the migrant.” See: Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).

Sunbelt historians such as Matthew Lassiter and Kevin Kruse point out, the suburban-driven growth of cities like these not only re-shaped the region’s geography but its political culture and electoral power as well. With the reapportionment of legislative seats after the Supreme Court’s

1962 ruling in Baker v. Carr, so the argument goes, cities became the new centers of power, replacing the “courthouse” gangs and local bosses that once dominated the political landscape of the rural South.16 In these accounts, suburbs became the engine that helped the region shed its most stubborn, distinctive qualities.

This “power shift” narrative offers much in the way of tracing and connecting shifts in both demography and ideology. However, using this approach also produces glaring absences in the historiography by ignoring communities, activist groups, and institutions across the region who sought to understand and address the depopulation trend in the rural South.17 Namely, it falls short in applying the same logic that links migration and political change to areas beyond the suburbs. Seeking to fill this gap, the case studies examined here show the persistent cultural and political relevance of exurban areas even in an age of enclosure, depopulation, and industrialization. Through decline, many rural areas gained almost an endangered status. The threatened cultural and natural heritage of certain communities became a powerful, albeit tenuous source of political capital.

16 Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Matthew D. Lassiter and Kevin M. Kruse, “The Bulldozer Revolution: Suburbs and Southern History Since World War II” Journal of Southern History 75: 3 (August 2009): 692-706; Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, eds., The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); On reapportionment, see: Lassiter and Andrew Lewis, eds., The Moderate’s Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). 17 On the rise of the Sunbelt and the origins of the “power shift” narrative, see: Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (New York: Vintage Books, 1976).

On the opposite end of the New Suburban History, economic and labor historians perpetuate images of the rural South as, a best, a stagnant backwater consigned to lose people, jobs, and capital to the region’s growing cities, or, at worst, a vast sacrifice zone ruled by either the barons of modern agribusiness and the dictates of the carceral state.18 By and large, the focus on quantifying changes to rural communities implies that their importance lies in being aberrant provinces, only notable when studied as deficient in comparison to other regional or national trends. This existing narrative of the region’s post-1945 history charts the rise of the suburban and urban areas as places of importance for ideological and political shifts toward conservatism, while exurban areas represent the victims of disappearing farms, gutted regulatory regimes, and neoliberalism run amok.19

With closer examination of changing land use patterns and cultural discourses, this history of the rural South seeks to illustrate the interconnections between material and ideological changes. Moreover, it seeks to show how certain rural communities used their perceived vulnerabilities and disempowerment as a source of political capital. When faced with harmful industrial development projects, both privileged and underprivileged southerners feared used their ties to the land to prevent their communities from becoming “sacrifice zones.” These places, as literature scholar David Farrier describes them, “are sufficiently out of the way of consumer experience or where the rights of inhabitants (typically indigenous or nonhuman) are

18 LaGauana Gray, We Just Keep Running the Line: Black Southern Women and the Poultry Processing Industry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014); Monica Gisolfi, The Takeover: Chicken Farming and the Roots of American Agribusiness (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014); Bryant Simon, The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (New York: New Press, 2017). 19 For two trenchant critiques of this narrative, which often reduces rural people and communities to the status of obsolete victims of historical processes beyond their control, see: Orville Vernon Burton, “The South as ‘Other,’ the Southerner as ‘Stranger’” Journal of Southern History 79: 1 (February 2013); 7-50; Andrew C. Baker, Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).

held sufficiently lightly that they can be considered expendable.”20 Sacrifice zones and landscapes of retreat were not pure opposites, but rather inextricably linked. The degradation of one rural community helped elevate the need to preserve another, and vice versa. As the following case studies indicate, in certain landscapes marked for tourism, local activists and non- local allies forced to locate chemical plants and prisons to locate in other rural communities.21

Whereas many scholars of environmental injustice movements focus on their mobilization as an ex post facto relationship—where the revelations of years of ecological harm then inaugurating the need for activism to correct the harm—this study looks at communal activism as guarding against potential harms from industrial plants and public works projects.22

Looking at the mobilization of local and trans-local forces to prevent such development from going through allows for a wider picture of the ways that communities fought these plans.

Certainly, concerns about poor, disempowered residents being burdened with chemical plants or displaced by dam projects figured into these debates. However, the growing presence of wealthier residents, many of them retirees or seasonal visitors, also complicated the picture. They

20 David Farrier Anthropocene Poetics : Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 52; see also: Steve Lerner, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Naomi Klein, “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World,” London Review of Books 38: 11 (2016): 11-14. 21 The best example of this is found in Chapter 6, where activists opposed to the petrochemical plant proposed for Hilton Head cited the negative effects of industrial pollution on tourism in other, nearby coastal cities like Savannah, Georgia and Georgetown, South Carolina. My analysis of the relationship between “sacrifice zones” and what some call “pleasure zones,” especially as it relates to tourism in the Global South, draws from Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), esp. 34-39. 22 On environmental injustice in the South, particularly the Black Belt and Appalachia see: Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990); Chad Montrie, To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Eileen McGurty, Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Ellen Spears, Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2014); Caroline Peyton, “Kentucky’s ‘Atomic Graveyard:’ Maxey Flats and Environmental Inequality in Rural America,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 115: 2 (Spring 2017): 223-263; for a classic, non-Southern study, see: Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1995).

clothed themselves in the language of the “Silent Majority,” as people who earned a vision of the good life that took them away from the city and, in this case, into the natural beauty of the countryside. This, in turn, entitled them to enjoy this landscape of retreat unperturbed by the hectic, crowded, and polluted characteristics of modern life in urban America.

More broadly, this scholarly emphasis on rural underdevelopment as a problem of political economy is a reflection of the fact that the bulk of historians do not take the twentieth- century South, especially areas beyond the metropolitan fringe, seriously as an environmental region.23 The region’s changing political order—especially the white moderates of the New

South Democrats and conservative, white Republicans in the suburbs—fought to win rural votes by defending communities whether from overzealous government planners or unscrupulous corporate developers. At a grassroots level, diverse coalitions of small farmers, fishermen, hobby farmers, and retirees understood and weaponized nostalgic discourses of a rural imaginary that appealed to broader, bipartisan assumptions about the virtues of community life, traditional culture, and natural heritage in such places. Rather, telling the story of change in the rural South through the lens of cultural discourses about the land and environmental movements to protect it, instead, underscores the importance of Southern landscapes, both real and imagined, to the modern history of both the region and nation.

In the minds of many environmentalists, Southern landscapes like North Carolina’s mountains and South Carolina’s coasts became worthy of preservation not simply due to the

23 Some key monographs that inform my approach include: Jack Temple Kirby, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Kathryn Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Christopher J. Manganiello, Southern Waters, Southern Power: How the Politics of Cheap Energy and Water Scarcity Shaped a Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Baker, Bulldozer Revolutions; and William D. Bryan, The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).

unique features endowed to the region by the vagaries of its climate and history. Due to its uneven, delayed industrialization and urbanization, parts of the South could claim the title of a kind of forgotten, pastoral frontier where humans still lived close to nature. This became an essential part of the trans-local, bipartisan movements forged in the 1960s and 1970s that revealed larger concerns about the disappearing rural spaces and natural beauty across the United

States.24

To understand rural environmentalism in the American South demands that environmental historians continue to embrace the diversity of their subjects, especially in terms of political ideology and race. First, the hard swing toward modern conservatism and its free- market orthodoxy did not preclude Republicans or other right-wing Americans for supporting environmentalist causes. As historians Brian Allen Drake and J. Brooks Flippen show in their respective studies of conservative figureheads like Barry Goldwater and Russell Train, skepticism of central planning and defending sensitive landscapes often went hand-in-hand, especially in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.25 Many conservatives in the South proved no different. As Chris Wilhelm shows in his recent article on “Sun Belt Environmentalism,” the growth of metropolitan areas like those in South Florida saw suburban Republicans wrap themselves in the flag of protecting unique ecosystems like the Everglades or similarly treasured landscapes with local and national appeal.26 Building on these recent works, the alliances formed between local citizens’ groups and conservative politicians over issues like dam building and

24 On the rise of open space and anti-growth movements, especially as they occurred within suburban contexts, see: Adam Rome, Bulldozer in the Countryside 25 Brian Allen Drake, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013); J. Brooks. Conservative Conservationist Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Environmentalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). 26 Chris Wilhelm, “Conservatives in the Everglades: Sun Belt Environmentalism and the Creation of Everglades National Park,” Journal of Southern History, 82: 4 (November 2016): 759-788.

industrial pollution show how modern environmentalism in the South transcended the artificial borders of urban areas that are so often the center of studies on the Sunbelt South.

By looking at how prominent, southern Republicans like Jesse Helms and Strom

Thurmond found common cause with environmental groups, the subsequent chapters show a bipartisan concern about the preservation of rural landscapes. In particular, white academics and politicians across the nation and political spectrum tied their concerns for the perceived decline of the region’s exurban areas with the cultural legacy of Southern Agrarianism.27 By the early

Seventies, many white politicians and academics—especially those with a moderate-to-liberal bent—worried that the forward march of the region’s cities would not only make it unrecognizable but re-create “Northern mistakes in a Southern setting” if the migration pressures on rural areas were not relieved. In an essay by that title, Joel Fleishman, a prominent political aide in North Carolina, fashioned a sound bite that would make its way through groups of white, rural Democrats that journalist Taylor Branch termed “The New Agrarians.”28 In contrast with the earlier generation of Agrarianism from the 1930s, these more recent cultural conceptions of rural landscapes drew more on implicit connections with white privilege than on explicit derivations of white supremacy.29 Shorn of explicit racist imagery, they idealized small

27 To some extent, this narrative of cultural agrarianism as a response to rural decline and urban revolts can be seen in the realm of media as well. The emergence and then “purge” of “country” shows on network television in the 1960s offers a useful reference point. Sara K Eskridge, Rube Tube: CBS and Rural Comedy in the Sixties (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2018). 28 Both Askew and Carter worked closely with the Southern Growth Policies Board, a think tank based in Raleigh, North Carolina that grew out of Fleishman and others’ work at the LQC Lamar Society. Both groups published numerous reports, essays, and conference proceedings on how to prevent urban crises and rural depopulation from repeating themselves in the South as they did in the urban areas throughout the country in the 1960s. It should be noted that the editors of the Lamar Society’s magnum opus draw explicit parallels (with notable differences) between their efforts and those of the Southern Agrarians in the 1930s. For essays including Fleishman’s, see: H. Brandt Ayers and Thomas H. Naylor, eds., You Can’t Eat Magnolias (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), esp. 169- 194; Taylor Branch, “The New Agrarians,” Washington Monthly, September 1970; “Regionalism Called Key to Southern Growth,” Christian Science Monitor, January 6, 1972. 29 On the Southern Agrarian writers of the 1920s and 1930s, see: Daniel J. Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Richard H.

communities as paragons of virtue and harmony, both in relations between community members and between humans and nature.

The neo-Agrarian cultural revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s is best exemplified in the literature of Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry and the Foxfire collection of essays on farm life in the mountains of North Georgia.30 Berry’s ideas, in particular, stand as emblematic of neo-

Agrarian thought for his analysis of racism and environmental degradation as operating on similar logic, in addition to his defense of localism and his criticism of economic planning by both public bureaucracies and corporate actors alike.31 Without making an argument for an essential “Southern environmentalism,” the case studies highlighted in this dissertation nonetheless show a renewed concern for the unique qualities of the region’s landscapes often caused political actors of all stripes to reconsider their support for the War on Poverty if it involved destructive development. Using Berry’s ideas as a lens can help historians understand the ways that anti-development movements transcended racial, class, and political fault lines.

In different ways, both these groups experienced some form of communal displacement, whether voluntary or involuntary. In the former category, mostly wealthy retirees leaving the cities of the Northeast and Midwest found peaceful havens in burgeoning, rural subdivisions in

King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the South, 1930-1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), esp. 20-77; Paul Keith Conkin, The Southern Agrarians (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001); Angie Maxwell, The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority and the Politics of Whiteness (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), esp. 87-167. 30 On the history of the Foxfire project to document cultural traditions in Southern Appalachia, see: Eliot Wiggington, Sometimes A Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1985); 31 For Berry’s book-length treatment of American racism, see: The Hidden Wound (Boston: Mifflin Press, 1970); Other works crucial to a basic understanding of Berry’s philosophy include: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977); and Norman Wirzba, ed., The Art of Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (Washington, D.C: Counterpoint, 2002); The Black feminist writer bell hooks (also a Kentucky native and resident) expresses admiration for Berry and includes a fascinating dialogue between them in her meditation on the power of place as it relates to the legacies of racial oppression and African American resistance in the South. See: bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2008).

places like Hilton Head Island, South Carolina and Highlands, North Carolina. In migrating from centers of urban industry to communities that bore the diffused pockmarks of slow industrialization, these newest rural residents carried specific, powerful assumptions with them about what the landscape should afford them in terms of natural soma, recreation, and overall quality of life. Without over-simplifying this transition, it is clear from the activism of retirees and, in Appalachia almost exclusively, some members of small back-to-the-land communities that the unique aesthetics and ecosystems of the rural South required protection both for their own enjoyment and for their unique existence in a land of disappearing, open space.32

Surprisingly, historians of the South have been reticent to interrogate the ways that discourses about “place” have been contested, refined, and reshaped for various political projects in the twentieth century. Novelists and literary scholars have long identified the concept of place as central to understanding the ways that southerners learn, speak, and write about the material settings that most concerned them in their work.33 Although place is a slippery concept, this project grows out of a conviction to historicize it as a cultural construction that humans use in ways that both respond to and try to shape changes in their material surroundings. As Rob Nixon defines the term in his award-winning work on poverty and environmentalism, “place is a

32 The historical literature on back-to-the-land communities or movements in the South is relatively sparse to this point. Mostly anthropological studies have done the most work covering this trend in Appalachia. For a recent historical study of such communities in West Virginia, see: Jinny A. Turman, “Appalachian Alter-Natives: The Back-to-the-Land Migration and Community Change in Appalachia, 1970-2000,” (Ph.D Dissertation, West Virginia University, 2013); For two important studies by anthropologists who studied Western North Carolina, see: Patricia D. Beaver, Rural Community in the Appalachian South (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1986, 1992); George L. Hicks, Experimental Americans: Celo and Utopian Community in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 33 Barbara Fields, “Dysplacement and Southern History,” Journal of Southern History 82: 1 (February 2016): esp. 7- 10; In her study of how Latinx residents tried to re-define their supposedly “blighted” mining town, Monica Perales’s excellent history of local “placemaking” in this borderland community in El Paso, Texas offers a useful model for historians of the American South. Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering A Southwest Border Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

temporal attainment that must be constantly renegotiated in the face of changes that arrive from without and within, some benign, others potentially ruinous.”34 Understanding place as something that is made and re-made helps explain why decisions to build, destroy, or preserve communities like those in the Coastal and Mountain Souths resonated at the national level.

Narratives about place as inhibiting or virtuous, anachronistic or sacred prove just as important to a community as its geographic location or topographical features.

This study understands landscapes as a concept both imagined and materialized. As southerners left, stayed, or moved to the Lowcountry and Southern Appalachia, they either knowingly or unknowingly sought to shape the landscape according to individual assumptions and beliefs about the place they inhabited.35 Using insights from cultural geography, this study shows how idealized representations of rural landscapes as pure, virtuous, and unpolluted reflected the racialized ideologies of late twentieth-century America. Members of the nation’s upper and upper-middle classes marked racial privilege and asserted their vision of a good life by buying land in and then trying to preserve the underdeveloped landscapes in places like Hilton

Head or Beech Mountain, North Carolina.36 These were not separate propositions in their mind.

To leave the city for the countryside illustrated a fusing of the preference for rural leisure and a meritocratic privilege to move to an exclusive, homogenous place.

34 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 35. 35 Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams (London: Verso Press, 1996); Anne Whitson Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 36 Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Jake Kosek, “Purity and Pollution: Racial Degradation and Environmental Anxieties,” in Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, and Social Movements, ed. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 125–165; Laura R. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscapes, Urban Development, and White Privilege (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

Furthermore, those city dwellers who built second-homes or participated in rural tourism economies—whether Northerners relocating to the South Carolina coast or Floridians vacationing in the mountains—illustrate Joseph Goddard’s point that rural America often “looks like the city thinks the country should look.”37 In this vein, this project seeks to understand both ruralites and urbanites perceived the landscapes of cities, suburbs, and the countryside in relationship to each other. Namely, it seeks to understand how planners and politicians saw rural economic development as bound up with the struggles of urban communities in the 1960s and

1970s. To date, few historians examine the intense policy discussions around “the rural origins of the urban crisis.” In its place, this work seeks to continue the work of historians Andrew

Needham, Francesca Ammon, and Andrew Baker to de-centralize the suburbs as the primary geographic scope of America’s postwar political economy. Instead, by showing the ways that cultural assumptions about cities, suburbs, and countryside influenced political debates and negotiations, studying debates over industrial development in the 1970s South offers new insight into the ways that concerns about divides urban and rural divide took shape in the late twentieth century.38

This understanding of place and landscape as dynamic, contested categories seeks to re- orient the study of the rural South away from a more rigid, empirical perspective that over-

37 Joseph Goddard, quoted in Baker, Bulldozer Revolutions, 6; On the relationship between the built environments in both city and countryside in other regions of the United States, see: Gary Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); David Stradling, Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 38 Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Francesca Russello Ammon, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Andrew C. Baker, Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018); Alan Dieterich-Ward, Beyond Rust: Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); For a landmark environmental history that draws on insights from human geography to examine the urban-rural relationship in the late nineteenth century, see: William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).

emphasizes its economic deficiencies. To many historians of modern economic development in the South, the region’s unique political economy, culture, or some combination of the two made it attractive for investment and exploitation by outside entities. For James Cobb, Bruce

Schulman, and others, the combination of cheap land, anti-union politics, and pro-business politics, among other factors, helped sell industrialists from other parts of the nation and across the world on the South.39

This emphasis on geographic discourses surrounding the landscapes of the rural South drew from the way that media outlets labeled impoverished or remote rural areas as “slums” in this period. It appears often in newspaper articles, speeches, and government reports about the issue of so-called “poverty pockets” or places defined by high poverty rates during the 1960s.

With such terminology swirling in the national discourse, it became a moniker most often applied to two distinct subregions of the South: Appalachia and the Black Belt, both of which included the communities studied in this project. For example, the official report of the

President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, in addition to the 1968 Republican

Party Platform, statements from labor groups, and numerous media reports all used the term

“rural slum” to warn that the urban crises of the late sixties would only worsen if the rural exodus continued. President Johnson’s Commission, in particular, lamented that by migrating to the city, “many [Americans] exchanged life in a rural slum for life in an urban slum, at exorbitant cost to themselves, to the cities, and to rural America as well.”40

39 James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sun Belt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 40 President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, The People Left Behind (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1967), ix; Frank P. Graham, “Reaffirmation of Faith,” New South 22: 1 (Winter 1967): 24-26; John D. Pomfret, “A Rural Slum Cuts Across South,” New York Times, March 3, 1964; Marjorie Hunter, “Appalachia is Prime Target of War on Poverty,” NYT, May 3, 1964; “GOP Platform: ‘We Must Think Anew and Act Anew,’” Washington Post, August 5, 1968.

Although “slum” and “ghetto” often appeared in contemporary studies to construct a racialized pathology of urban places as supposedly crime-ridden and economically depressed, the inclusion of rural places is not a mere accident of language. Rather, the term “rural slum” lived and died with the War on Poverty and forged a purposeful association between poverty and place, between desolation and isolation. Labeling communities in this way papered over the fact that monumental changes were already underway in places like Appalachia and the Lowcountry.

Decline, both real and perceived, became a clarion call for planners, developers, and politicians alike to invest in these rural landscapes in ways that would ease the transition from an agricultural economy to one based on manufacturing or tourism.

In recognition of the national attention given to poverty, environmental justice, and land loss in these communities, my approach understands these controversies as grounded within local realities, but often incorporating networks and outside actors that transcended a local- national dichotomy. Overlapping circles of concern about the unique landscapes found in both

Southern Appalachia and the Lowcountry contributed to the South’s environmental moment.

This aesthetic character that seemed especially “southern,” became even more notable in the late twentieth century as it became a way to contrast the ugliness of regional poverty with the beauty of nature.

The Mountain and Lowcountry areas examined here encompass multiple counties in

Western North Carolina and Eastern South Carolina (Figure 1-1 and Figure 1-2). In the first three chapters, two different river valleys take center stage, the Upper French Broad in the central part of the study area and the New River located in the northwesternmost corner of North Carolina.41

41 Generally, the Upper French Broad River Valley encompasses five counties: Henderson, Transylvania, Haywood, Buncombe, and Madison. The New River, for the purposes of this study, includes Watauga, Ashe, and Alleghany Counties, although Grayson County, Virginia figures heavily into the New River controversy discussed in Chapter 3.

Although other nearby communities, including some in Tennessee and Virginia, are referenced to illustrate broader trends, these areas are the focus in large part due to the two, separate dam- building controversies that attracted national media coverage. Moreover, this area saw its traditional, small-scale agricultural economy give way to one where agribusiness, manufacturing, and tourism formed a sometimes inharmonious triumvirate. By focusing on this period of economic transition and the forgotten histories of rural environmentalism here, this work hopes to offer some comparative perspective to balance out the coal-centric studies of Southern

Appalachia after World War II.42

The final chapters examine events at Beaufort County primarily, while keeping events in the surrounding counties of Jasper, Hampton, and Colleton within view, to allow for a more representative analysis of the Lowcountry as part of the rural South. Although historically dominated by an agricultural economy that included a high landownership rate among the black majority, new industries made their way into these counties by the middle of the twentieth century. Military bases in Beaufort, as well as Interstate-95, reflected the modernizing impulses of the Sunbelt South even as the stubborn, rougher edges of the Old South remained. On the edge of the Black Belt and yet still an ostensibly coastal region, the Lowcountry represented an important proving ground for both the War on Poverty and the environmental movement.

These two regions are primarily worthy of study for the national attention garnered by their environmental controversies. Contemporary commentators noted that the issues raised by anti-dam and anti-pollution campaigns in the South represented important test cases for the fledgling environmental movement and the federal safeguards, namely the 1970 National

42 For a helpful introduction to the often-divergent pictures of Appalachia, see: Drew Swanson, Beyond the Mountains: Commodifying Appalachian Environments (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).

Environmental Policy Act. Concomitant controversies over water rights and wildlife out West— especially the dam fight over the Snake River and Hells Canyon in Idaho—also tested the political muscle of environmentalists at local and national levels.43 However, the tensions between concentrated poverty and landscape protection remained a problem most acute in the

American South. As retired journalist and Hilton Head resident Jonathan Daniels described this situation in both local and regional contexts, “poverty can often be the best preservative of the environment.”44

By looking at overlapping trends and issues in two different parts of the South, my analysis seeks to balance the depth of local case studies without sacrificing the breadth and diversity of the region. In examining citizens’ groups that built coalitions that linked local, state, and national networks of activists and politicians, the chapters that follow try to convey the multi-layered nature of these controversies, even if it creates a more muddled picture. This emphasis attempts to reflect the way these events produced unexpected alliances and consequences.

In Chapters 2 and 3, this work shows how both public and private entities believed they could use dam building to spin the proverbial straw of Southern Appalachia’s abundant soil, water, and land into the gold of jobs, power, and industrial growth. Chapter 2 begins by picking up the oft-ignored phase of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) dam-building campaigns that occurred after World War II. After failing to build dams on the Upper French Broad River in

43 On the Hells Canyon controversy, see: Karl Boyd Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); For two classic works on water and power in the Western United States, see: Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). 44 Jonathan Daniels, “Sojourner’s Scrapbook: Poverty As Preservative,” Hilton Head Island Packet, November 30, 1972.

the New Deal era, the TVA tried again with renewed vigor in the early years of the Cold War.

This flood control project was more than just preventative. By damming the river to prevent future flooding, TVA officials reasoned, artificial lakes would be created for recreation and tourism in addition to boosting ongoing industrial development.45

Meanwhile, Chapter 3 investigates the concomitant plants of the Appalachian Power

Company (APCO) to turn the turgid waters of the New River into a source of hydroelectricity and jobs by constructing a dam system near the border of Virginia and North Carolina, a three- county region one hundred miles north of the French Broad. At the dawn of the War on Poverty, these massive undertakings were spurred on by a renewed emphasis on regional planning, industrial development, and tourism promotion that promised to cure Southern Appalachia of its apparent ills. In drumming up support for these dam projects, local allies of TVA and APCO bet their fortunes on the argument that moving earth and water could reverse years of population loss, economic decline, and political neglect. This turned out to be a losing bet.

Both dam plans ran into political and legal roadblocks at almost every turn over the next decade and a half. Although both the TVA and APCO made key inroads over the years, these new schemes met determined opposition that resulted in unmitigated defeats by the mid-1970s.

By that time, a combination of top-down factors like new environmental protections and federal austerity made decisions to cancel dam projects more likely. Still, steady pressure from a diverse coalition of grassroots actors made them possible. Longtime locals joined with transplants— retirees and young “back to the landers” alike—with the backing of suburban environmentalists and politicians. In getting the TVA to back down in 1973, the Upper French Broad Defense

Association’s impressive mobilization and public relations campaign helped flip much of North

45 Tennessee Valley Authority, Valley With a Future: TVA in the Sixties (Knoxville: TVA, 1962), 3-4.

Carolina’s political class who had backed the project. So by the time the National Committee for the New River formed within two years, new governor James Holshouser, aided by Senators

Jesse Helms and Sam Ervin, joined a local campaign against dam construction and in doing so, helped the anti-dam campaign become a celebrated, national cause by the late 1970s.

Even as Southern Appalachia hemorrhaged human and economic capital in the postwar decades, thus becoming the poster child for the War on Poverty, mountaineers used their very existence and surroundings as a wellspring of political capital. In the willing hands of their defenders, rivers like the New and French Broad became symbols for the imagined virtue of rural communities. As it turns out, concerns about Appalachian land loss had a currency that extended beyond the mountains. In an age of suburbanization, the notion of imperiled, agrarian communities appealed to politicians of different stripes who worked to preserve the New River.

Dam fighters couched their demands in the discourses resembling the “Silent Majority” and

“hard hat revolts” of modern conservatism just as much as, if not more than, that of environmentalism. The ultimate legacy of the dam fighters involved their ability to get so many people from far-fetched places to care about the fate of seemingly-forgotten river valleys in the

Blue Ridge Mountains. Theirs was a triumph of geography as much as democracy.

Building off these case studies, Chapter 4 places these campaigns within the larger context of changing debates over land use in Southern Appalachia from the 1970s through the

1970s. No longer was development for development’s sake the guiding principle of regional planning in Appalachia. Poverty remained, of course, and a greater emphasis on localized, low- impact development emerged out of these situated struggles. This, of course, brought its own share of problems.

By the 1980s, it became clear that the greatest threat to land loss in Appalachia was no longer private or public utilities, but rather commercial real estate. As more and more farms continued to be sold in the river valleys once threatened with dams, the cross-class alliances that sustained grassroots movements withered in the face of mounting debt and eager brokers.

Groups like the National Committee for the River and the Appalachian Land Ownership Task

Force continued to raise awareness about the fact that outside corporations, especially Florida- based development companies, were gobbling up significant chunks of land in the very communities protected from dam-building. As the title of one alarming report on the rash of outside land-buying summed up the problem, native mountaineers were rapidly becoming “a landless people in a rural region.”46 Despite these efforts, citizens groups struggled to elicit the kind of necessary, legislative momentum to make more than piecemeal changes to protect mountain lands and people from the harms of residential and tourism development.

In the second part of the dissertation, my lens shifts to examine the struggles of African farmers and fishermen, to maintain their livelihoods and ties to the land in Lowcountry South

Carolina. Taking a cue from Greta de Jong’s work on agricultural displacement and the Civil

Rights Movement, Chapter 5’s examination of the area around Beaufort, Jasper, and Hampton

Counties in South Carolina as the epicenter of intergenerational black landholding and land loss helps elucidate a better cross-section of regional experiences.47 As civil rights leaders shifted their attention to the cause of economic justice in the late-1960s, the South Carolina Lowcountry exemplified the larger socioeconomic inequalities that African Americans wanted the federal

46 Steve Fisher, ed., A Landless People in a Rural Region: A Reader on Land Ownership and Property Taxation in Appalachia (New Market, TN: Highlander Center, 1979). 47 Greta De Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice After the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

government to address through the War on Poverty. White control of various bureaucracies at the local, state, and federal levels made it difficult for black communities to gain access to social welfare, anti-poverty, and farm loan programs, to name a few. On top of the white power structure’s control of government largesse, barriers to equal employment remained across rural communities in the Lowcountry and beyond. In the late 1960s, grassroots activists in Beaufort

County documented and raised awareness about the immense, human consequences of these power differentials in the form of high rates of poverty, disease, and malnutrition.

Amplified by reports from physicians, journalists, and progressive foundations, the anti- hunger movement in South Carolina exposed clear gaps in America’s fight against poverty. By

1969, the U.S. Senate held hearings to address the fact that many of the state’s citizens did not have their basic needs met. Although these hearings ultimately established a free food stamp program for the poor in this three-county area, the campaign held larger implications in the waning days of the Great Migration. Namely, it showed how finding ways to reduce and eventually reverse the out-migration of African Americans remained an important civil rights cause for groups like the National Sharecroppers Fund and the Federation of Southern

Cooperatives. Black residents asserted a fundamental right to stay and make a life for themselves in their home communities. Yet, without basic access to jobs, food, health care, or housing, black leaders in the area steeled themselves for a longer battle to increase the purchasing power of native Sea Islanders. However, divisions remained over how this should be done.

From the end of Chapter 5 through the entirety of Chapter 6, the narrative shifts to show how the aesthetics of the Lowcountry landscape served as more than a backdrop to contrast with the misery of hunger and malnutrition. In response, the local NAACP leadership stepped up their longstanding calls for more industrial development. Working with the state’s moderate governor,

Robert McNair, this biracial alliance tried to recruit various industries to move their operations to the Lowcountry. In late 1969, their efforts came to fruition when the German petrochemical company Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF) announced plans to locate a new plant on

Victoria Bluff, just west of Hilton Head Island.

Even as the Lowcountry gained notoriety for its hunger problem, the Beaufort County resort community on Hilton Head became a renowned tourism hub attracting wealthy residents and visitors alike. Although many African American leaders supported BASF out of a desire to end the stalking poverty that lived in the shadows of the island, others did not. A strategic, yet temporary alliance between a black fishermen’s cooperative and white real estate developers helped kill the project. Working-class and upper-class concerns united for a time here, but this alliance proved short-lived. The rejection of planned industrialization helped establish Hilton

Head as an early destination for eco-tourism. Yet, in turning the area into a vacation paradise for the wealthy, thousands of acres of black-owned land succumbed to the machinations of real estate developers. This process began before the BASF controversy and continued apace in its aftermath. As a result, Beaufort County’s former majority-black population became majority- white in the three decades between 1950 and 1980.48

Building on the works of William Bryan and Andrew Kahrl detailing the histories of changing land use patterns on Hilton Head, both chapters shed more light on the racial politics in

Beaufort County as well as their larger implications.49 Land loss in the Lowcountry stung with

48 Orville Vernon Burton and Wilbur Cross, The Penn Center: A History Preserved (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 128. 49 Andrew Kahrl, The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches From Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); William D. Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality: Weighing Paths to Economic Development at the Dawn of the Environmental Era“ Journal of Environmental History 16: 3 (July 2011): 492-522.

the barbs of racism and the destruction of generations of property ownership in places like

Beaufort County. Longstanding institutions such as the Penn Center for the Sea Islands as well as newer groups like the Emergency Land Fund took on the issue and won some, small gains. For example, the establishment of the Gullah-Geechee Heritage Corridor stands out as one, clear accomplishment. Still, the threat of development-based displacement and heritage depletion among native islanders are by no means resolved.

Examining each region on its own within one half of this study is an attempt to emphasize their similarities while not erasing their differences. However, differences in social structure, politics, and topography separated them. The legacies of institutionalized racism under

Jim Crow shaped the struggles of the Lowcountry’s mostly African American population in ways that cannot be compared in any way to Appalachia or any other impoverished areas in the

United States.

Differences in geography and topography ensured that politicians in each region saw the paths out of poverty differently. Dam projects promised both a technological and economic fix to mountain communities’ woes, while industrial plants like BASF’s offered more straightforward solutions in terms of job creation. Moreover, economic development through dam-building differed from industrial recruitment in the sense that it utilized a more direct and obvious means of social displacement. While industrial pollution from the BASF chemical threatened to ruin the livelihoods of African American shrimpers and fishermen—and thus bring a more indirect displacement—it did saw a somewhat different kind of property seizure than that seen in

Appalachia. Heirs’ property laws reflected the legacies of racism in ways that white mountaineers did not have to worry about.50 Even so, after the success of grassroots, anti-

50 Kahrl, The Land Was Ours.

development movements in each area, unscrupulous land buyers and real estate companies used nefarious means to turn these so-called “slums” into prime real estate.

The primary similarities of high rates of poverty and out-migration combined with growing tourism economies based on recreation and real estate ensnared both these sub-regions into roiling debates about economic development and environmentalism. Since they could be considered underdeveloped or at risk of over-development at the same time, whether they fit into imagined geographies of rural slums or landscapes of retreat remained an open question. The trans-local nature of these debates further illustrated that the South’s history remained bound up with the rest of the nation. Outsiders to these communities took notice regardless of whether they ever visited or lived there. Although the South’s deficiencies and problems were always

America’s too, in the post-Jim Crow era, the region’s environmental moment captivated the national imagination in a previously unseen way. It’s lands, waters, and communities represented something that seemed at once unique and universal. The idea of place, namely being rooted in a place as “natural” and “authentic” appealed to people beyond the region in a way that affirmed southern landscapes as uniquely American and uniquely worthy of protection.

Figure 1-1. County Map of Western North Carolina

Figure 1-2. Map of Relevant Counties in Lowcountry South Carolina

CHAPTER 2 ERASING DECLINE: THE FRENCH BROAD RIVER, TVA, AND A RURAL SILENT MAJORITY, 1962-1973

The French Broad is a river and a watershed and a way of life where day-before-yesterday and day-after-tomorrow exist in odd and fascinating harmony. —Wilma Dykeman The French Broad

Background on the Upper French Broad River Valley, 1916-1966

The French Broad River begins in the upper heights of the Appalachians, about fifty miles to the southwest of Asheville. From there, as it meanders toward the northeast, it cuts a narrow, lush river valley where farms and small towns like Rosman, Brevard, and Mills River formed between the mountains. Just before it reaches downtown Asheville, the French Broad takes an almost ninety-degree turn northward then making its way across the Great Smoky

Mountains until it crosses the North Carolina-Tennessee border and joins up with the Tennessee

River. Despite being endowed with almost Edenic beauty, for much of the early twentieth century, the French Broad’s waters seemed to bring more misfortune than fortune. With its frequent, destructive floods, it left an indelible mark on the landscape, economy, and culture of the surrounding area.

On October 4, 1964, rain from Hurricane Hilda lashed the mountains of Western North

Carolina, causing the French Broad River to overflow its banks. At this moment, the awesome, destructive power of the floodwaters offered a reminder that nature not only made the region attractive to people and industry, but it also hindered its growth. As the river flowed from the

Balsam Mountains to the northeast, its swollen waters flooded the office of Kermit Edney, a white man who owned a radio station in nearby Hendersonville, for the second time in three years. For Edney, the rising waters confirmed what he already knew. The French Broad needed to be tamed and harnessed, he believed, to boost the manufacturing and tourism industries of

rural communities along its banks.1 He would dedicate the better part of the next decade to this effort.

Edney’s decision came at an opportune time as the 1960s saw Americans devote greater energy and imagination to the problem of poverty in a nation of supposed plenty. In Western

North Carolina, the problem seemed especially acute as poverty often shared the same zip codes as stunning natural vistas. For planners and boosters, the natural resources of the Upper French

Broad Valley constituted both the problem and the solution. When North Carolina Governor Dan

K. Moore, a native of the western part of the state, identified the roots of poverty in the area he first noted “limitations imposed by geography,” followed by those created by “low income” and

“lack of educational opportunities.”2 Flanked by rolling halls and imposing mountain peaks, the riverine landscape brought both beauty and blight, isolation and desolation. However, this connection between geography and poverty was nothing new in Southern Appalachia. As it turned out, business and community leaders like Edney who formed the Upper French Broad

Economic Development Commission (UFBEDC) did not have to look far or use much imagination to find plans for a solution.

Heeding the call for flood control and economic development, the Tennessee Valley

Authority (TVA) proposed a series of fourteen dams along the French Broad River in 1961

(Figure 2-1 and Figure 2-2). Designed to prevent destructive floods, boost ongoing industrial development, and replace farmland with man-made, recreational lakes, the project seemed like

1 Chapter epigraph from Wilma Dykeman, The French Broad (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1955), 25; “Floods Rip Mountain Area; Two Killed,” Asheville Citizen, October 5, 1964; “Floodwaters Begin Receding: Hurricane Hilda Leaves Loss in Millions,” Chicago Tribune, October 6, 1964; “Heavy Rainstorms Flood WNC Sections,” Asheville Citizen, August 25, 1961. 2 Dan K. Moore, “Speech at Appalachian Development Conference, June 25, 1966,” in Memory F. Mitchell, ed., Papers of Dan K. Moore (Raleigh: NC Department of Archives and History, 1969), 486.

an economic godsend to many in nearby communities. However, to other residents of this largely white, rural section of Western North Carolina, damming the French Broad amounted to the desecration of their cherished heritage. Citizens groups like the Upper French Broad Defense

Association (UFBDA) resented the implication that their land could be destroyed, their neighbors relocated, and their river castrated all because a government agency and its local agents declared their rural community an economic backwater. This tenuous alliance of working and middle-class white residents fought and ultimately defeated the TVA dams. Because they saw rights to home and place as something they had earned, development by the TVA was something unwanted, unneeded, and undeserved.

These competing visions for the French Broad River valley indicated an important but understudied history of sustainability and “counter-urbanization” in the Southern Mountains. The

TVA and the UFBDA clashed over how to best preserve rural communities and ways of life in an increasingly urbanizing and industrializing region and nation. Flood control and regional planning promised to industrialize the countryside as a counter-urbanization measure in the minds of TVA leaders and regional boosters. In this sense, it meant providing jobs and stopping outmigration to the city. Fueled by agrarian sentimentalism and environmental knowledge, the

UFBDA, on the other hand, advocated for preserving and highlighting the unique natural and cultural resources of the river valley to ease the transition away from the old, agrarian economy.

In short, the TVA wanted to create an economy that could sustain human habitation in this scenic, rural landscape. By contrast, dam fighters saw protecting the landscape as the only way to sustain life for residents both old and new.

Moreover, French Broad affair speaks to a few, other important shifts in the history of

Southern Appalachia. First, it showed how communities in the rural South became

environmental flashpoints that gained national attention from media and politicians alike. For the

UFBDA and other grassroots movements, environmental ideas and laws became a tactic to help defend their way of life. Yet, their collective rhetoric and motives portrayed their cause as one driven by an emotional attachment to the land, tinged with populist outrage at the TVA’s supposed land grab. Second, the TVA’s doomed attempt to build dams on the French Broad is an important reminder that the agency tried to recapture the magic of its halcyon era in the 1930s and 1940s after World War II. Certainly, the TVA’s increased use of strip-mined coal became the subject of protests during the 1970s and 1980s. But the TVA’s important role in the War on

Poverty has gone largely unacknowledged by historians. In responding to the urgency of the

Great Society, the agency committed greater resources to the development of rural, “problem areas.” But in doing so, projects like the French Broad dams, even with their anti-poverty bent, found themselves challenged by both a growing environmental conscience and the Nixon

Administration’s penchant for fiscal austerity.

Lastly, the TVA’s failed venture into Western North Carolina foreshadowed the genesis of a post-industrial economy in the mountains. Before the devastating furniture and textile plant closures that swept through Western North Carolina in the 1990s and early 2000s, many mountain communities exchanged the dream of replacing farms with factories for one of replacing farms with vacation homes, golf courses, and resorts.3 In this trade-off, the cross-class solidarity that defeated the dams faded. Resentment at the TVA lingered, but mountain residents and their allies soon confronted the problem of residential growth and “people pollution,” especially as Florida-based developers bought up acres upon acres of land there in the late

3 For an excellent, brief history of this larger trend, see: Peter Coclanis and David Carlton, “The Roots of Southern Deindustrialization,” Challenge 61: 5-6 (2018): 418-426.

twentieth century. In turn, the region’s land, water, flora, and fauna—once potential commodities in the industrial supply chain—now became valuable selling points for a southern form of ecotourism.

At the dawn of the War on Poverty, as national policymakers appropriated public funds to tackle out-migration, dilapidated housing, and poverty, they often worked in concert with local leaders and planners to prescribe development by destruction as the cure for what they termed

“urban ghettos” and “rural slums.” That policymakers used similar terms to denote rural and urban areas is no accident. To render poor places objects of national concern, antipoverty discourse ensured that terms like “slum” or “ghetto” were not only reserved for urban, mostly black spaces.4 The War on Poverty drew the rural South, Appalachia, and urban America— disparate places like Harlem and Harlan County, Kentucky—into a discourse that minimized the differences between underdeveloped places locked out of postwar prosperity. This relationship encouraged organizations like the TVA to link their regional planning and economic development programs with antipoverty efforts emanating from Washington. Even so, historians of antipoverty programs and the modern Sunbelt have largely ignored the importance of urban and regional planning in the development of the region.

Although studies by James T. Patterson and Michael B. Katz discount the efficacy of the rural War on Poverty, this study suggests that policymakers’ intent to remake and revive these areas mattered just as much as the results. Boosting the industrial capacity of regions like the

4 On the emergence of the linkage between urbanity, blackness, and criminality, see: Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); In his landmark 1963 book The Other America, journalist Michael Harrington described the poor as inhabiting a national “ghetto, a modern poor farm for the rejects of society and of the economy.” Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963), 17-18. For further evidence of the widespread usages of terms like “rural slum” among white elites, see: John D. Pomfret, “A Rural Slum Cuts Across South,” New York Times, March 3, 1964; Marjorie Hunter, “Appalachia is Prime Target of War on Poverty,” NYT, May 3, 1964; Frank P. Graham, “Reaffirmation of Faith,” New South 22: 1 (Winter 1967): 24-26.

South held out the promise of slowing rural-to-urban migration.5 Although more recent studies emphasize the importance of community action to rural areas, they miss the importance of the planning industrial complex evident in the efforts of TVA and the Appalachian Regional

Commission to crafting a more pro-business approach to eradicating poverty.6 The construction of an imagined geography of poverty to justify massive development projects often motivated residents to construct their own counter-narratives. Their rights to home and place, which once seemed tangible and solid, now seemed to crumble. To make their case they constructed a narrative of rural prosperity to replace one of poverty and blight. Playing on ideas of American meritocracy, UFBDA activists united a language of rights with a language of place. In doing so, white dam fighters like those examined here parroted rights discourses employed by white conservative activists of the 1960s and 1970s.7

Designs on the Upper French Broad: The TVA and Economic Development in Western North Carolina, 1962-1968

Announced in 1962, the TVA’s flood control plan for the Upper French Broad River promised a technological solution to the problem of rural poverty. Improving the landscapes of this valley held out the promise of liberating the human and natural resources of the area out of

5 James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 1900-1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990). 6 Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, eds., The War on Poverty: A Grassroots History, 1964-1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Robert R. Korstad and James L. Leloudis, To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Kent B. Germany, New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (Athens: UGA Press, 2007); Elizabeth Kai Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 7 Zachary Lechner, The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of Southern Whiteness, 1960-1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018); Joseph Bagley, The Politics of Whites Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).

their supposed isolation and squalor. Planners from both the agency and local governments cited the need for industrial development, unperturbed by the river overflowing its banks, as crucial to economic prosperity across a five-county area that dealt with the most devastating effects of past floods. Additionally, new recreational lakes created by the fourteen projected impoundments would provide a shot in the arm to the region’s growing tourism industry.8

Although supporters frequently cited a series of devastating floods dating back to 1916 as the source of the region’s troubles, flooding alone did not explain both the necessity and urgency of this project.9 According to TVA officials as well as their local supporters, major demographic indicators like low, per capita income and high rates of out-migration in the region justified the need for such a massive undertaking like damming the French Broad.10

With diminishing prospects down on the farm, young mountaineers continued to flee

Southern Appalachia in droves after World War II. Reports from state officials noted with great concern how larger changes in the regional economy affected the western part of the state as a whole, especially the counties awaiting the potential TVA dams. Between 1950 and 1960,

Madison County, a rural area just north of Asheville, lost 2,000 farms as its population declined by 3,305 people, to 17,217 residents. By 1965, local officials estimated it lost another 1,279 residents.11 In the same period, a state government report found that Transylvania County, near

8 Timothy Silver, Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 212-214 9 On the 1916 flood, see: Jessica A. Bandel, So Great the Devastation: The 1916 Flood in Western North Carolina (Raleigh: NC Department of Archives and History, 2016). 10 Martha Gash Boswell, Grassroots Along the Upper French Broad: The Valley People Versus the Tennessee Valley Authority, 3, Box 1, Folder 1: “Introductory and Administrative Material,” Upper French Broad Defense Association (1967-1977) Records [hereafter UFBDA Records], UNCA-SPC. 11 Ronald D. Eller, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 30; Madison County Planning Board, Land Potential Study, Madison County North Carolina (Asheville: Division of Community Planning, 1970), 9, North Carolina State Documents Collection [hereafter State Documents Collection],

the southern headwaters of the French Broad, saw 1,493 persons leave, many of them young adults, largely due to limited opportunities for employment there. This same report noted that the numbers proved worse for Transylvania’s rural residents; considering the town of Brevard accounted for most of the gains in population, employment, and industry. In recognition of these trends, state economists projected that the region would shed around fifty percent of its agricultural jobs by 1980.12 Henderson County-native Charles Edmunds was part of this transition. Despite growing up on a farm in Mills River, Edmunds moved to Asheville to work in manufacturing because, in his words, “it became apparent to me that a little farmer simply can’t make it anymore… the big grower gets bigger, and the little farmer finds another way to make a living.”13 Although Edmunds found a job in moving to the region’s largest city, not everyone proved so fortunate. Concerns about ex-farmers fleeing to urban areas en masse gave increased urgency to rural development projects.

At this time, economic troubles were not confined only to the rural communities of

Western North Carolina. From 1950 to 1960 the Asheville metro area experienced a net out- migration of nearly 10,000 people, while Western North Carolina writ large saw over 70,000 migrants leave the area.14 The flight of middle and upper-class whites to the suburbs in the

North Carolina Division of Archives and History, http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/p16062coll9/id/163448/rec/22 (accesses January 12, 2017). 12 Western North Carolina Regional Planning Commission, Economy of Brevard, N.C. (Raleigh: Western North Carolina Regional Planning Commission, 1964), 25, 33, North Carolina State Documents Collection, North Carolina State Library, http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p249901coll22/id/42487/rec/47 (accessed January 12, 2017). 13 Charles S. Edmunds Statement, August 30, 1971, Box 4, Folder: “Statements, E-H,” UFBDA Records, UNCA- SPC. 14 Metropolitan Planning Board of the City of Asheville and Buncombe County, The Land of the Sky: A Summary of the Population and Economy of Metropolitan Asheville (Asheville: Housing Authority of the City of Asheville, 1966), 3, Box 150: “Publications, 1940s-1970s” Folder 3: “The Land of the Sky,” Housing Authority of the City of Asheville Records [hereafter HACA Records], UNCA-SPC.

postwar decades ensured that Asheville, like other American cities, resembled a “doughnut city,” with its central business district decrepit and vacant.15 By the end of the 1960s, a TVA survey described the city as a “tarnished hill station” just “begging to be nurtured.” Much like the region surrounding the city, agency staffers saw a landscape marked, on the one hand, by a

“magnificent setting” of stunning, grand mountains and, on the other, “junked autos lining the banks of the once beautiful French Broad River.” Since the river represented one of the city’s most defining features, beginning in the early 1940s, TVA officials pushed for an urban flood control system as the best way to boost the city’s economy.16

Located in the center of the project, the city stood to benefit from new dams and levees just to the south of its main business district. Asheville-area boosters took heart from this proposal. While city leaders pursued a massive urban renewal project targeting mostly black neighborhoods near the French Broad, the proposed TVA levee along a nearby stretch of the river promised predictability for “potential industrial sites” that might want to locate there.17

Urban renewal and flood control offered development by destruction as a way of eliminating obsolete spaces, curing blight, and bringing the poor into the new economy. To make these dreams a reality, “planning” became the buzzword for many local leaders.18

In their minds, rural and urban poverty were inextricably linked. Economic stagnation in the countryside threatened to swell the ranks of the unemployed in the cities, leaving the poor to,

15 Nan Chase, Asheville: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), 167-168. 16 Tennessee Valley Authority, The Image of Asheville (Knoxville: TVA, 1969), quoted in Chase, Asheville, 177, 182; Tennessee Valley Resources: Their Development and Use (Knoxville: TVA, 1947), 24. 17 “5 County Economic Report Released,” Hendersonville Times-News, August 31, 1964. 18 Phillip Clark, “Planning Makes Sense,” Asheville Citizen, April 22, 1962.

in the words of one prominent economist, “choose the urban slum over the rural one.”19 Trying to head off such changes, area boosters saw the TVA’s flood control project as the best way to ensure that conditions in both the city and the countryside were right for facilitating an industrial boom in their corner of Appalachia.

At the same time, glimmers of progress appeared in the valley in the early 1960s. After the 1920s land boom and bust saddled the city with crippling debt, Asheville-area boosters seemed poised to capitalize on the general prosperity of the postwar era. Sitting at the junction of what would become Interstates 26 and 40, large industrial sites soon found an accommodating locale in the Upper French Broad River Valley. In 1964, the city’s largest newspaper heralded the arrival of a manufacturing and tourism boom in the region with a special issue. Citing the production of parachutes for America’s armed forces at Northrop’s Asheville plant, along with

American Enka’s massive nylon plant west of the city, and a new General Electric manufacturing center in nearby Hendersonville, residents could take pride in the fact that they were an important cog in the larger machine of the national economy.20 With new roads and industries coming to the greater Asheville area in the early 1960s, the “Land of the Sky” once again seemed like a place of promise. As TVA’s Board of Directors wrote in a 1962 report, the

“strength of the region lies in its capacity for economic growth.”21 In the minds of regional boosters, these pockets of industrial growth in the midst of grinding poverty did not make flood

19 On this broader phenomenon especially among Appalachian whites, see: Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Quote from Marion Clawson, “Rural Poverty in the United States,” Journal of Farm Economics 49: 5 (Dec. 1967): 1227-1232, quote on 1232. 20 “Northrop-- From North Carolina to Outer Space,” Asheville Citizen, June 26, 1966; “Enka Operation at Record Highs,” and “GE Plant in Hendersonville Living Example of Success,” Asheville Citizen, January 30, 1966. 21 “Tributary Areas Get TVA Office,” New York Times, January 7, 1962.

control less urgent. Rather, its promise of a more ordered, regional planning made it more desirable.

That the TVA took on new dam-building projects in Appalachia during the 1960s speaks to the ways that its guiding ethos became re-calibrated in the first two decades after World War

II. Dam building in the American South did not begin with the passage of the TVA Act in May

1933. However, the new federally-owned corporation did more in less time to reshape the region’s landscapes than any other utility, public or private. According to economists Patrick M.

Kline and Enrico Morretti, between 1940 and 1960, areas served by the TVA saw 10-year employment growth in both agriculture and manufacturing that exceeded the regional and national rates by at least ten percent.22

Despite two decades of depression and war, the agency built dams at breakneck speed. In its first dozen years of existence, TVA erected twelve dams in the Greater Tennessee River

Valley, stretching from northern Alabama to just south of the Ohio River in western Kentucky.

Western North Carolina itself saw one of the TVA’s largest projects when the hulking concrete edifice of Fontana Dam rose above the remnants of the Upper Little Tennessee River in 1943.23

Still, the TVA’s reach had limits. About one hundred miles to the east, early designs for a series of dams on the French Broad River never got off the ground thanks to local opposition and

(later) military demand.24 With such limited setbacks, the TVA’s track record for improving economic conditions in rural Appalachia seemed clear.

22 Patrick M. Kline and Enrico Morretti, “Local Economic Development, Agglomeration Economies, and the Big Push: 100 Years of Evidence from the Tennessee Valley Authority,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 19293, (August 2013): 12-13. 23 Donald Edward Davis, Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 183-185; Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power. 24 Manganiello and Stewart, “Watershed Democracy,” 5-7.

For communities like those along the French Broad, the benefits of dam-powered development were just out of reach, but near enough to be noticed. Whether built for flood control, hydroelectricity, or both, dams transformed rivers into lakes whose initially placid waters soon became disrupted with the splashes of swimmers and the roars of motorboats. As

President Franklin D. Roosevelt praised the TVA’s efforts in 1940, the agency created “the Great

Lakes of the South.” The long-term recreational impact of the dam-building crusade proved FDR correct. By 1947, TVA-owned lakes saw an average of nearly 3 million visitors each year, a string of success that peaked with over 42 million in 1960 alone.25 Additionally, it paved the way for innovations in scientific agriculture, improvements to rural housing, and the opening up of a competitive energy market in previously untapped areas.

In the estimation of its admirers, the TVA helped preserve rural life in an increasingly urban America. As Vanderbilt professor and Southern Agrarian Herman C. Nixon gushed in

1938, by “modernizing agriculture, conserving rural manhood, and facilitating village development,” dam-building would “prove a godsend to the hillbillies.” Nixon and most of his fellow Agrarians saw the TVA as the ideal vehicle by which economic progress could preserve traditional folkways and hierarchies.26 About thirty years after they heaped praise on the TVA, the Agrarians had faded from view, but their clamoring for a sustainable rural life built on industry and agriculture remained. As a symbol of successful rural modernization, the TVA

25 Ian Draves, “’It’s Easier to Pick a Tourist Than a Bale of Cotton: The Rise of Recreation on the Great Lakes of the South,” Southern Cultures 20: 3 (Fall 2014): quote on 88-89, statistics on 97. 26 Donald Davidson would stand as the only consistent, Agrarian critic of the TVA, see: Edward Shapiro, “The Southern Agrarians and the Tennessee Valley Authority,” American Quarterly 22: 4 (Winter 1970): esp. 799-804, quote on 802.

cultivated a committed core of acolytes interested in exporting the agency’s economic development model elsewhere.27

By the early 1950s, agency officials looked to advise and assist with large-scale development projects beyond the riverine landscapes of the Tennessee Valley. Responding to

Cold War imperatives to win the “hearts and minds” of so-called “non-aligned nations,” TVA staff provided technical assistance to dam projects along the Indus River in India and the Volta

River in Ghana, along with other river basin development schemes across the Middle East,

Africa, and Latin America. In his study of the TVA’s work in Mexico’s Papaloapan basin, historian Tore Olsson notes that Arthur Morgan and David Lilienthal, the veritable godfathers of the agency, would have balked at the way it elevated the “ideal of bigness” and expertise over the ideals of community participation and “preserving small-scale communities.”28 This signaled an important shift for the agency.

In addition to the increasing scale of ambitions, the TVA also adjusted the tools by which they tackled underdevelopment in rural areas. Whereas previous efforts in the U.S. South exhibited a laser-like focus on the goal of generating electricity, its experiences in Mexico and beyond demonstrated a greater focus on marrying flood control and industrialization to transform the economies of impoverished river valleys.29 In 1962, an agency publication put it this way,

27 On the ways that both the TVA and Rural Electrification Administration (REA) helped drive a more competitive energy market by challenging private utilities for control of the Tennessee Valley markets, see: Brent Cegul, “Creative Competition: Georgia Power, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Creation of a Rural Consumer Economy,” Journal of American History 105: 1 (June 2018): 45-70. 28 On the TVA’s international assistance campaigns, see: James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), esp. 181-270; David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Immerwahr, Thinking Small; Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the U.S. and Mexican Countryside (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 181. 29 Olsson, Agrarian Crossings, esp. 180-189.

“flood control has taken on new meaning in the world of industry. Once regarded mainly as a means of preventing damages, it is now the creator of safe shoreline sites for new factories.”30

By installing new dams and levees along the French Broad, approximately 6,700 acres would be flooded by artificial lakes and reservoirs to create a space where manufacturing and tourism could flourish in relative harmony.31 These international ventures indicate that the antipoverty bent to the TVA’s work in the 1960s was not unique.

By bringing flood control projects back to rivers like the Upper French Broad, TVA leaders also believed they could deflect conservative criticism by industrializing poor places and thereby help win the Cold War at home. For the agency’s mostly Republican critics, its area modernization efforts in developing countries became easy targets for criticism. Castigating a bill for more development money in Appalachia, one Ohio Congressman noted that after the

TVA’s nearly thirty-year existence, “one would expect any part of the valley not flooded by the tremendous reservoirs is now a land of milk and honey.”32 In large part due to this increased federal scrutiny, Congress cut off federal appropriations in 1959, making the agency self- sustaining from that point forward. With meager federal support, the TVA derived nearly all of its revenues from its power system.33 By the 1960s, the agency tried to do more with less. It needed to remain solvent while also expanding and committing resources to ameliorate poverty in the Southern Mountains.

30 Tennessee Valley Authority, Valley With a Future: TVA in the Sixties (Knoxville: TVA, 1962), 3. 31 North Carolina State Planning Task Force, Upper French Broad River Basin: Regional Development and Investments Related to the Proposed Water Control System (Raleigh: Division of Community Planning of the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development, October 1967), 1, 7-8. 32 Congressman Frank T. Bow, “TVA Region: A Depressed Area,” Human Events, October 6, 1960, 475. 33 Kline and Morretti, “Local Economic Development,” 4-5.

Sensitive to the persistence of poverty in Appalachia, TVA officials went to great lengths to address underdevelopment and poverty in its backyard. But it did not do so alone. Instead, the organization sought out allies in private industry who stood to benefit from a more industrialized

Appalachia. More than just turning water into power for the region, the agency embraced what new general manager Aubrey “Red” Wagner would call its “new mission” in the post-1945 era by making dams an engine of “total area development.” Building more dams, in the logic of

Wagner and his staff, advanced this goal by creating cheap power, abundant water for recreation, and secure shorelines for industrial or residential development.34

By the mid-1960s, the rhetoric of the War on Poverty gave increased political cover to the TVA’s total development projects. As agency board member Frank E. Smith told Johnson administration officials, “TVA regards the war on poverty as part of its basic mission.”35 In

1962, one year after they announced the French Broad project, agency officials framed their expanded efforts in terms of aiding “the economic development of small tributary areas where special problems exist.” As a tributary of the Tennessee River, the French Broad River Valley became grandfathered into this program.36

Expanding flood control to problem areas like these seemed promising. Under the right situations, TVA leadership predicted industrial growth could reverse trends of shrinking incomes and out-migration in mountain communities that had yet to see the agency’s direct impact. As

Smith wrote at the time, the tributary development program “holds the best possible chance—

34 On Wagner’s “new mission” and the 1955 Watts Barr Conference, see: William Bruce Wheeler and Michael J. McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam, 1936-1979: A Bureaucratic Crisis in Post-Industrial America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), esp. 18-19; Officials from TVA used the phrase “total area development” in a 1969 forum with regional leaders at Western Carolina University, Lillian Hirt, “Community Group Hears of TVA Plan,” Asheville Citizen, January 22, 1969. 35 Frank E. Smith, quoted in Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sun Belt, 183. 36 “Tributary Areas Get TVA Office,” New York Times, January 7, 1962.

working with other general agencies of the Great Society—to help local people on their own initiative eliminate poverty and build a new local economic life in some of the back corners of

American geography.” Along nearly similar lines, local writers Wilma Dykeman and James

Stokely lauded tributary development efforts as “another important move to translate national promises into community practicalities,” and thereby continue the agency’s work “to render the local scene more compatible with nature’s magnificence.”37 Tributary development tried to make regional planning less regional and more local. Moreover, the agency’s interest in helping mountain communities stem the tide of out-migration did not mean the TVA became a charity, suddenly uninterested in performing rigorous cost-benefit analyses for its projects. Instead, its new mission to build more dams glommed onto the War on Poverty’s best intentions. Projects like the French Broad dams offered a way for the TVA to use the spotlight given to Appalachian poverty to advance its own interests.38

In a de-facto public-private partnership that characterized the TVA’s planning-industrial complex, new manufacturing represented only half the picture. New highways and infrastructure helped create a revived automobile culture by encouraging middle and upper-class consumers to enjoy outdoor recreation. North Carolina officials embraced this vision as well. New marketing campaigns paid off handsomely as tourism contributed over $1 billion to the state’s economy by

1965. Drawn to the scenic vistas of the mountains, one report from the State Planning Division noted, visitors should enjoy an escape from “the jumble of signs and structures on a commercial

37 Frank Smith, “TVA and the Politics of Conservation,” New South 21: 4 (Fall 1966): 78-87, quote on 87; Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, “The Changing Tennessee Valley Region,” Tennessee Valley Perspective 1: 1 (Fall 1970): 4-5. 38 See: Kenneth M. Murchison, The Snail Darter Case: TVA Versus the Endangered Species Act (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2007), esp.12-14; Wheeler and McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam, 21-22.

strip.”39 Still, some rural areas found it difficult to attract their share of well-endowed visitors.40

George Stephens, an adviser to the governor, informed area boosters in 1963, “scenery is the goose that lays the golden egg.” To correct “the rape of roadsides,” Stephens suggested that rural leaders first address the “billboards, old car graveyards, snake farms, and low-quality development” that made the region resemble Hoboken, New Jersey, among other urban areas where tourists wanted to escape from.41 In this view, poverty ravaged the unspoiled, rural aesthetics that tourists expected in the mountains. No one, it seemed wanted to spend their vacation touring a rural slum.

Making this modern economy a political reality depended on a concerted lobbying effort to establish rural blight as a socioeconomic fact. Despite the high cost of relocating around 400 people in the farming communities around Mills River and Hooper’s Creek, the TVA and its local allies believed that it would be justified by allowing large-scale agribusiness to replace smaller farm operations. One 1966 TVA report on the French Broad project cited “the heritage of a system of low income agriculture” as the primary culprit behind the valley’s widespread

“poverty and underemployment.”42 Moreover, area Congressman Roy Taylor assured local

39 On the historical connection between American automobility and the protection of natural scenery, see: Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015); Christopher W. Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 253-287; quote from Richard R. Wilkinson and R. Paul Darst, Critical Environmental Areas of North Carolina (Raleigh: State Planning Division, Department of Administration, 1972), 46. 40 Timothy Silver, Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 212-214; Richard D. Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Starnes, ed., Southern Journeys: Tourism, History & Culture in the Modern South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), esp. 149-153. 41 “WNC’s Wide Open Spaces Periled, Sanford Aide Tells Area Leaders,” Asheville Citizen, August 2, 1963. 42 Tennessee Valley Authority, Development of the Water Resources of the French Broad River Basin in North Carolina (1966), 4, ,” Sam J. Ervin Papers, Subgroup A: Senate Records, 1954-1975 [hereafter Ervin Papers], Folder 6371: “Tennessee Valley Authority, French Broad River Basin,” Southern Historical Collection [hereafter SHC], Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

leaders that flood control would help create a stable economic base for their communities. In particular, he assured local politicians that the plan would boost manufacturing jobs, make tourism the region’s “fastest growing business,” while also ensuring that agricultural operations would soon have “greater production potential” to compete in the new farm economy.

Dismissing concerns that giving the region’s land and water over to the TVA would harm farmers in the river valley, Taylor and others believed that the dams would enhance, rather than undermine, the agricultural traditions of these rural communities.43 Flood control proponents defended it as part of a necessary all-of-the-above development strategy. Like a proverbial three- legged stool, new dams would ensure the stability of the regional economy based on manufacturing, tourism, and agriculture.

This emphasis on “field-to-factory” economics mirrored the thinking of the TVA’s top brass, especially general manager Aubrey Wagner. A fiery engineer who—one journalist wrote—bore an uncanny resemblance to a basset hound, Wagner informed Knoxville-area journalists in 1966 that “the future of East Tennessee and the whole Tennessee Valley is in further industrialization… It is an area that never can support great numbers of people with agriculture.”44 Such a statement indicated the agency’s broader commitment toward preventing further out-migration and thereby sustaining rural communities in the river valley. However,

Wagner’s confidence in industrial growth also fed doubts that the agency had little interest in preserving farmland. Local knowledge of previous TVA projects showed that leading areas out

43 Roy A. Taylor to Charles H. Taylor, March 13, 1967, Ervin Papers, Folder 6370: “Tennessee Valley Authority, French Broad River Basin,” SHC. 44 Aubrey Wagner, quoted in Wheeler and McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam, 31; James Branscome, “TVA’s Return to ‘Limelight’ Goal of Chief,” Washington Post, May 18, 1978; for a helpful survey of rural industrialization in North Carolina, see: Tyler Gray Greene, “Farm to Factory: Secondary Road Building and the Rural Industrial Geography of Post-World War II North Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 84: 2 (May 2018): 277-310.

of their economic torpor often meant exchanging traditional agrarian patterns of work and living for a dam-powered development strategy that married tourism and manufacturing.

To develop these communities required drastic, new investments that often threatened the very character of regional landscapes targeted by the TVA. The process of land condemnation and confiscation to make room for new lakes and operating facilities constituted a necessary sacrifice offered in the service of economic progress. As historian Drew Swanson writes, since

TVA projects—with their “dams, spillways, service buildings, access roads… and the impoundment lakes,” often covered hundreds of thousands of acres, “landowners would have to go, voluntarily or not.”45 Although agency programs promised to help dispossessed farmers find new jobs and homes, many felt cheated out of ancestral lands and livelihoods only to be offered only a pittance in return for their losses. As farm losses continued to mount in the three decades since the TVA’s founding, the taking of even more farmland for recreational and industrial purposes seemed to add insult to injury for rural communities.

Trying to balance economic development through such destructive means as dam building created an inevitable tension. How could a rural, river valley be developed without destroying the very landscape aesthetics and social fabric that made it so alluring in the first place? If scenery was the “goose that lays the golden egg” (as George Stephens said) or if beauty could be a community’s “money crop,” as in one of Flannery O’Connor’s fictional small towns, why did it need to be altered? With its abundant water, malleable terrain, and easy access to soon-to-be brand new interstates, the Upper French Broad River Valley provided a crucial proving ground for resolving this question.46

45 Drew Swanson, Beyond the Mountains, 163. 46 Flannery O’Connor, “The Partridge Festival,” in Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1946, 1971), 426.

A Rural Silent Majority: The Triumph of the Upper French Broad Defense Association, 1969-1973

Rather than an anti-democratic, “high modernist” scheme foisted by an out-of-state agency on an unwilling population, as it might seem, Wagner’s TVA went to great lengths to recruit support from willing area residents. In 1964, the Upper French Broad Economic

Development Commission (UFBEDC) emerged as the agency’s foot soldiers. Consisting of an all-male leadership from communities across the river valley, this group sought to convince local people that the project was worthwhile. In the minds of TVA officials, this group performed an essential task since its original flood control plan succumbed to grassroots opposition twenty years earlier. This strategy also went beyond the French Broad. The agency embraced similar partnerships with local chamber-of-commerce groups on other dam projects as part of its “new mission.” In a 1964 report, the UFBEDC described the region as “in a race with time,” and if they pursued “active development programs” now, the region would soon be enriched by population growth, new industries, and higher per capita incomes.47 As a result, the TVA plan proved consistent with a very real, quasi-grassroots clamoring for regional planning among some area residents, particularly among wealthier white businessmen.

From there, local, white leaders like Kermit Edney of Hendersonville and P.R. Elam of

Marshall worked to assure state and federal politicians that flood control had the backing of communities large and small by calling upon collective memories about past floods. Indeed, the

TVA’s proposal to state officials included dozens of photos depicting the devastation of recent floods offered a striking portrayal of the need for flood control. In a resolution sent to state leaders, a men’s club in the town of Fletcher cited the “destructive consequences and loss to the

47 On groups like UFBEDC, see: Wheeler and McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam, 42-43; “5-County Economic Report Released,” Hendersonville Times-News, August 31, 1964.

economy” that resulted from “the improvident use of our water resources.”48 In their view, a more prudent use of the region’s resources would remake the area from a rural backwater into a hub of new economic activity.

For his part, Edney emphasized his local roots in defending the French Broad project before the U.S. Senate in 1969. Speaking of the pioneer culture that motivated him to back the

TVA, Edney said his family and people like Congressman Taylor could “testify that we have managed by sheer determination to hack out a livelihood, and force those formidable mountains to give way to progress.”49 In his mind, damming the French Broad River signified the next, logical step in the region’s evolution, where nature often proved a hindrance, or even an enemy, of progress. Such a statement reveals how pro-dam forces tried to make it clear that the TVA’s plans reflected the clamoring of longtime residents and not the whims of distant bureaucrats.

Nearly all local and state politicians soon fell in line behind the French Broad Project.

Governor Dan K. Moore, Senators Sam Ervin, and B. Everett Jordan, and Congressman Roy

Taylor voiced their approval. Citing the dire economic situation of rural areas, mountaineers, they reasoned, would want the economic benefits promised by the TVA. In Governor Moore’s letter to Aubrey Wagner, he praised the agency for giving “full consideration to all affected interests,” while reassuring him that “the local people are favorable to this development.”50 Both

Moore and his successor, Robert Scott, advocated for the “total development” of North Carolina

48 P.R. Elam to Senator Sam Ervin, December 6, 1967, Folder 7358: “Tennessee Valley Authority, French Broad Rivers;” Tennessee Valley Authority, Development of the Water Resources of the French Broad River Basin, 1-6, Folder 6371: “Tennessee Valley Authority, French Broad River Basin;” Fletcher Community Men’s Club Resolution, February 21, 1967, Folder 6370: “Tennessee Valley Authority, French Broad River Basin,” Ervin Papers. 49 Kermit Edney, “Prepared Statement, Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations: United States Senate, 91 H.R. 14159, June 9-12, 1969, pg. 6314. 50 Dan K. Moore to Aubrey Wagner, November 30, 1966, Ervin Papers, Folder 6370: “French Broad Dams,” SHC.

communities. This all-of-the-above economic development strategy shared the TVA’s desire to create rural prosperity through industrialization and tourism promotion. Thanks to the combined lobbying efforts of state officials and the TVA itself, Congress appropriated $250,000 in 1968 to allow the agency to begin planning and acquiring land for the dam project.51

Undaunted by the establishment support for the TVA, numerous community groups emerged and formed the main organs of opposition. They found a key ally in Republican State

Representative Charles Taylor of Brevard. Traditionally a Democratic stronghold, Transylvania

County backed Taylor because of his campaign’s focus on challenging the TVA. Sounding the alarm at a 1967 meeting of the Citizens and Taxpayers League, he offered a speech that indicted the flood control system’s technical flaws and defended the region’s economy. Disputing the portrayal of these communities as “an area of poverty and unemployment,” Taylor thundered that the agency “attempts to play down the growth” of the region by implying that “it will not develop further” without their intervention. Taylor and local activists also took umbrage with claims made by the UFBEDC, among others, that support for the project exceeded “95 percent… including those whose land will become part of a lake.”52

For this young state legislator, challenging the state’s Congressional delegation depended upon a groundswell of local support that first carried him to victory. A handful of Transylvania

County leaders soon joined him, decrying the proposal because it would “take over one-third of our farm land, industry sites, and ruin our county.”53 In their initial attempt to defeat or at least

51 E.W. Kenworthy, “T.V.A. Drops Plan for 14 Dams Along River in North Carolina,” New York Times, November 17, 1972. 52 Charles Taylor, “Speech Delivered Before the Citizens and Taxpayers League, February 2, 1967, Ervin Papers, Folder 6370, SHC; Boswell, Grassroots Along the Upper French Broad, 12. 53 Hale Sinaird quoted in Boswell, Grassroots Along the Upper French Broad, 5; Martha Boswell to Sam J. Ervin, undated, Ervin Papers, Folder 7358: “Tennessee Valley Authority, French Broad Rivers;” SHC.

alter the dam project, grassroots activists marshaled discourses that depicted rural areas as vibrant and growing on their own.

Within the five-county region of this river valley, Henderson and Transylvania counties represented the hotbed of TVA opposition. In 1967, an anti-dam coalition emerged out of the

Citizens and Taxpayers’ League of Brevard to form the Upper French Broad Defense

Association (UFBDA). The UFBDA helped bring together middle-class and working-class residents, natives and new-comers alike, all groups who saw their community not as underdeveloped, but as economically prosperous, culturally unique, and rich in natural beauty.

One white woman in Asheville, who identified herself “as a taxpayer,” paired her demand for a referendum with a denunciation of the TVA as evidence that “in our man-made world, we forget

God and Mother Nature.”54

Meanwhile, newly-arrived retirees expressed concerns about the need to preserve open spaces as critical to an improved quality of life. Fred Orpurt, a retiree who recently moved to

Hendersonville, praised the generations of families who “kept the place almost as God had made it, and today it is still a Garden of Eden to them as well as us.” Local businessman J.W. Simpson of Brevard expressed similar sentiments. While driving a reporter by the area’s popular trout streams, he lamented, “we’re going to run out of these mountain streams some day.” Certainly, this notion of the valley as an endangered Eden bolstered the case for its protection.55 Moreover, it shows that the messages of the anti-dam forces did not always follow a clear, tidy progression

54 Mrs. Sam Stokes, “Vote on Dam Plan?” Asheville Citizen, April 8, 1965 55 Fred E. Orpurt, “My Statement Defending God-Given Beauty and Against TVA’s So-Called Progress,” Box 4, Folder 10: “Statements, N-Q,” UFBDA Records, UNCA-SPC; Roy Reed, “T.V.A. Dam Plans Anger Carolina Farmers,” New York Times, July 13, 1971

from scenery to environmentalism, or vice versa. They often mixed arguments about both protecting farmland and preserving the flow of the river.56

As the fight over the TVA dams ramped up, UFBDA activists derived the motivation and energy for their movement from a variety of concerns about the vulnerabilities of rural communities in the Southern Mountains. For many, issues of ecology remained important, but often secondary in justifying their opposition. Just as the river valley represented a precious habitat and landscape to some, many residents derived immense value from ancestral ties to land and community. Pastor Jesse A. Bailey of the Little River Baptist Church warned that the new lakes would “severely injure if… not destroy” his historic church, thus ensuring that “the community attitude will not be preserved.”57 UFBDA internal memos confirmed the importance of religious imagery and cultural heritage as part of the anti-dam messaging. At a 1971 board meeting, the group’s leadership “suggested that churches threatened by destruction… be highlighted.” Furthermore, they cited the idea that “buildings can be bought and sold but that irreplacible [sic.] intangibles of community history and activities cannot be so bartered.” As visual confirmation of this, UFBDA fliers (Figure 2-3 and Figure 2-4) featured the steeple of

Bailey’s over century-old congregation as a visual symbol of rural virtue that resonated in the late 1960s.58 Environmental protection and historic preservation proved inextricably linked.

Locals also wrapped themselves in the flag of populist victimhood, portraying the dam project as selfish and exploitative. In letters to Senator Sam Ervin, residents described the TVA as “un-American,” an “Empire,” and its local allies as “land-grabbers.” Others, like Celia Garren,

56 On this argument for an evolution in the UFBDA’s rhetoric, see: Stewart and Manganiello, “Watershed Democracy.” 57 Jesse A. Bailey, “TVA’s Plan for Little River,” Box 4, Folder 4: “Statements B,” UFBDA Papers, UNCA-SPC. 58 Alex Duris, “Minutes of Meeting Held at Hooper’s Creek Community Building,” May 1, 1971, Box 1, Folder 2: “UFBDA Meetings;” UFBDA Flier, Box 1, Folder 13: “Publications,” UFBDA Papers, UNCA-SPC.

asked why the TVA could not take public lands from nearby national forests, as she expressed her dismay that “the land which my forefathers and I have used to make a living will be turned into lakes to attract a few pleasure mad tourists.”59 Promoting tourism and building vacation homes had their place, but not at the expense of local heritage. Not only the domain of suburban conservatives, rural whites employed meritocratic rights languages to defend their communities from anything or anyone they considered to be an unwanted intrusion.

When confronted with growing opposition from residents, pro-TVA politicians doubled down on claims that sufficient popular support existed for the dam project. When confronted with protests over the potential taking of land followed by the flooding of homes and communities by the TVA dams, Senators Ervin and Jordan argued that the economic benefits were too good to pass up. As Martha Gash Boswell, a prominent leader in the UFBDA, accused

Ervin of ignoring the social and environmental consequences of the plan, he fired off an angry letter in response. In an almost exasperated tone, he wrote, “I simply do not have the personnel or the facilities to investigate all of the circumstances and implications of the proposal.”60

Despite their immense interest in seeing the plan succeed, it seemed that Ervin and his colleagues overlooked the consequences of the plan. Instead, they opted to trust the judgment of TVA staff and their local allies that dam-building had both the necessary local support and would deliver on its economic promises to resuscitate flagging rural economies.

However, if Ervin had no time to address concerns about the dams, his counterpart in the

House, Roy Taylor proved more sanguine. After a rousing, anti-dam speech by state legislator

59 Katherine Cadbury to Sam Ervin, March 14, 1967; Celia Garren to Ervin, February 13, 1967, Ervin Papers, Folder 6370; Julian M. Capps to Sam Ervin, December 29, 1967; Henderson County Citizens Forum to Sam Ervin, November 8, 1967, Ervin Papers, Folder 7358, SHC. 60 Roy Taylor to Charles L. Schultze, November 14, 1967; B. Everett Jordan to Schultze, November 22, 1967; Ervin to Martha Boswell, January 10, 1968, Ervin Papers, Folder 7358: “French Broad Dams,” SHC.

Charles Taylor, the Congressman Taylor (no relation) wrote him expressing his shared regret

“that many citizens will be inconvenienced and suffer the loss of private property.” Still, Roy

Taylor refused to budge on his support for the dams. “If a man has a home or a farm,” he lectured the younger Taylor, “he is subjected to a hardship just as when his property is taking for a highway site.”61 Frequent invocations of the TVA’s powers of eminent domain only fed the sense of righteous indignation among the river’s defenders. As an interested newspaper columnist from eastern North Carolina would later put it, the TVA “can take your home and your land, and there is virtually nothing you can do about it.”62 In the minds of dam fighters and their supporters, local lands, churches, and communities should not be mere causalities in a larger economic experiment designed by bureaucrats and politicians.

If hostility toward the TVA’s flood control plan ran deep south of Asheville in Henderson and Transylvania, local feelings in Madison County proved different. Promised two new reservoirs, local leaders saw the project as an economic godsend. In their minds, the new jobs and improved infrastructure promised by the project would support the grassroots, antipoverty campaigns that had been going on in the area. The Model Madison program, a name derived from the Office of Economic Opportunity’s (OEO) Model Cities, was funded by the North

Carolina Fund and worked since 1964 to improve public health and housing in this county. Its director described it as a rural renewal program that could “led the way for the nation in demonstrating how a rural county can solve its problems.”63

61 Roy A. Taylor to Charles Taylor, March 13, 1967, Ervin Papers, Folder 6370, SHC. 62 Jim Dean, “Wildlife Afield,” Raeford News-Journal, February 3, 1972. 63 Earl Willis, “Unique Program Urged for Madison,” Asheville Citizen, July 3, 1968; “Model County Program to Transform Madison?” Asheville Citizen, July 5, 1968.

However, by the late 1960s, Madison County needed more federal help to make this bold claim a reality. Appealing to federal budget writers to allocate construction funds, Model

Madison staff described the communities as part of a “100% poverty area” where “67% of our families have incomes of less than $3000 a year.” In addition to new jobs, Madison County leaders hoped the dams would lead to improved infrastructure and provide “the impetus for real economic development.” As a case in point, they called attention to the fact that a 5000-acre resort on Bald Mountain would be located near the proposed Ivy Dam.64 Still, as representatives of the least-populous of the five affected counties, Madison County’s leadership struggled to be heard above the din made by the dam fighters organizing on the south end of the river. As

Martha Gash Boswell, a longtime activist from Transylvania County wrote in her memoir, with perhaps a hint of disdain, Madison constituted the only county that met “the official criteria for federal development… low income and a shrinking population.”65 Although the legitimacy of her assertion depended on whose numbers were used, Boswell’s glancing shot at conditions in

Madison County speaks to the ways that UFBDA activists tried to highlight the relative prosperity of their own communities.

However, for TVA backers in Madison County and beyond, the presidential election of

1968 had immediate, painful consequences. Within three months of taking office, the Nixon

Administration stripped over $3 million in construction funds allocated in the 1970 budget for the Mills River dam in Transylvania County. Instead, the TVA was only given $100,000 in planning funds, in addition to the $250,000 they already received. This decision shocked the

64 Resolution Adopted by Model Madison at Annual Meeting, April 28, 1969; Marietta P. Suhart to Senator B. Everett Jordan, May 2, 1969, Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations: United States Senate, 91 H.R. 14159, June 9-12,1969, pgs. 6318-6319. 65 Boswell, Grassroots Along the Upper French Broad, 3.

North Carolina Congressional delegation. In a letter to Nixon, Sam Ervin made note of the fact that the project would spur private investment in “one of our most depressed areas.” And in doing so, he reasoned the project would help keep “the people of Appalachia in a non-urban area rather than increasing their migration to the cities.”66 To further drive home the point, Ervin and

Jordan trotted out Kermit Edney to address the Senate Public Works Subcommittee. Edney’s testimony dismissed the opposition and as limited to one “neighborhood” near the dams while describing continued funding for the project as “our only hope.”67 In both statements, the pro- dam forces drew a thin line between growth and decline. The dams, it appeared, would be the source of the region’s future prosperity or continual misery. Despite such desperate pleading, the construction funds never came through.

Back along the French Broad, the UFBDA cheered the news that the TVA had been stymied. As it developed into a coherent, powerful political force, they saw their communities as already standing on the frontlines of a wave of rural industrialization and residential expansion.68

In the minds of TVA and state planners, the relatively flat river valley stretching west and north of Asheville represented a proverbial promised land for the coexistence of manufacturing, agribusiness, and tourism. However, UFBDA activists saw things differently. They warned the project constituted a fundamental threat to rural ways of living not because the area seemed bereft of development, but rather because it would accelerate trends already underway. Local boosters and newspapers who backed the dams liked to promote operations like the Ecusta pulp

66 Sam Ervin Jr. to Richard M. Nixon, March 19, 1969, quoted in Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, June 9-12, 1969, 6317. 67 Kermit Edney Statement, quoted in Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, June 9-12, 1969, 6314-6317. 68 Martha Gash Boswell, Grassroots Along the Upper French Broad, 3; Tennessee Valley Authority, Development of the Water Resources of the French Broad River Basin, 4-6, Folder 6371: “Tennessee Valley Authority, French Broad River Basin,” Ervin Papers.

plant near Brevard as examples of the river valley’s industrial potential.69 However, by one estimate, industries in the larger French Broad basin, including Ecusta and the infamous

Champion Paper mill in Canton, produced nearly a quarter of all water pollution in North

Carolina. UFBDA activists like Dr. Jere Brittain laughed at the TVA’s claims that it would attract more industrial plants to the area with its flood control plan, but in the same breath, it sought to use the waters of the French Broad to dilute polluted waters throughout the river basin.

For Brittain and others, this approach signaled that the TVA had little interest sustaining their communities, but rather leaving local people increasingly vulnerable to the power of both unaccountable corporations and unresponsive bureaucracies.70

By the late 1960s, a wave of interest in resort development led by out-of-state companies swept through the area, touting the merits of rural, mountain life. When a Henderson County principal named Clara C. Babb informed Senator Sam Ervin that he should “Keep North

Carolina for North Carolinians,” her sentiment echoed larger concerns in small, rural communities about the growth of new subdivisions and resort communities.71 By 1974, Florida- based Realtec Corporation and two other Florida companies owned a combined 26,000 acres in

Transylvania County, while the DuPont Corporation had acquired over 11,000 acres in

Henderson and Transylvania.72

The TVA’s efforts to create a flood control system on the French Broad River created the perception that the agency represented another in a long line of potential land takers. In a 1971

69 “Ecusta Boasts Diversification, Quality,” Asheville Citizen, January 30, 1966. 70 Stewart and Manganiello, “Watershed Democracy,” 12-13. 71 Clara C. Babb to Sam J. Ervin, February 13, 1967, Ervin Papers, Folder: 7358: “Tennessee Valley Authority: French Broad River Basin,” SHC. 72 Branscome and Matthews, “Selling the Mountains,” Southern Exposure Vol. 2: 3 (Fall, 1974), 122-123; Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, 171.

UFDBA newsletter listing key talking points, the group noted that the TVA touted “recreation” and “shoreline development” as important benefits of the flood control plan. Dam fighters questioned whether these represented “appropriate functions of TVA.”73 Although not part of its original mission, TVA land purchases, bought in advance of dam building, soon became valuable real estate for homes and docks after new impoundments created man-made lakes. One the one hand, as historians Michael McDonald and Bruce Wheeler point out, revenue procured from so- called “shoreline development” or “land enhancement” helped the agency inflate the projected benefits of dam projects.74 However, on the other hand, it also made the TVA susceptible to criticism. In his 1970 book Diligent Destroyers, ecologist George Laycock questioned how the agency could claim the altruistic cause of economic uplift while “moving into the real estate business” at the same time. TVA acolytes, who had long touted their work as guardians of the public interest, now struggled to reclaim the moral high ground they claimed over self-interested private utilities.75

UFBDA activists once again seized the opportunity to paint the TVA as an exploitative behemoth. As anti-dam leader Martha Boswell made clear in a 1970 letter to the Asheville newspaper, TVA officials never denied this aspect of their plans. In her paraphrase of Aubrey

Wagner’s Congressional testimony, she warned that if residents “surrender[ed] control of our valley… TVA will own the land, [then] control and administer its development.”76 Boswell and her fellow dam fighters objected to flood control for reasons that went beyond ecology. In their

73 UFBDA Newsletter #5, March 16, 1971, UFBDA Records, Box 1, Folder 13: “Publications,” UNCA-SPC. 74 McDonald and Wheeler, TVA and the Tellico Dam, 93-101. 75 George Laycock, The Diligent Destroyers (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 195-196; McDonald and Wheeler, TVA and the Tellico Dam, 166. 76 Martha Gash Boswell, “For French Broad: TVA Plan is Outrageous,” Asheville Citizen, August 10, 1970.

minds, it amounted to another land grab by an out-of-state entity for its own benefit. Although the TVA differed in its corporate structure from private developers, its status as a well-known, public institution made it an easy target compared to the often-vague development corporations set up to build new resort communities. It soon became clear to many politicians that requests to

“Keep North Carolina for North Carolinians” were not just hyperbole

However, other housing subdivisions seemed more respectful of local traditions. Moving to Cedar Mountain, eight miles south of Brevard, in 1957 Arthur and Betty Dehon established a neighborhood of summer and year-round cottages that they marketed as a mountain sanctuary for both humans and animals. Named the Audubon Colony, advertisements promoted the community as a development “where the natural beauty of the forest is protected and not destroyed carelessly.”77 For the Dehons and other “outsiders” who bought homes in the Audubon

Colony, the TVA represented an enemy of rural ways of life they shared with longtime residents.

Addressing the flood control plans in a letter to Senator Ervin, Arthur Dehon defended his new neighbors decrying the idea that “these families and these lands should be put in the sacrificial altar for the benefit of TVA.” In turn, Dehon represented newer residents on the Board of

Directors of the UFBDA. In the minds of newcomers and old-timers alike, rural places represented an ancestral heritage or what one mountain resident described as a “portion of Eden” that could not be sold for the forbidden fruit of progress.78

By contrast, local supporters of the plan saw people like the Dehons as evidence that radical, environmentalist outsiders pulled the strings for the UFBDA. After a raucous town meeting in Mills River, UFBEDC director James Winston blamed “people who have recently

77 “Audubon Colony, Sherwood Forest,” Galax News, August 31, 1967. 78 Arthur Middleton Dehon to Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., December 7, 1967, Sam Ervin Papers, Folder 7358; Sam Parker, Interview by Rob Amberg, 5 December 2000, K-0252, Southern Oral History Program Collection, SHC.

retired to the area” as stirring up controversy because they had “little to no prior knowledge of the devastating floods” of years past. Charles Edmunds, who worked in Asheville but owned land near Brevard, warned UFBDA activists at a public hearing, “if we allow people who always fight change of any sort to stop this project—we won’t have to worry about environment in this valley. There won’t be anybody here.”79 Although TVA officials and other supporters eschewed such personal attacks, they nonetheless considered the opposition to be unreasonable in making a mountain of protest out of the molehill of flooded farmland. At a public hearing, Western

Carolina University Professor Ralph J. Andrews described the agency’s opponents as using

“arguments of emotion” and “hoary rabble rousing techniques” in a blatant campaign to defend their parochial interests.80 Along similar lines, TVA chairman Aubrey Wagner told Sam Ervin,

UFBDA activists seemed to refuse to understand that “changes are taking place… from which the river cannot escape. Migration from the farm to city continues. Jobs will be needed.

Industries and businesses must expand.”81 And for Wagner, these challenges could be met through the type of planned development that only the TVA could provide.

Before the federal government could renew funding for the TVA plan, the UFBDA secured another victory with the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of

1970. Although concerns about land loss and social damages provided the fuel for the grassroots movement, NEPA provided a crucial legal conduit through which the activists could challenge those energies. As Martha Boswell later praised the legislation, “the tide had turned against the

79 James W. Winston Jr., “Letter to the Editor,” Marshall News-Record, September 23, 1971; Charles S. Edmunds Statement, August 30, 1971, UFBDA Records, Box 4, Folder: “Statements, E-H,” UNCA-SPC. 80 Statement of Ralph J. Andrews, August 31, 1971, UFBDA Records, Box 4, Folder 3: “Statements-A,” UNCA- SPC. 81 Aubrey Wagner to Sam Ervin Jr., February 1, 1971, in UFBDA Records, Box 4, Folder 13: “Statements-T-Z,” UNCA-SPC.

despoilers.”82 NEPA required that any “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment,” like the TVA’s dams, undergo a thorough review, culminating in the submission of an environmental impact statement (EIS).83 This strict review process forced the

TVA to spell out why this project was necessary and justify its cost-benefit calculations. By opening legal avenues through which the UFBDA could block the flood control plan, local activists now made their case through both emotional appeals about their ties to the land and river combined with plain, objective evidence of environmental and economic harm.84 For the

UFBDA, these arguments went hand-in-hand. Looking to make the use of more time to mobilize their growing organization, the UFBDA lined up support from a broad-based coalition of residents, including farmers, retirees, standing alongside prominent local educators and business leaders.

In time, the TVA’s decision to hedge their bets on a groundswell of local support ran into trouble. Seeking to put agency officials and local allies on the spot, UFBDA activists called for more public debates and hearings to voice their concerns. At first, the TVA demurred. When it eventually agreed to a public meeting in the city of Asheville, UFBDA leaders howled in protest at the choice of location. By refusing to hold a hearing in the communities most affected by the dams, they considered a “charade” designed to “minimize attendance by opponents of the project.” Instead, Jere Brittain suggested the meeting occur at the Little River Baptist Church, a symbolic choice since it would be underwater if the dams were built.85

82 Boswell, Grassroots Along the Upper French Broad, 14. 83 Elaine Moss, ed., National Resources Defense Council, Land Use Controls in the United States: A Handbook on the Legal Rights of Citizens (New York: Dial Press, 1977), 18-19. 84 Stewart and Manganiello, “Watershed Democracy,” 15. 85 UFBDA, “An Open Letter for Release,” August 15, 1971, UFBDA Records, Box 1, Folder 12: “UFBDA Media Releases,” UNCA-SPC.

With the EIS in hand, raucous public hearings followed in Brevard and Asheville.

Members of the UFBDA turned out in full force. Dam fighters knew each other because most wore “neckerchiefs colored in international distress orange,” as a visual symbol both of the urgency of their opposition and their strength in numbers.86 Here, rural whites constructed images of personal and communal virtue as rhetorical cudgels with which to beat back arguments that their communities needed these dams. Using lines straight from the “silent majority,”

Winfred L. Jones, a ninety-year-old tobacco farmer from Mills River, denounced the TVA saying, “I bought that farm, labored like a convict to pay for it… now they want to throw me out.

It’s a damned outrage.” Along similar lines, a local school principal named Clara Babb stared down TVA officials, describing the people of the river valley as deserving protection. “They have never desecrated the flag; they have never bombed the draft board,” nor, she added, “have they participated in demonstrations of violence and destruction.”87

Portraying themselves as victims of geography UFBDA members linked rural life and patriotic citizenship. Identifying himself as a “taxpaying resident,” a phrase used often by dam fighters, a farmer from Henderson County named T.R. McCall defended the area as “a highly developed, active community whose residents contribute their fair share to the well-being of their country.” In a more vivid, specific illustration of rural virtue, Bernice Goodrich, a white woman living near the proposed dams, contrasted her small community of Fletcher with images of urban crime and decay. “We don’t have marijuana patches in the backs of our homes. We don’t have gangs hiding behind buildings waiting to rob you,” she added, “this is a peaceful valley where

86 James Robertson and John Lewallen, eds., The Grassroots Primer (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1975), 122- 124. 87 Roy Reed, “T.V.A. Plan Angers Carolina Farmers,” New York Times, July 13, 1971; Clara Capps Babb, “A Statement in Opposition to the Proposed TVA Upper French Broad Project,” 6, UFBDA Records, Box 4, Folder 4: “Statements B,” UNCA-SPC.

neighbor knows neighbor.”88 The contrast here between white rural places as maternal and nurturing, versus urban ones as menacing, helped the dam fighters present their cause as defending this notion of rural purity against TVA defilement. For the UFBDA, the river valley’s unique natural resources were worth preserving because they were linked to what they saw as unique and endangered social bonds. In the cultural atmosphere of the early 1970s, nostalgic calls for the preservation of almost mythical rural places soon found willing ears in state political circles.

Such strategic arguments, deployed in large volume in such a public venue as these hearings, produced nearly immediate results. Sensing a groundswell of support at this meeting,

UFBDA leader Jere Brittain issued a gendered challenge to the TVA and its ilk. Taunting people like Kermit Edney for refusing to claim paternity of the dam project, Brittain bellowed, “let the

Father of This Plan step forward… Let him take responsibility for destroying our community, burying our church, wrecking the lives of our old people, flooding our land, killing our streams.”89 For their part, TVA backers struggled to register their message that flood control represented the best and only way to preserve rural life. Brevard native Charles Edmunds, who now worked in Asheville and led a local union, spoke of the dams as halting rural depopulation by “allow[ing] the working man a reasonable means of making a living and living a decent life away from the asphalt jungles that our cities have become.”90 For both sides, living in the country represented the normative way of life in both the region and the nation. But, the question

88 Statement of T.R. McCall, September 2, 1971, Box 4, Folder 9: “Statements, M;” Bernice Goodrich, Statement, September 1, 1971, UFBDA Records, Box 4, Folder 6: “Statements, E-H,” UNCA-SPC. 89 Jere A. Brittain, “A Statement in Opposition of the Proposed TVA Dam and Reservoir at Mills River,” September 1, 1971, UFBDA Records, Box 4, Folder 4: “Statements, B,” UNCA-SPC. 90 Charles S. Edmunds Statement, August 30, 1971, UFBDA Records, Box 4, Folder: “Statements, E-H,” UNCA- SPC.

of how to make that possible represented the central fault line between dam proponents and dam fighters.

Entering the election year of 1972, pressure mounted on state and national leaders to scrap the TVA’s flood control plan. At the beginning of that year, publications like Field and

Stream picked up the story of the UFBDA and encouraged its readers to put pressure on

Congressman Taylor and local county commissioners to listen to their constituents.91 Soon, following the string of negative attention for the TVA and UFBEDC, defections mounted among state leaders, beginning with Governor Robert Scott. The Governor rapped the TVA for producing an “inadequate” EIS that downplayed or, worse, ignored the local consequences of its plan.92 Following Scott, Roy Taylor walked back his support for the TVA in a gradual manner.

About one week before the public hearings, Taylor hemmed and hawed in a letter to the

Asheville Citizen. He defended his past support for the TVA, but also stressed multiple times that

“to permit farmland to be flooded… when it can be prevented is not my idea of conservation.”93

Senators Jordan and Ervin also abandoned the now sinking ship that was the French Broad dams.

However, even in reversing their positions almost simultaneously, the collective damage control of North Carolina’s Democratic establishment came a little too late.

Buoyed by President Nixon’s landslide re-election campaign, North Carolina

Republicans won key races in 1972. With support from many anti-TVA mountaineers, the GOP slate reclaimed its traditional strongholds in Western North Carolina, especially in Transylvania and Henderson Counties. Although an avowedly bipartisan organization, the UFBDA took

91 “Cheers to Upper French Broad Defense Association,” Field & Stream (January 1972), 90. 92 Scott, quoted in Stewart and Manganiello, “Watershed Democracy,” 18; Mike Boyd, “Scott’s TVA Stand Called a Reversal,” Asheville Citizen, September 15, 1971. 93 Roy Taylor Statement, in Taylor to Edward L. Ingle, September 8, 1972, UFBDA Records, Box 1, Folder 13: “Publications,” UNCA-SPC.

encouragement from Democrats bearing the political costs of their alliance with the TVA.94 In the U.S. Senate race to replace B. Everett Jordan, Raleigh television personality Jesse Helms defeated Democrat Nick Galifianakis. Even before Helms announced his Senate candidacy,

UFBDA leaders discussed recruiting him as a potential ally who might feature and endorse their fight in his popular “Viewpoint” TV editorials.95 Meanwhile, in the Governor’s race, the anti- dam forces called on Republican state legislator Jim Holshouser of Boone to “capitalize” on the

“inept impression” that both local and state Democrats only backed off their support for the TVA when it suited their electoral fortunes. In response, the Holshouser campaign highlighted the cooperation he gave to fellow mountain Republican Charles Taylor’s work to defeat the French

Broad dams.96

The political wave building around the UFBDA’s anti-dam movement crested in

November 1972. Now, sensing an imminent defeat, the agency backed down. Citing the fact that

“adequate local support and commitment no longer exist,” the TVA abandoned its flood control plans for the Upper French Broad River Valley.97 In the minds of its leadership, the combination of political pressures from both the grassroots and the corridors of power made damming the river.

94 Stewart and Manganiello, “Watershed Democracy,” 18-19. 95 On Helms and Galifianakis, see: William A. Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s 2008); Alex, Duris, “Minutes of Meetings Held at Clifton’s Cafeteria, Hendersonville, NC,” November 9, 1970, UFBDA Records, Box 1, Folder 2: “UFBDA Meetings,” UNCA-SPC. 96 David Stephenson to Peter H. Feistmann,, April 11, 1972; Feistmann to Stephenson, April 18, 1972, Folder 241: “Campaign-Environment,” James Holshouser Personal Papers [hereafter Holshouser Papers], Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC [hereafter SHC]. 97 E.W. Kenworthy, “T.V.A. Drops Plan for 14 Dams Along River in North Carolina,” New York Times, November 17, 1972.

TVA and the Changing Politics of Regional Planning

At a national level, Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election, followed by Nixon’s ascension to the Presidency had far-reaching consequences for the French Broad and other projects like it. In Nixon’s mind, Democrats who backed the TVA or public works projects by the Army Corps of Engineers held onto the old, Rooseveltian dream of winning rural electoral support through massive federal investment. And with grassroots groups drawing attention to the environmental, social, and financial costs of TVA dams or the Corps’s massive Cross-Florida

Barge Canal, the President jumped at the chance to embarrass his political enemies.98 Partisan concerns carried the day in Nixon’s White House. When needed, local opposition became the proxies to deliver political payback. Their efforts allowed Nixon and his conservative ilk to settle old scores and win electoral victories under the convenient guises of populism, environmentalism, and fiscal austerity.

Already riding Nixon’s re-election coattails, North Carolina Republicans built on this advantage by seizing on Democratic misfortune. As Scott, Ervin, and Taylor realized by then, they backed the wrong horse in the TVA. Any idea that Helms or Holshouser were recent converts to the gospel of ecology was mere posturing. The heavy political costs borne by North

Carolina Democrats in 1972 had more to do with their willingness to embrace the TVA’s dam plan and all the baggage that came with it. Of course, they had little foreknowledge of how the

98 Although Nixon did support the Corps construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, he did so out of political expediency of a different kind. Backed by George Wallace, the Tenn-Tom enjoyed the support of most Alabama politicians. Not wishing to cross (or perhaps to co-opt) Wallace, Nixon gave the project his blessing, even as he worked to defeat other, similar ones. Jeffrey Stine, Mixing the Waters: Environment, Politics, and the Building of the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway (Akron: University of Akron Press, 1993); for a trenchant comparison between Tenn-Tom and other Corps projects that sets forth the argument for political concerns over ecological ones, see: Steven Noll and David Tegeder, Ditch of Dreams: The Cross Florida Barge Canal and the Struggle for Florida’s Future (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 272-274.

politics of regional economic development did and would change in the late sixties and early seventies. For that, they could thank the diligent work of grassroots activists.

Although the TVA and its allies promised to build a new foundation for rural economies and the communities they sustained, the UFBDA saw things differently. For them, dam building offered a false choice between the ability to live in the country and the right to define the landscapes and waterscapes of these communities. For local farmers, retirees, back-to-the- landers, and outdoor enthusiasts, the notion of the Upper French Broad as a commons supplied an emotional connection with the land. But emotion and devotion were not enough to defeat the powerful forces arrayed against them. For that, the UFBDA relied on a superior organizational capacity combined with a powerful message that made the dams an issue of both moral and ecological harm. Their public relations offensive replaced a narrative of regional poverty with one of regional wealth, based on notions of a unique, but threatened cultural and natural heritage.

The defensive language of vibrant, undeveloped rural existence became a powerful tool to advance an environmentalist cause. And in doing so, grassroots activists blunted arguments that dam-powered industrialization was the only way their communities could survive over the long- term.

As an inter-class group made up of almost entirely rural whites, the UFBDA’s message proved influential in an age of urban uprisings, anti-war protests, and conservative backlash. As the architects of the War on Poverty granted white mountaineers a measure of sympathy not always available to city dwellers, they forged the initial link between rural whiteness and virtue that the UFBDA would exploit in the end. In editorials addressing the local and national fronts of the antipoverty fight, local newspapers and leaders went to bat for white, rural Carolinians. In contrast to those “locked into urban ghettoes,” the Charlotte Observer saw rural folks as “the

truly forgotten poor.” As the Asheville Citizen explained this concept in May 1968, “the [rural] poor appear to lack the militant leadership or the crowded conditions that are basic to riots or organized protests.”99 As a result, when these “non-rioters” did stage protests, outside journalists and politicians took note. Rural areas like this one saw a gradual increase in middle-class retirees and second-home owners, rendering them not as poor and underdeveloped as it seemed from the outside. In turn, they parroted the tactics and language of white suburbanites. Mixing discourses of rural virtue with middle-class notions of meritocratic property rights—in the vein of Nixon’s

“Silent Majority”—white dam fighters in this river valley turned pity into respect. Being supposedly “forgotten,” in their hands, proved to be a virtue, not a vice.

Although its failures in Western North Carolina revealed soft spots in the TVA’s armor, alliances between farmers and environmentalists did not prove to be its Achilles heel in all circumstances. The French Broad affair represented a clear and substantial setback for the TVA, but it did not stop the agency from building other dams. Instead, at the same time, it became embroiled in a similar fight over the Little Tennessee River. There, the TVA’s Tellico Dam project also found determined opposition from residents and their outside allies. Whereas the

Upper French Broad was un-dammed, this new dam was one in a series of dams on the Little

Tennessee. Designed to control flooding, generate hydroelectricity, and create over 15,000 jobs for area residents in both tourism and manufacturing, the TVA justified it as a needed economic jolt for a depressed area. In 1967, the agency received a Congressional appropriation of around

$3.2 million to begin construction on the dam. However, cost overruns combined with delays in land acquisition followed by a prolonged legal battle put the project in jeopardy by 1973.100

99 “Editorial: Rural Poor a Big Factor in NC,” Charlotte Observer, November 27, 1967; “Editorial: Experts Are Ignoring Plight of Rural Poor,” Asheville Citizen, May 14, 1968. 100 Murchison, The Snail Darter Case, 13-22.

The Tellico controversy saw the TVA snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, dealing a crushing, symbolic blow to rural conservationism. It seemed the dam fighters there had all the ingredients for success as the UFBDA: a similar coalition of grassroots activists—although they also counted the support of the Cherokee nation in addition to farmers, conservationists, and outdoor enthusiasts—armed to the teeth with nearly identical, rhetorical weaponry. Also,

Supreme Court Justice William Douglas paid a well-publicized visit to the river and wrote disparagingly of the TVA’s plans for it.101

However, for better or worse, the anti-Tellico campaign became associated less with the human costs of the dams than with the mortal threat they posed to a diminutive fish known as the snail darter. Although the Supreme Court halted construction in 1978, noting that it deserved protection under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Tennessee Congressional delegation led by Senator Howard Baker had other ideas. Baker attached a last-minute rider to a public works appropriation bill through both chambers exempting the Tellico Project from the law’s requirements. After unsuccessfully lobbying to remove the amendment, President Carter signed the bill and sealed the fate of the Little Tennessee.102 As historians William Wheeler and Michael

McDonald sum up Tellico’s legacy, the TVA owed its ultimate victory to a “blatant piece of political chicanery.” In the end, it signaled the final and unequivocal abandonment of the trappings of democratic idealism promoted by Arthur Morgan and the agency’s forefathers.103

Considered in the light of the French Broad affair, North Carolina politicians about-face on the French Broad did make a substantial difference. The political capital that the TVA

101-Wheeler and McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam, esp. 64-86, 124-156. 102 Peter Matthiessen, “How to Kill a Valley,” New York Review of Books 27: 1 (January 1980): 31-36; Wheeler and McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam, 204-213; Murchison, The Snail Darter Case, 108-169. 103-Wheeler and McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam, x.

established in its home state did not transfer well across state lines. When given the chance, leaders like Sam Ervin and Roy Taylor did not hesitate to cast off the TVA albatross. They owed them little. However, North Carolina’s political leaders were neither full-throated environmentalists nor did Tennesseans represent their bulldozer-loving foil. Most white mountaineers, along with their representatives, did not experience a Damascus moment that forever committed them to the cause of preserving rivers. In fact, residents of East Tennessee knew this better than anyone. While protesting the TVA’s overtures across the border, North

Carolina leaders from the sixties through the nineties stood idly by as industrial effluent from

Canton’s paper mills produced a nearly permanent disaster zone along the Pigeon River as it moved into Cocke County, Tennessee.104

To understand the utter destruction of the Pigeon River by industrial pollution alongside the preservation of the French Broad is about choices made by those in power to condemn or protect certain landscapes, whether by explicit or implicit means. These decisions were not made on a whim. In the case of the Pigeon River, Champion Paper held important connections to state power brokers. Before becoming governor in 1965, Dan Moore served as the company’s general counsel. The political latitude given to industrial polluters by Moore or other Democrats was not reversed with the Republican victories in 1972.105 Instead, Holshouser picked his battles carefully. Along with James Harrington, a resort developer he appointed Secretary of the

Department of Natural and Economic Resources (DNER), the new governor confronted

104 John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 352- 355. 105 On the decades of environmental degradation on the Pigeon River, see: Richard A. Bartlett, Troubled Waters: Champion International and the Pigeon River Controversy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995); On the close ties between private utilities (especially those based in North Carolina) and the rise of Jesse Helms and other, conservative Republicans in the state, see: Conor M. Harrison, “Electric Conservatism: The Rise of North Carolina’s Conservative Power Politics,” Southeastern Geographer 57: 4 (2017): 332-350.

problems that seemed both new and old. Private companies from outside the state continued to buy up mountain land for development. Whether interested in building dams or housing subdivisions, these entities saw value in buying up mountain land as an investment toward the goal of uplifting rural communities. However, their attempts at sustaining rural life foundered on similar lines to their public counterparts at the TVA.

Figure 2-1. Map of Geographic Extent of TVA Dam Plan, Roy Reed, “T.V.A. Dam Plan Angers Carolina Farmers,” New York Times, July 13, 1971, Box 6, Folder 3: “Clippings 1971,” UFBDA Records, Courtesy of D.H. Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina at Asheville Special Collections, Asheville, North Carolina.

Figure 2-2. Map of Proposed TVA Dam System, Jon Elliston, “NC Archives Opening its First Western Branch,” Carolina Public Press, https://carolinapublicpress.org/11015/nc- state-archives-opening-its-first-western-branch/ North Carolina Department of Archives and History (accessed June 9, 2018).

Figure 2-3. UFBDA Flier, Box 1, Folder 13: “UFBDA Literature,” UFBDA Records, Courtesy of D.H. Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina at Asheville Special Collections, Asheville, North Carolina.

Figure 2-4. UFBDA Pamphlet, Box 1, Folder 13: “UFBDA Literature,” UFBDA Records, Courtesy of D.H. Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina at Asheville Special Collections, Asheville, North Carolina.

CHAPTER 3 A LOCAL AND NATIONAL TREASURE: THE NEW RIVER IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION, 1968-1976

Any area that wants to stop development will soon become a huge slum. —Hugh Morton Southern Exposure

The New River As It Was, 1945-1962

From 1962 to 1976, the New River cheated death. This mountain waterway, which covers much of Southern Appalachia, seemed poised for destruction. It had long been an object of desire for the Appalachian Power Company (APCO), which saw these waters as a potential source of hydroelectric power and recreational lakes. Through the building of two dams along the Virginia-North Carolina border, the company touted a plan known as the Blue Ridge Project

(BRP) as an economic boom for struggling, rural places. If construction advanced, hundreds of families with deep roots in the Blue Ridge Mountains would be displaced. Much to the surprise of APCO, the residents of this river valley had friends in all kinds of places. By forging a grassroots movement around the preservation of these mostly white, rural communities, the fate of the New River captured the nation’s attention.

By 1976, statements and petitions defending the New River poured in from across the

United States. Journalists and politicians of all stripes would join the ranks of the river’s defenders. For the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), Bill Moyers gave a special report in 1971 entitled “Requiem for the Mouth of Wilson,” about a small Virginia community that would be submerged under the impending deluge. Not far behind Moyers, but miles apart in ideology, conservative thinker George Will celebrated the New River Valley as “a triumph of happy fixidity in a restless nation.” Meanwhile, he equated damming it with turning the Louvre into a

strip mall.1 Republican Senators including North Carolina’s Jesse Helms and Arizona’s Barry

Goldwater stood with their liberal colleagues to protect the river valley residents against APCO’s designs. Lastly, interest groups like the Sierra Club and local Farm Bureaus recognized a shared desire to preserve farmland along the river. All told, this cause made national headlines and strange alliances. The implications of the New River controversy went far beyond a flurry of newspaper editorials and wrangled votes in Congress.

The New River controversy saw simultaneous battles on political, bureaucratic, and legal fronts. Opposition to the dams grew slowly. It began at the local level, where the dams would be located: the border area covering Grayson County, Virginia and Ashe and Alleghany Counties in

North Carolina. By the early 1970s, the river’s defenders won over supporters in both the North

Carolina state government and Congress. Yet, APCO continued to attract support among a vocal minority of valley residents, in addition to most of Virginia’s political establishment. While the

APCO-Virginia legal teams locked horns in court with lawyers for North Carolina and environmental groups, a license Federal Power Commission (FPC) to build the dams eluded the company again and again. Amid this legal stalemate, the river’s defenders scored a remarkable political victory as Congress passed a bill, signed by President Ford in September 1976, to include the New River within the system of waterways that the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act protected. This ended the BRP. In doing so, anti-dam forces illustrated the broader political appeal of protecting historically working-class, white communities in rural America even amid a time of energy crises and economic stagnation. Saving the New River became a local cause with a national reach.

1 Chapter epigraph from: Hugh Morton, quoted in James Branscome and Peggy Matthews, “Selling the Mountains,” Southern Exposure Vol. 2 (Fall, 1974), 122; Thomas Schoenbaum, The New River Controversy (Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, 1979), 130-132; “Program Scheduled,” Statesville Record and Landmark, December 9, 1971; George Will, “‘Progress’ Threatens Again,” Washington Post, January 8, 1976.

Although grassroots activists and their political proxies did put an end to APCO’s plans, this represented much more than a tale of backwoods David defeating a corporate Goliath.

Despite a dearth of scholarly studies on the New River controversy, it has much to say about the importance of rural southerners to American politics as well as the complex interplay between rural poverty, environmentalism, and conservatism in the 1970s.2 Beginning in the 1960s, the discourses of underdevelopment, isolation, and poverty once synonymous with Appalachia became replaced with new cultural narratives in the New River case. Here, residents and politicians constructed a message of rural virtue, agrarian heritage, and exceptional natural beauty to defend the river. By fusing traditional discourses of agrarian virtue with the new language of modern conservatism, this rural movement advanced environmentalist goals.

The New River controversy showed how, in many cases, rurality could become less of a vice and more of a virtue. Its two sides symbolized a clash between competing ideas about sustainability in rural America. On the one hand, local boosters emphasized the need for placing factories in fields to provide jobs. While on the other, rural environmentalists saw the preservation of the landscape itself as a source of economic potential. In many ways, the battle over the New River foreshadowed the difficult transition toward a post-industrial economy.

Historians have mostly ignored the New River controversy.3 However, it reveals much about the relationship between poverty, environmentalism, tourism, and political changes in the

2 This metaphor and argument draws on Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), esp. 4-8. 3 The first published works on these events, Thomas Schoenbaum’s 1979 book represents an insider’s re-telling that focuses mostly on the legal dimensions as a reflection his time as an attorney working for the State of North Carolina. Also, anthropologist Stephen William Foster’s The Past Is Another Country provides a vivid, thoughtful study of life in Ashe County, North Carolina at the time of the dam fight. His chapter on the BRP itself helps place it in terms of larger changes in work and lifestyle within this community. Lastly, Robert Woodward Jr’s master’s thesis helps provide a wider contextual lens to understand the relationship between APCO, the river, and the national environmental movement. Schoenbaum, New River Controversy; Stephen William Foster, The Past is Another Country: Representation, Historical Consciousness, and Resistance in the Blue Ridge (Berkeley: University of

late twentieth-century South. The trans-local nature of this battle illustrates the enduring cultural discourse of rural virtue or what Adrienne Monteith Petty terms the “agrarian ideal.”4 A critical part of the anti-dam campaign’s success in defending the New River involved appeals to a kind of fading pastoralism, something that seemed increasingly rare in the suburbanizing South and the United States writ large. Its defenders emphasized the social, more than the ecological, consequences of dam building. The media portrayals of the people of the New River became fixed in the public imaginary just as much as the land and the river itself.

Both older and more recent histories of the postwar South rightly emphasize the vulnerabilities that shaped rural southerners facing an ailing farm economy and decades of population losses. Trying to create a new economy out of the ashes of the old farm economy required an influx of fresh capital through new, often exploitative, industries or public investment.5 However, understanding rural areas as merely “poor places” obscures the ways that residents, corporations, and politicians attached political meanings to the changing economies and residential patterns of such communities. By showing the contested nature of conceptions of the rural, local, and underdevelopment in the New River fight, this piece considers a different side of the story.

California Press, 1988); Robert Seth Woodward Jr., “The Appalachian Power Company Along the New River: The Defeat of the Blue Ridge Project in Historical Perspective,” (M.A. Thesis, Virginia Tech University, 2006) 4 This nostalgic vision of life in the countryside is certainly racialized in the Appalachian context examined here. Adrienne Monteith Petty, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 5 See for example: James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sun Belt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and more recently LaGauana Gray, We Just Keep Running the Line: Black Southern Women and the Poultry Processing Industry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014); Monica Gisolfi, The Takeover: Chicken Farming and the Roots of American Agribusiness (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014); Bryant Simon, The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (New York: New Press, 2017).

In challenging narratives that their communities needed the dams, rural opponents of the

BRP drew a distinction, perhaps without a difference, between their movement and environmentalism. Although saving the New River depended both on the new framework of environmental law and the support of environmental groups to be politically viable, it also promoted the verifiable involvement of local activists who had little interest in advancing such a cause. This irony, that the local movement required the national one and vice versa, is critical to understanding these events. Equally important, it indicates unexplored connections between what historian Christopher Manganiello terms “countryside conservationism” and the dynamic political culture of the 1970s South.6

The fight over the New River is also an important part of the post-1945 history of

Appalachia. By the 1960s, the region became a project of economic and cultural uplift under the

Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty. Many observers noted the strange contradiction between the region’s immense natural beauty and its common deprivation, terming it one of

America’s worst “rural slum[s].” As a report from the Great Society’s Appalachian Regional

Commission (ARC) noted in 1964: “Rural in Appalachia does not mean a checkerboard of rich farms; instead, dense but narrow ribbons of bleak habitation wind along the valley roads and up the tributary hollows.”7 For many areas like the New River valley, new development whether from private or public sources seemed to provide the best way to ameliorate poverty.

6 Christopher J. Manganiello, Southern Waters, Southern Power: How the Politics of Cheap Energy and Water Scarcity Shaped a Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), esp. 143-144; For a few other trenchant studies examining rural southerners’ relationships to the land and environmental protection, see: Kathryn Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Andrew C. Baker, Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018); and William D. Bryan, The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018). 7 Marjorie Hunter, “Appalachia Portrait,” New York Times, February 7, 1965; Richard I. Ulman, “Appalachia’s Tourism Plan,” New York Times, August 2, 1964; Appalachian Regional Commission, Appalachia: A Report (Washington, D.C.: Appalachian Regional Commission, 1964), 4.

However, plans for major industrial operations like hydroelectric dams brought their own problems. Development threatened to ruin scenic landscapes, disrupt traditional livelihoods, and displace hundreds of residents. Communities like those along the New River faced a difficult balancing act. The resulting defeat of the dam project helps to account for what scholars term the

“two Appalachias” arising out of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As historian

Drew Swanson explains, one Appalachia is “a rural-industrial region of strip-mining, embattled unions, opioid abuse, and poor hollows,” while the other is marketed as a land of “ridgetop vacation homes and pristine nature.”8 In the case of the latter, the argument for preserving the

New River’s scenic beauty proved important not just as a point of local pride but also as a source of political capital.

Place and Possibility: Rural Development in the New River Valley, 1962-1971

The New River is not new. By most estimates, it began flowing somewhere between three and 320 million years ago, making it one of the oldest rivers in the world.9 Local lore, probably apocryphal, holds that the name of the river originated from Thomas Jefferson’s father

Peter, who surveyed the remote border region and found the body of water to be uncharted and therefore “new.”10 For the elder Jefferson and other, early explorers into what became the New

River Valley, the unique nature of the landscape endowed it with both immense challenges and possibilities.

8 Drew Swanson, Beyond the Mountains: Commodifying Appalachian Environments (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 136-137. 9 Peter Lessing, “Geology of the New River Gorge,” March 1997, http://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/www/geology/geoles01.htm (accessed June 10, 2018). 10 Schoenbaum, The New River Controversy, 5; More reliable historical accounts date the river’s discovery to a British expedition in 1671 led by Abraham Wood. The river was named Wood’s River as a result. However, the date and rationale for renaming it as the “New” remains somewhat of a mystery. Oits Rice, West Virginia: A History (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 12-19.

The New follows an unusual, northward course that makes an indelible mark on the mountain landscape. Winding northwest from tributaries along the North Carolina and Tennessee line, the New’s sharp switchbacks and curves speak to millenniums of give-and-take between earth and water, with the mountains and river engaged in a seemingly endless struggle for control. Along this undulating path, mountain communities formed along the banks of the New

River at points where its fertile valleys interrupted towering cliffs. Stretching from just outside

Boone, North Carolina through western Virginia before opening up to an eponymous gorge and joining with the Gauley River to form the Kanawha just outside Charleston, West Virginia, the

New River gave cultural and geographic definition to places and peoples across hundreds of miles (Figure 3-1 and Figure 3-2). The culture, history, and natural beauty of such a place added to its legend, endowing its residents with a sense that they lived in a unique place.

Even so, the hand of human habitation and industry shaped the New River since the days of the Jeffersons. Despite monikers like the “Lost Provinces,” the rugged, mountain landscape neither sealed the area off from larger economic or cultural forces nor did it dissuade early industrialists. Along with farming, mining interests, and other extractive industries defined much of the New River Valley’s eighteenth and nineteenth-century economy.11 Where mines and furnaces helped turn local rocks and minerals to profit, power companies soon followed by the early twentieth century.

Targeting water resources for flood control and electricity, APCO, a subsidiary of

American Electric Power Company (AEP), made its mark across Southern Appalachia beginning in the 1940s. Based in Roanoke, Virginia, APCO proved adept at moving tons of rock, earth, and

11 Randal Hall, Mountains on the Market: Industry, Environment, and the South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

water to build dams and power new industries like the recreation areas created at both Smith

Mountain and Claytor Lakes. Completed after the end of World War II, both Claytor Dam in

Virginia and Bluestone Dam, an Army Corps of Engineers unit, in West Virginia slowed the

New’s northwestern advance.12 Like the Corps, APCO touted its projects as bringing jobs and prosperity, only without the bureaucratic inefficiencies of a government agency.

With a foothold in Southern Appalachia and a new dam rising on the nearby Roanoke

River, about fifty miles northeast of the New, APCO turned its attention again to the New River in June 1962 when the company announced plans for the BRP. Spanning 20,000 acres across the

Virginia section of the river, this effort would commit millions of dollars to the building of two hydroelectric plants, one on a new dam and another on the existing, but federally-owned

Bluestone Dam.13 APCO possessed an impressive track record of building rural infrastructure.14

To APCO officials, expanding their foothold in Virginia and North Carolina would not only benefit their profit margins and satisfy shareholders, but that of the entire region too. When it came time to request a license from the Federal Power Commission (FPC), company officials had to prove that their operation satisfied a legitimate public interest. As company lawyer Joseph

Dowd told Congress years later, building facilities like the BRP represented the best way to sustain rural life in an increasingly urban society.15

12 Hall, Mountains on the Market, 121-123; Woodward, “The Appalachian Power Company Along the New River,” 39-44, 72-73; Bob Wiedrich, “How Power Plant Created ‘Eden,’” Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1976. 13 “State Parks Forecast as VA. Dam Dividend,” Washington Post, March 1, 1965. 14 Its parent company, New York-based American Electric Power (AEP) representing the second-largest power system in the U.S. Woodward, “Appalachian Power Company,” 46. 15 Joseph Dowd, Testimony Before the House Interior Subcommittee, Hearings on H.R. 11120: To Amend the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, June 3, 1974, 148.

Even as Congress and President Lyndon Johnson called for new investments in the

Appalachian economy, the federal government constituted a serious threat to APCO. When

Secretary of Commerce Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. floated proposals in early 1964 for new federal power plants in Appalachia as part of the War on Poverty, he drew the ire of regional power companies. APCO Vice President Joseph Gills bristled at the suggestion that private power companies could not meet the full energy needs of the area. “We will build these plants,” he said,

“and keep more miners at work.”16 From these comments, it became clear the company wanted the government to support, rather than challenge, investor-owned utilities. Building hydroelectric dams like the BRP would both support and supplement, rather than reduce, the company’s coal- heavy energy portfolio. Official company pamphlets bragged that for the 350,000 annual tons of coal burned to operate these new dams on the New River, it would create stable work for around

115 miners every year.17 In doing so, the project offered more benefits to mountaineers than federal funds through the War on Poverty. Or at least APCO’s leadership saw it that way.

Although the New’s waters to heel was not a new dream, APCO’s new designs on the river came at a critical time for the communities nestled along its banks. Long defined by an agricultural economy, the New River Valley hemorrhaged farms in the first two decades after

World War II. Languishing under the need for greater capital investments to harness new technologies and chemicals, the small, mountain farmers most common in this region struggled to maintain their operations (Figure 3-2). In the 1950s alone, Ashe County, North Carolina lost

16 George Lawless, “Proposal of Generating Plant Shocks Public Utility Figures,” Charleston Gazette, March 11, 1964. 17 By the 1970s, just under 90% of all the electricity produced by APCO relied on coal. Woodward, “Appalachian Power Company,” 72.

around 2000 farms. Just across the state line, Virginia’s Grayson and Carroll Counties saw agricultural employment fall by over fifty percent in that same time.18

Although the emergence of some light manufacturing facilities and tree farming operations helped absorb some of these losses, wages remained low and poverty persisted. For example, in Ashe County, a Thomasville Furniture facility and the Sprague Company’s electronics plant offered stable, albeit low-wage employment. Even so, per capita income here remained about $2000 well into the 1970s, ranking Ashe County ninety-first out of one hundred

North Carolina counties by this metric. Moreover, its poverty rate of nearly twenty-eight percent in 1970 far outpaced the statewide rate.19 Despite signs of a more diverse economic sector in the

New River Valley, such a limited industrial footprint set the area apart from other parts of

Appalachia, especially the mining-heavy regions near the Virginia-West Virginia line, where

APCO’s reach was more well-established.20

For many residents, the promises of prosperity still seemed a world, or at least a few zip codes, away. As one Virginia man described the situation in his community, “The only thing that is keeping pace with today’s world in Grayson County is our welfare payments. We continue to have more people on welfare programs every year.”21 As Ashe County native Julie Colvard told

18 Ronald Eller, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 (Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 30; Lowell D. Ashby, Growth Patterns in Employment By County, 1940-1950, 1950-1960 (Washington D.C: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1966), Table 7-25. 19 Stephen William Foster, “Identity as Symbolic Production: The Politics of Culture and Meaning in Appalachia,” (Ph. D dissertation, Princeton University, 1977), 227; Schoenbaum, New River Controversy, 42, 74; James O. Rash Jr., Glenn C. McCann, and M. Gaston Farr, “Ashe County, North Carolina,” in Charles L. Cleland, ed., Development in the Rural South: County Case Studies from Eight States (Knoxville: Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Tennessee, 1982), 15. 20 On the two Appalachias, again see Swanson, Commodifying the Mountains, 136-137. 21 Mr. Wright, “Open Letter to Fellow Citizens of Grayson County,” March 26, 1973, National Committee for the New River Records [hereafter “NCNR Records”] Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January 1971- December 1973,” W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC.

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anthropologist Stephen Foster in the late 1970s, her school teachers often emphasized the difficulty of making life in their hometowns. “They tell you you’re goin to have to go, there are no jobs here,” Colvard admitted, but then emphasized that moving away from the mountains felt like “a strain.”22 The powerful force of local heritage—in terms of familial ancestry and connections to the land—gave shape to the lives of people like Colvard.

APCO stepped into undeveloped areas like the New River and promised to bring orderly development. Dam building represented more than just the generation of electric power, but it held the potential to expand manufacturing and tourism, which would create a more robust local tax base. As soon became clear to leaders in the New River Valley, the company had built a successful track record of developing rural areas. APCO officials touted the fact that their plants avoided large urban areas, instead choosing to locate in communities with an average population of 2000 residents.23 When it came time to expand their operations, APCO promoted its reputation as a kind of heartland utility, the kind that took an interest in the well-being of forgotten communities. Despite its substantial political muscle in Appalachia, APCO’s new plans for the New River needed to clear a series of bureaucratic hurdles in Washington.

False Starts: Early Opposition to the Blue Ridge Project, 1968-1972

From 1962 to 1968, the company struggled to walk a series of regulatory tightropes to get the BRP underway. First, APCO requested a series of feasibility studies on the project. Soon after, the Department of the Interior objected to this request and filed an injunction against the plan. Over these objections, the FPC gave the green light for the process to begin immediately.

Yet, after mulling on the application for nearly a year, the FPC rejected the company’s request.

22 Julie Colvard quoted in Foster, “Identity as Symbolic Production,” 276-277. 23 Woodward, “Appalachian Power Company,” 46.

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The main objection centered on APCO’s proposal to run a hydroelectric facility at the Corps-run

Bluestone Dam.24 Undeterred by this rejection, APCO leaders went back to work on a new project for the river valley. Only this time, without the Bluestone power plant, the new BRP would have to be bigger.

In early 1966, APCO developed a revised BRP that would erect two new dams further south (from the original site) near Moore’s Ferry in Grayson County, Virginia, along the North

Carolina border. These facilities would involve a pump-storage system that both consumed and produced electricity. Using energy from APCO’s coal-powered grid, water would move from one reservoir to another, using both gravity and man-made conduits to spin the turbines.25 As one company brochure put it, this pumped-storage approach symbolized “the marriage of coal and water” for power generation. Yet their goals were more than merely symbolic.26 The energy from the dams would flow to the company’s mostly Midwestern customer base during times of peak demand. Meeting the needs of consumers not only served the company’s bottom line but also offered job security to both coal miners and tourism industries in communities near the new dam-created lakes.

Everyone, it seemed, could find something to like about this plan. During periods of reduced demand, the company’s energy infrastructure would allow APCO to send back the waters of the New River, or what remained of it, to the upper reservoir. Despite these fluctuations in water levels, company officials exuded confidence that such recreational lakes

24 Foster, The Past is Another Country, 125-126. 25 Stephen J. Lyton, “People v. Power in Brumley Gap,” Washington Post, March 31, 1982. 26 Appalachian Power Company, Land Acquisition Program for the Proposed Blue Ridge Pumped Storage, National Committee for the New River Records [hereafter “NCNR Records”], Series I, Subseries F, Box 17, Folder: “Citizen Responses,1974-1976,” W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC

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would serve as “a catalyst to a growing tourist business” in the area.27 For many pro-dam boosters, later derisively termed “beavers,” only a private power company with the resources of

APCO could operate a pumped-storage unit like BRP, while still maintaining a “reasonably stable water level.” Government-owned dams would have to buy this power, they noted, thus forcing costs to skyrocket beyond all practicality.28

However, the complex nature of the plan made matters more difficult. First, APCO’s new facilities would consume substantially more power than they produced. Not only that, but most of this power would go outside the region that housed the dams.29 Lastly, the expanded scope of the project meant that around 42,000 acres would be flooded, 12,000 of those in Ashe and

Alleghany Counties and the rest in Grayson County (Figure 3-3).

All told, this would require the forced displacement and relocation of around 4,000 people in these three counties in addition to at least thirty businesses and over a dozen churches.30 Moreover, the impoundments threatened to inundate thousands of acres of valuable farmland, whose total annual income reached over $13 million.31 In the minds of many APCO critics, the economic and social costs of the plan seemed inextricably linked. The agricultural losses, in particular, would strike a nerve among valley residents as discussions over the BRP

27 Appalachian Power Company, Land Acquisition Program, NCNR Records Series I, Subseries F, Box 17, Folder: “Citizen Responses,1974-1976.” 28 R. Floyd Crouse, unpublished and untitled report, R. Floyd Crouse to J.E. Holshouser Jr., February 18, 1969, Jim Holshouser Papers, 1954-2013 [hereafter “Holshouser Papers”], Folder 279: “Campaign Collection: New River,” Southern Historical Collection [hereafter “SHC”], University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. 29 By most estimates, the Blue Ridge pump-storage facility would consume anywhere from twenty-five to forty percent of the amount of energy it produced. Foster, The Past is Another Country, 126-127. 30 Richard Corrigan, “Appalachia Wants Lake, Tourists, Not a Mudhole,” Washington Post, May 25, 1967; “1200 Families Face Ouster by Va. Dams,” Associated Press, December 10, 1970; Maurine McLaughlin, “Virginia Panel Will Oppose Blue Ridge Dams Project,” Washington Post, March 6, 1970. 31 Owen J. Malone to Representative Stephen Neal, May 8, 1975, NCNR Records, Series I, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “May-August, 1975.

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moved forward. Even so, these adjustments set into motion a series of events beginning in 1967 that would alter the feelings of valley residents and politicians alike.

With preparations underway for a new application, the Department of the Interior, under the leadership of Secretary Stewart Udall, threw a controversial wrench into the plans. Although consistent with the department’s mandate, Interior now required the company to take steps to mitigate water pollution in the river valley. When APCO acceded to these standards, the project nearly quintupled in size.32 This meant that the dammed waters of the New River would be sent

250 miles downstream to “flush” the waters of the Kanawha River basin, where Charleston- based chemical companies had long polluted that river.33 Frequent draw-downs of thirty to fifty feet would be needed to send water out of the two reservoirs, thus rendering them useless as recreational lakes. In a series of conversations with Interior, company president Donald Cook expressed his grave concerns that “the potential for a major recreational complex” would be ruined by these water quality requirements.34 Still, given the choice between abandoning the project and complying with this order, APCO chose to forge ahead with their designs.

For the North Carolina and Virginia communities surrounding the proposed dam sites, this requirement threatened to take away the most attractive carrot that the BRP offered them: the creation of a mountain wonderland for recreation and tourism. In hearings before the FPC, an array of the company’s powerful friends came ready for a fight. They objected to the new pollution requirements on economic grounds. By reducing the water level by up to fifty feet,

Interior’s plan would deny a promising revenue stream to this cash-strapped area.

32 Bayard Webster, “2 Dams Planned to Ease Pollution,” New York Times, October 26, 1969. 33 Richard Corrigan, “Appalachia Wants Lake, Tourists, Not a Mudhole,” Washington Post, May 25, 1967. 34 Donald C. Cook to Hon. Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior, October 22, 1966, Holshouser Papers, Folder 241: “Campaign Collection- Environment,” SHC.

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For the time being, local and state leaders in Virginia and North Carolina joined them in objecting to the new requirements. At FPC hearings in the Summer of 1967, Senators Harry F.

Byrd Jr. of Virginia and Sam Ervin Jr. of North Carolina issued a joint statement opposing

Interior’s order. Local boosters arrived in DC armed with a petition containing nearly 8,000 signatures of local residents backing the project. As one Chamber of Commerce official told

Hearing Examiner William Levy, reduced water levels ensured “a 15,000-acre asset would become 7000-acre mudhole.”35 The possibility of massive draw-downs not only threatened the recreational side of the BRP but the promised boom to the regional economy as well.

Agricultural groups came to the aid of APCO, which guaranteed nearby farmers continued access to the New’s waters for irrigation and other uses. In their newsletter, the

Virginia Farm Bureau lauded APCO’s plans as not only “practical and useful,” but also in line with the public interest. Meanwhile, they denounced the pollution dilution requirements as “very injurious” by limiting the impounded water that would be critical to crops and livestock.36 With support from leaders across the New River Valley, APCO’s appearance before the FPC represented a major show of force.

In response, local opponents fought back at the 1967 FPC hearing. Representing the most affected counties, public energy cooperatives resented the idea that APCO tried to claim that the

BRP served a compelling public interest and therefore deserved a license. In their minds, granting such a license flew in the face of decades of planning on the part of the federal government by pouring public funds into dam projects on the rivers of Southern Appalachia.

35 Jim Chaney, “A Power Play in the New River Basin,” Carolina Farmer July 1967): 20-21, Edmund Adams Papers [hereafter Adams Papers], Box 27, Folder: “Serial Publications, 1967-1975, NCNR Records, Series II, Subseries A, W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC; Richard Corrigan, “Appalachia Wants Lake, Tourists, Not a Mudhole,” Washington Post, May 25, 1967. 36 “Farm Bureau Opposes Deep Draw-Down,” Virginia Farm Bureau News, August 1, 1967, 6.

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Attorneys for the cooperatives argued that the BRP would be “a waste of the river’s resources.”37

At any rate, APCO’s plan provided some jobs, but very little energy, to the areas affected by the dams. Instead, they reasoned, the FPC should force the company to consider alternate, relatively more remote locations like one near Pipestem Creek in West Virginia.38 Despite the clamoring of both sides, the FPC held off on making any decisions, leaving APCO’s application for the revised project still marked “pending” as the calendar turned to 1968.

With the BRP still suspended in a state of bureaucratic limbo, a sense of desperation mixed with opportunity motivated a small yet determined coalition of valley residents to organize in opposition to the dams. Like many large development projects across the nation,

APCO’s initial announcement about the BRP kindled only brush fires of opposition among the communities most affected by the potential floodwaters from the impoundments. However, in time, the three-county border area became a hotbed of opposition. Originally out of APCO’s crosshairs, this part of the valley, with its landscape of rolling hills and dwindling farmland, became a symbol of why they fought and what could be lost.

At first, the localized nature of anti-dam activism ensured that residents struggled to convince politicians that their cause was about more than just parochial, not-in-my-backyard

(NIMBY) politics. Local attorneys like Lorne Campbell of Grayson County, Virginia, and R.

Floyd Crouse of Alleghany County, North Carolina, emerged as the de-facto voices of local opposition in the late 1960s. However, their fellow attorneys either did business with APCO or

37 Jim Chaney, A Power Play in the New River Basin,” Carolina Farmer July 1967): 21, Adams Papers, Box 27, Folder: “Serial Publications, 1967-1975,” NCNR Records, ASU. 38 Jim Chaney, “Will the Public’s Interest Prevail?” Carolina Farmer (August 1967): 10-11, NCNR Records, Adams Papers, Box 27, Folder: “Serial Publications, 1967-1975.”

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saw little point in opposing the inevitable.39 The seeming indifference of the local citizenry combined with pro-dam statements given by politicians at all levels gave them little reason for optimism. As Campbell lamented years later, earlier efforts failed because the area seemed then

“small and politically expendable… possessed of only one thing—the beauty of its lands, its rivers and feeding streams.”40 At this point, with no way to undo the BRP, the lonely, determined duo of Campbell and Crouse tried to limit the damages and maximize the potential economic benefits to their respective counties.

With no legal or political legs to stand on, they had only a glimmer of hope as Crouse turned to a priceless connection in Washington for help. Perhaps the only Harvard-trained lawyer to cut his teeth in Alleghany County, he counted U.S. Senator and fellow country lawyer Sam

Ervin as a good friend. Having known each other since their undergraduate days at the

University of North Carolina, Crouse and “Senator Sam” worked together to argue against

Interior’s pollution-dilution scheme.41

Despite his distaste for the project, Crouse understood its benefits. In February 1969, he sent a report to Ervin and state leaders relaying the “general opinion” of most valley residents that the BRP offered the best chance to ensure “this water power be developed.” In the same breath, he also heaped scorn on Interior’s plan to reduce water levels in the upper basin. Crouse mourned the proposed destruction of a place he deemed “one of the most beautiful valleys in

39 Lorne R. Campbell, Interview with Janice Young, August 2, 1975, Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, Belk Library, ASU, https://omeka.library.appstate.edu/items/show/37309 (accessed June 23, 2018). 40 Lorne Campbell to Sam Ervin, January 24, 1974, NCNR Records, Box 1, Folder: “Correspondence, January-May 1974.” 41 Sam Ervin Jr., Preserving the Constitution: The Autobiography of Senator Sam Ervin (Charlottesville: Miche Company, 1984), 337-338.

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Eastern America,” that testified to the “handiwork of the Infinite.”42 Decrying the impending theft of the New River’s “recreational and aesthetic values” for the benefit of faraway communities, Ervin and Crouse stood opposed to Interior’s plan. Without a strong environmental regulatory structure, mitigation rather than elimination represented the only viable strategy. By early 1969, it became clear that the Alleghany County attorney’s health was fading. When

Crouse died in October of that year, others picked up the mantle of leadership.

In declining health, Crouse appealed to his comrades to re-dedicate themselves to continuing the fight, even in his absence. First, in late 1968, he set out to put the Upper New

River Valley Association (UNRVA) on firmer footing as the main organ opposition to the dams.

Following a September meeting in Independence, Virginia, the organization issued a resolution denouncing “the use of our land… for the production of power production and pollution control, without due consideration for the best interests of the people of the three counties.”43 The tone of this document made clear that Crouse and the UNRVA despised with equal ferocity the attempts by both APCO and Interior to harness the river and surrounding lands for their respective purposes. However, the group’s leadership was also pragmatic. With no recourse to stop the dams, they instead focused their efforts exclusively on preventing the draw-downs.

Building a local movement of dam fighters took time to build trust and social infrastructure across community lines. The UNRVA depended on connections between local lawyers and activists across the three counties and two states affected. Two weeks before he died, Crouse and Lorne Campbell met on the side of modern-day U.S. Highway 21, near a bridge

42 R. Floyd Crouse, unpublished and untitled report, R. Floyd Crouse to J.E. Holshouser Jr., February 18, 1969, Jim Holshouser Papers, SHC, Folder 279: “Campaign Collection: New River.” 43 Upper New River Valley Association, Resolution By Upper New River Valley Association, October 24, 1968, NCNR Records, Subseries F, Box 17, Folder 7: “Group Preservation Efforts.”

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where the New River straddles the border of their respective states. There, the two friends resolved to expand the movement with people they could trust. Suspecting that APCO held many local leaders in their deep pockets, they decided that Jim Todd, a long-time Independence banker, and the Rev. Hal Eaton of Oak Hill Academy should join Campbell as the Grayson

County representatives.44

On the North Carolina side, Crouse recruited retired lawyer Sidney Gambill, a longtime

Ashe County visitor who now lived there year-round.45 After Crouse died, Georgia native and

Winston-Salem attorney Edmund Adams took the short drive west across the foothills to Sparta, becoming the new Alleghany County attorney. These men shared an abiding desire to protect the river and preserve their community. As Sidney Gambill said at the time, “I didn’t know at first, but I’ve always loved the area, and now that I had moved here, my interests were intensified.”46

Whether their roots in the area went shallow or deep, each of the UNRVA leaders became dedicated field marshals in the battle for the New River.

To drum up support for stopping the project among neighbors and friends, the revitalized

UNRVA settled on a simple, yet effective message that the need to preserve farmland and local heritage far outweighed the potential economic benefits of impounding the river. Not long after

Edmund Adams settled into Crouse’s old office in Sparta, he got to work. As an Alleghany

44 Campbell Interview, August 2, 1975; Rev. Hal Eaton, Interview with Jane Effrid, February 19, 1976, Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, Belk Library, ASU, https://omeka.library.appstate.edu/items/show/37316 (accessed June 23, 2018). 45 Sidney Gambill, quoted in Michael Penland, Ken Baker, and Anna Fail, “The New River,” unpublished manuscript, NCNR Records, Subseries F, Box 17, Folder: “Citizen Responses, 1974-1976”; Leland R. Cooper and Mary Lee Cooper, eds., The People of the New River: Oral Histories from the Ashe, Alleghany, and Watauga Counties of North Carolina (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2002), 222-223. 46 Sidney Gambill, quoted in Michael Penland, Ken Baker, and Anna Fail, “The New River,” unpublished manuscript, NCNR Records, Subseries F, Box 17, Folder: “Citizen Responses, 1974-1976.”

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County Commissioner, he soon convinced his colleagues that they needed to oppose the BRP.47

Spreading the message to their friends and neighbors produced cracks in APCO’s seemingly impenetrable wall of local support. According to Lorne Campbell, the increased pressure came as a result of a determined organizing campaign where anywhere from three to thirty people met in houses, churches, and school buildings across the three counties to listen, discuss, and persuade others to oppose the dam project.48 In the process, a local movement spawned with a crystallized message backed by committed activists. Now, the challenge became how to win an audience in the corridors of power. Slowly, the UNRVA fanned the embers of local opposition into a small, but steady blaze.

Meanwhile, the legal tug-of-war over licensing for the BRP continued to go nowhere fast.

At first, it seemed as though the FPC would accept APCO’s application and let construction on the dams proceed by the end of 1969. However, concerns about the effects of the “pollution- dilution” requirements once again held up its approval as West Virginia Attorney General

Chauncey Browning who, in defiance of the governor, asked for further studies on the effects of these draw-downs on fish populations in the Kanawha.49 With adjustments made, FPC hearing examiner Judge William Levy again approved the BRP, only to have the U.S. Court of Appeals stop it from moving forward on the charge that both the agency and APCO failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Taking effect on the first day of 1970, NEPA set forth two requirements, among many, that altered the legal and political battle over the New River dams. First, Congress empowered

47 Leland R. Cooper and Mary Lee Cooper, eds., The People of the New River: Oral Histories from the Ashe, Alleghany, and Watauga Counties of North Carolina (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2002), 222-223. 48 Campbell Interview, August 2, 1975. 49 Schoenbaum, New River Controversy, 54-56; William Nye Curry, “Conservationists Protest Plan to Flush River,” Washington Post, November 15, 1971.

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the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), rather than the Department of Interior, to regulate water quality and take steps to mitigate pollution in rivers like the New. By this point, former Interior Secretary Udall expressed regret over the “pollution dilution” mandate.50 Second,

NEPA required the submission of environmental impact statements for “major federal action[s]” such as granting a license for the BRP. With the new law in effect, the FPC and APCO both had to submit these statements. When they did, lawyers opposing the license noted that their statements were submitted too late and appeared “almost identical.”51 With federal courts dismissing the agency’s claims that it followed proper protocol in approving the BRP application, once again, another round of hearings and study would be required. These changes soon tipped the scales against APCO. As Lorne Campbell noted in retrospect, “after the NEPA went in, then the whole thing started to turn around.”52

Opposition Grows at the State and National Levels, 1971-1974

Amid this legal stalemate, the New River and its people became the subject of adoring media coverage. After canoeing the river with anti-dam activists, New York Times reporter E.W.

“Ned” Kenworthy wrote a series of articles in 1971, focusing on what he described as the

“sorrow and anger of local residents over the prospective loss of ancestral homes and land.”

Interviewing farmers like Independence, Virginia’s Guy Halsey, Kenworthy found “local misgivings were voiced in a countryman’s language” as Halsey lamented the impending inundation of his sprawling farm. In subsequent stories on the New River, Kenworthy wrote with subtle, yet palpable admiration for the river and its defenders.53 In 1974, he would open a story

50 William Nye Curry, “Conservationists Protest Plan to Flush River,” Washington Post, November 15, 1971. 51 Schoenbaum, New River Controversy, 56-58. 52 Campbell Interview, August 2, 1975. 53 E.W. Kenworthy, “’Pollution Dilution Issue in Blue Ridge Power Plan,” New York Times, November 7, 1971; “FPC Curb Asked in Waste Control,” New York Times, February 6, 1972; “Project to Dam Carolina River is

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about the New River by quoting former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, saying

“a river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.”

Similar national coverage followed. A month after Kenworthy’s initial story, Bill Moyers profiled the Grayson County hamlet of Mouth of Wilson in his “Bill Moyers Journal” series for

PBS. Moyers and his crew contrasted the tranquil way of life in the town with the looming threat of full submersion by APCO’s dams.54 A 1974 NBC News broadcast featured the sights and sounds of the New’s gentle waters and rolling hills, while also profiling local dam opponents.

Interviewed in front of his silos while light snow fell in the background, dairy farmer Jack

Phipps mourned that he would have to leave the area if the BRP went through. Meanwhile, activists like retired lawyer Sidney Gambill stressed the point that “our local people haven’t been heard.” Portraying them as a kind of rural silent majority, Gambill intoned, “they’re good people…honest people, law-abiding people, they pay their taxes, they support their government.”55 Depicting the river valley itself as a collection of unique communities backed by hardworking people living close to the land, these glowing profiles of the area’s rich cultural and natural heritage papered over narratives of poverty and underdevelopment.

While APCO received favorable coverage from its hometown paper, the Roanoke Times, former Camel City attorney Edmund Adams found an ally in the Winston-Salem Journal, whose new editor, a former New York Times Washington Bureau chief, Wallace Carroll became invested in saving the New River. In return, he brought Ned Kenworthy and other reporters to stay and take a canoe ride up and down “every nook and cranny” of the river. After receiving this

Fading,” New York Times, November 22, 1972; “The Battle for the Future of a River,” New York Times, December 8, 1974. 54 Schoenbaum, New River Controversy, 57. 55 Robert Goralski, NBC Evening News, December 18, 1974, Item #474675, Vanderbilt Television News Archive [hereafter “VNTA”], Vanderbilt University, https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/. (accessed August 8, 2018).

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tour, Lorne Campbell boasted, they told their hosts it was “the most beautiful spot they had ever seen.” From here, Kenworthy called Moyers and the New River became an object of national fascination.56

This relationship between the media and local activists only grew closer as the controversy intensified. One unnamed employee at the Journal appointed himself as “Carolina secretary” to Kenworthy, keeping him up-to-date on all the events down South. Creating a steady stream of information from the New River on to Winston-Salem and then to Washington, D.C. or

New York ensured this was no longer just a local story. Meanwhile, Adams and his ilk fed

Journal reporters like Charles Osolin key talking points—such as the clear increase in agricultural production in Alleghany County—to counter the supposedly “inaccurate reports” often ran by the Roanoke Times portraying the region as an economic backwater.57

Through regional and national media outlets, local activists capitalized on the positive publicity. With more time to make their case and a growing number of allies, the unique sense of place accentuated by Kenworthy and Moyers alike continued to serve as a rallying cry for the

New River defenders. By emphasizing the local, the cause of saving the valley would become national. As the ranks of APCO’s enemies continued to swell beyond 1972, it became clear that media allies reinvigorated a local movement that had struggled to gain traction.

With plans to begin work on the dams still stalled in the early 1970s, new gubernatorial administrations in Virginia and North Carolina severed their alliance. To that point, officials from both states offered only mild criticisms to the BRP. North Carolina Governors Dan Moore,

56 Campbell Interview, August 2, 1975. 57 Letter to Ned Kenworthy, February 11, 1972, NCNR Records, Box 1: Correspondence,” Folder: January 1971- December 1973”; Jim Todd to Warner Dalhouse, November 12, 1973; Edmund Adams to Charles Osolin, November 21, 1973, NCNR Records, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: January 1971-December 1973.”

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followed by Robert Scott, had been content to follow the lead of their northern neighbors who had around 150 more miles of river affected the BRP. For state leaders, the tourism potential of the plan seemed too good to pass up. For example, in 1967 an official from the State Recreation

Commission testified that the new reservoirs proved consistent with the state’s all-of-the-above development strategy. Along with reducing poverty, the BRP could help make North Carolina not only a “Variety Vacationland,” its chosen tourism slogan, “but also a year-long vacationland.”58

Until the 1972 elections, opposition to the plan remained almost localized to the tri- county region where the dams would be located. The governor’s race that year produced candidates who did not take the New River issue for granted. In a fierce contest, Democrat

Hargrove “Skipper” Bowles, a former state parks administrator, took on Republican state representative James H. Holshouser, who owned a house near the river’s headwaters in Watauga

County.59 Meanwhile, in the 5th Congressional District election of 1972, both the victorious incumbent Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell and his Democratic opponent Brooks Hays beat the drum of anti-dam politics to bolster their respective candidacies.60

The most important signal that things had changed was the nature of their opposition. No longer did candidates seek only to mitigate the effects of the BRP, they now sought to stop it altogether. For example, as he coasted to victory that Fall, Mizell introduced a bill to prevent the construction of any dams along the upper reaches of the New River, approximately from Boone,

58 “1200 Families Face Ouster by Va. Dams,” Associated Press, December 10, 1970; Robert L. Buckner, “Affidavit of Robert L. Buckner,” April 28, 1967, Holshouser Papers, Folder 241: “Campaign Collection: Environment,” 9. 59 R. Floyd Crouse to J.E. Holshouser Jr., February 18, 1969, Holshouser Papers, Folder 279: “Campaign Collection: New River;” Thomas B. Fowler to Skipper Bowles, November 9, 1973, NCNR Records, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January 1971-December 1973.” 60 Brooks Hays, Politics is My Parish: An Autobiography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 269-270.

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North Carolina to Fries, Virginia. “Not only would it destroy people’s homes and livelihoods,”

Mizell reminded his constituents, “it wouldn’t even supply power to anybody in North

Carolina.”61 The 1972 elections for both governor and Congress proved that anti-dam politicking had promise, or at least it seemed that way on the North Carolina side of the New River.

Although North Carolina officials turned to embrace their position, dam fighters struggled to solidify their support elsewhere. In Virginia, Governor Linwood Holton proved a fierce critic of the pollution-dilution requirements. During his term, it seemed to Commonwealth officials that the adverse human and environmental impacts could only be mitigated, not reversed.62 Still, if Holton had a plan to stop APCO beyond expressing concern, the clock soon ran out on him. Barred from running for a second, consecutive term, former Democratic

Governor J. Mills Godwin soon switched party loyalties and kept the governor’s office in GOP hands in 1973. Under Godwin’s leadership, Virginia abandoned its former position of cautious dissent toward the BRP. Now, with Godwin joining Senators Harry Byrd and William Scott,

Virginia gave APCO its full-throated support.

Almost immediately, Governors Holshouser and Godwin set themselves on a collision course over the BRP. In the meantime, the EPA removed the controversial pollution dilution requirements from the bill, preferring instead to clean up the Kanawha closer to the source. Still, the rest of the project remained intact. While APCO and Godwin initiated the political equivalent of a full-court press to secure a license to begin construction on the New River dams, Holshouser responded in kind. Addressing the FPC Commissioners in a July 1973 letter, he made clear that

61 “Mizell Offers Bill to Block Blue Ridge Twin Dam Project,” Greensboro Daily News, September 13, 1972; Wilmer Mizell, quoted in “Bill Would Kill Dams on the New River,” Washington Post, September 14, 1972. 62 Maurine McLaughlin, “Virginia Panel Will Oppose Blue Ridge Dams Project,” Washington Post, March 6, 1970; “Save River Project, Virginia Asks US,” Washington Post, March 7, 1970.

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North Carolina’s concerns now centered around “the social implications of the project” or “the loss of land and disruption of [a] way of life.”63 Using similar rhetoric to that of local activists, state officials couched their political appeals in the language of agrarian virtue. As Department of Natural and Economic Resources (DNER) Secretary James Harrington informed the Raleigh

Rotary Club, “this is not a case of the environmentalists against the developers.” A ski resort developer himself, Harrington continued by depicting valley residents as “hard-working people who have chosen to live a quiet, pastoral life.”64 As Harrington and Holshouser assembled a team of lawyers and scientists in Raleigh, he needed to move quickly and take advantage of the time afforded to them. Like travelers speeding down the highway without a map, North Carolina officials grasped for solutions.

As the Governor’s team huddled and reviewed their options, they discovered and soon dismissed a harebrained scheme developed by a Greensboro lawyer. Dating back to 1959, James

MacLamroc suggested that the Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative reverse the flow of the New

River, then pipe the water some 13,000 feet to the southeast where it would crash over 2000 feet down a cliff called the “Jumping Off Place” into the Yadkin River basin. The force of the water,

MacLamroc reasoned, could then be used to provide power for the growing cities of Greensboro,

High Point, and Winston-Salem; while also creating the second-highest waterfall in North

America.65 By preventing the New’s waters from reaching Virginia, this project would neutralize

63 James E. Holshouser to Secretary Kenneth F. Plumb, July 11, 1973, NCNR Records, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January 1971-December 1973.” 64 James Harrington Speech at the Raleigh Rotary Club, January 1975, in Stephen Meehan to Carol Fitzgerald, October 22, 1976, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 2: “Correspondence,” Folder: “August-December, 1976.” 65 Joseph Knox, “Money, Old Law Dam Waterfall,” Greensboro Daily News, December 20, 1959; Jim MacLamroc to Senator B. Everett Jordan, September 14, 1972, Holshouser Papers, Folder 241: “Environment”; “A New Idea is Set Forth for a Controversial Waterway,” North Carolina Citizens Association (December 1975), North Carolina Collection, UNC.

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the BRP threat and create a tourist attraction in the process. According to environmental lawyer

Thomas Schoenbaum, a member of the state’s legal team, the governor and all the state government found the idea laughable.66 Even so, a kernel of truth from this idea presaged the state’s strategy to stop the dams in that protecting the headwaters of the river in North Carolina would render the dam system unworkable (Figure 3-4).

Their new strategy attempted to put APCO on the defensive. Unable to get cooperation from the Virginia political establishment to oppose the dams, North Carolina leaders tried to use their legislative muscle in Raleigh and Washington. With crucial input from Ashe County lawyer

Sidney Gambill of the UNRVA, they decided to use the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act to include the upper stretch of the New River in this protected system and thereby stop the dams before a license could be issued. Taking heart from the case of the Hell’s Canyon dam project in

Idaho, which had been delayed reviewing a potential “wild and scenic” designation for the Snake

River, officials in North Carolina pushed for the same.67

In Washington, Congressman Mizell along with Senators Sam Ervin and Jesse Helms pushed for a bill to study a potential designation for the New River as a wild and scenic waterway. As a newcomer in Washington, elected in 1972 to replace the retiring B. Everett

Jordan, Helms promised his wholehearted support for the bill after his initial wavering on the issue brought a torrent of criticism. In July 1973, the Winston-Salem Journal accused him of

“inconsistency,” for denouncing environmentalists while supporting the New River bill. Within

66 Schoenbaum, New River Controversy, 101. 67 Woodward, “Appalachian Power Along the New River,” 93.

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two days, the paper’s editors found a furious reply from Helms waiting, wherein he assured his

Ashe and Alleghany constituents that they “need have no fear that I will change my position.”68

On one hand, the new Senator’s fiery rejoinder to the media demonstrated the heightened political costs of lukewarm commitment. On the other, Helms justified his embrace of an environmental cause as more than just political expediency. As he appealed to Agriculture

Secretary Earl Butz in 1975, “it would be a great injustice to set aside the property rights of families that have worked this land for so long.”69 By emphasizing issues of local control, farmland protection, and property rights allowed Helms to make a conservative case to his GOP colleagues for protecting this river.

As it turned out, North Carolina’s senior Senator had a similar, political tightrope to walk. Something changed in Sam Ervin between 1969 and the end of his Senate career in 1974.

After his starring role in the Watergate hearings, Ervin became the New River’s most prominent defender. In hindsight, this transition seems stunning given his extreme reluctance to involve himself in previous dam fights regarding the New Hope or French Broad River dams.70

Although political expediency played some role, Ervin’s genuine concern for the effects of the dam project along with his Christian view of nature as part of a divine creation motivated his strident opposition. Growing up a mere seventy miles south of the New River, he was not afraid to wax nostalgically about the creeks and foothills that embodied the joys of childhood. “I am satisfied that when the Good Lord restores the Garden of Eden to Earth,” Ervin wrote with

68 Charles Osolin, “Helms Backs the Dam Builders,” Winston-Salem Journal, July 15, 1973; Jesse Helms to Winston-Salem Journal, July 17, 1973, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January 1971- December 1973.” 69 Jesse Helms to Earl Butz, December 31, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “September-December, 1975.” 70 See: Bruce E. Stewart and Christopher J. Manganiello, “Watershed Democracy: Rural Environmentalism and the Battle Against the TVA in Western North Carolina, 1965-1972” Environmental History (2018): 1-26

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confidence in his autobiography, “He will center it in Burke County.”71 Soon it became clear that the New River fell within the borders of Ervin’s sanctified geography. As the Senator from

Morganton prepared to leave the Senate in 1974, the BRP set a fire deep in his bones. And this fire, fueled by equal parts love of the place and its people and equal parts wrath for the power company, along with its enablers in the federal bureaucracy and union offices, motivated Ervin to fight for the river through and beyond his last days in Washington.

With battle lines drawn across state borders, the scenic river bill soon occupied center stage on Capitol Hill. In a series of Congressional hearings, Ervin addressed his colleagues with the righteous convictions of a biblical prophet. Squaring off against another titan of the Senate in

Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd Jr., Ervin argued the BRP represented a question of morality that could not be settled by bureaucratic edict. Challenging FPC Judge Levy in early 1974, Ervin denounced APCO as a corporate behemoth concerned only with the “filthy lucre it can get by making a raw rape upon the handiwork of God.” Such zealous rhetoric became only more common as the AFL-CIO leadership backed the power company in August 1974. With an overzealous bureaucracy (the FPC)and private utility now joining forces with organized labor— who saw the BRP as a boon for union jobs—Ervin and his allies’ resolve became strengthened.

Taking on what he described as an “unholy alliance,” the New River controversy became more than just a debate about economics or hydroelectricity.72 Just as damnable for Ervin, the BRP would “drive 3,000 people from their ancestral homes and farms and convert a leisurely, rural life-style into a hodgepodge of motels, trailer camps, marinas, hamburger stands, and gas

71 Sam Ervin, Autobiography, 11. 72 Sam Ervin, quoted in Charlie Osolin to Charlie and Tula Newman, January 23, 1974; Andrew Biemeller, AFL- CIO Press Release, August 12, 1974, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January-May, 1974” and Folder: “June-December, 1974”; “Ervin: Dam Backers an ‘Unholy Alliance,’” Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, June 22, 1975.

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stations.”73 By laying out the stakes of the fight in such dramatic language, Ervin set the tone for the national debate over the New River dams. The river became part and parcel of a larger defense of rural citizenship and agrarian virtue.

As the 93rd Congress headed toward its final days in late 1974, Ervin directed one last- ditch effort to pass the study bill. After securing passage through the Senate, H.R. 11120 faced an uphill battle in the House. As Ed Adams confided to another UNRVA member in October, skeptical Congressmen opposed the bill due to suspicions of supposed “damned environmentalists” in their ranks. To get around this, he suggested that they would be “sensitive to the loss of farms and farm homes.”74 Adams’s agrarian messaging would continue to be the primary discourse adopted by the dam fighters going forward. But in the meantime, the local stakes of the BRP barely resonated amid a series of legislative roadblocks as Ervin, Helms, and

Mizell continued to lean on their colleagues.

Still, Senators Byrd and Scott, the Virginia House delegation, along with Governor

Godwin, along with APCO lobbyists did not take this rhetorical offensive lying down. First, they raised questions about the intentions of the river’s defenders. Company CEO Donald Cook described the wild and scenic designation as a “legislative gimmick to kill Blue Ridge” that would be “abandoned” after defeating the dam plan. Senators Byrd and Scott echoed these sentiments in almost identical language.75 Second and more curiously, Virginia officials and company attorneys argued before Congress that the New River could not be considered “wild” or

73 Sam Ervin, quoted in John Hodel, “Appalachian’s Blue Ridge Project in News Again,” Raleigh Register, February 13, 1974. 74 Edmund Adams to Joe Matthews, October 2, 1974, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “June-December 1974.” 75 Donald Cook to Hon. Roger C. Morton, Secretary of the Interior, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “June-December, 1974”; Senator William Scott, quoted in Schoenbaum New River Controversy, 71-72.

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“scenic” because it already had two dams, albeit much further downriver, while being crossed by forty-seven bridges, and bordered by 118 miles of highway. In their minds, being impounded and

“neither primitive nor inaccessible” meant the New River valley could not be the verdant, pastoral land its defenders made it out to be.76 Similar questions dogged Ervin when he appeared before the House Rules Committee. BRP backer Ohio Republican Delbert Latta lobbed a sneering query at him, asking why the two dams had not destroyed the river “but a third one would.” Ervin stared back, slammed his right hand down on the desk and boomed, “this is a damn dam.”77

By the end of 1974, the House Rules Committee voted down the scenic river study bill.

To negate this vote, Wilmer Mizell tried but failed to secure a two-thirds majority of the whole

House. Even so, the message pushed by local activists and state leaders made some impact as a bare majority went on record for declaring the New as a wild and scenic river. Its near passage provided momentum by showing that the fate of these rural communities symbolized something bigger, something that appealed to Americans who never visited or lived by the New River.

Despite voting down the bill, Congress did not unleash APCO’s bulldozers on the New

River. For one, North Carolina’s appeal of the granting of an FPC license had not yet been decided by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. With Congress no longer in session, both sides used the media to argue over whether the fight was over or just beginning. In

76 Joseph Dowd, Testimony Before the House Interior Subcommittee, Hearings on H.R. 11120: To Amend the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, June 3, 1974, 125; Donald Cook to Hon. Roger C. Morton, Secretary of the Interior, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “June-December, 1974.” 77 Kenneth Bredemeier, “Va. River Dams Pass Hill Hurdle,” Washington Post, December 12, 1974.

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private New River defenders worried that a sustained “propaganda campaign… to undermine public opposition” to the plan lay ahead. These concerns proved prescient.78

In the first four months of 1975, several groups worked hard to win the hearts and minds of valley residents. To be sure, the company already had support among many business leaders in the tri-county area. But now, they tried to convince anti-dam county commissioners that they backed the wrong horse and thus head off the impending introduction of a new scenic river bill in the next Congress.79 This became clear as full-page ads appeared in local papers like the

Skyland Post and the Alleghany News. Posted by groups like the Committee for the Improvement of Alleghany, they denounced the scenic river bill as “the worst proposal of all” and raised the alarm about the necessity of higher taxes should the area lose out on revenues from the dams.80

Another group called the Ashe County Citizens Committee also leveled similar charges at the river’s defenders. Buying billboards and bumper stickers with the motto “Dam the Scenic,” pro- dam forces found a specific target to attack, rather than only defending the general economic benefits of the dams. APCO officials with the backing of the Roanoke Times, deemed its

“propaganda organ” by dam fighters, continued the war of words in public statements, calling on

North Carolina officials to drop their appeal and allow the FPC license to move forward.81 With no surrender forthcoming and undaunted by Congressional setbacks, Ed Adams, Lorne

Campbell, and others got back to work.

78 Edmund Adams to Friends of the New River, December 12, 1974, NCNR Records, Series I, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “June-December, 1974.” 79 Edmund Adams to Thomas Fowler and Sidney Gambill, March 14, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January-April, 1975.” 80 Committee for the Improvement of Alleghany, “Scenic River: Did You Know?” and “Taxes!” Alleghany News, 1975, NCNR Records, Subseries F, Box 17, Folder: “Citizens Responses, 1974-1976.” 81 Schoenbaum, The New River Controversy, 102; Edmund Adams to Thomas Fowler and Sidney Gambill, March 14, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January-April, 1975.”

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Back along the New River, beyond the halls of Congress, the three-county leadership of the UNRVA decided to close ranks and create a new organization to coordinate their campaign.

Formed on the campus of North Carolina State University in January 1975, the National

Committee for the New River (NCNR) relied on a crack team of local activists including Adams,

Campbell, and Polly Jones joined by environmental lawyer Joe Matthews and state senator

Hamilton “Ham” Horton both of Winston-Salem. Although not a local, Horton had grown fond of the New River after spending many family vacations there and thus understood what he called the “homegrown” nature of the campaign. In defining the stakes of the struggle, Horton mixed emotion with biting sarcasm saying, “They’ve lived on the land and loved it for 200 years. Now they’re being asked to let everything they’ve held dear go underwater to provide electricity for some apartment dweller’s toothbrush in Chicago.”82 Possessing both charisma and connections, he soon became a formidable attack dog for the NCNR. As a new scenic river bill wound its way through Congress, the NCNR represented the synthesis between the local, state, and national strategies that had so far only brought a series of false starts and legislative failures in the New

River battle.

By Summer 1975, NCNR’s organizing efforts paid dividends at the state level. With action in Congress and the courts pending, the group launched a concerted campaign to secure action from the North Carolina General Assembly to pass a bill that placed just over twenty-six miles of the New River under the state’s scenic river system. State officials worked with

82 Schoenbaum, New River Controversy, 106, 119; Hamilton C. Horton to Thomas Fowler, March 18, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January-April, 1975;” Horton, quoted in Bob Lipper, “The New Threatens the Old,” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, April 25, 1976.

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diligence to ensure that land acquired for public use and preservation would not disrupt farming activities and therefore alienate landowners.83

A series of contentious hearings followed in both Ashe and Alleghany Counties. At these hearings, anti-dam activists set out to prove the prudence of their plan while also blunting the lobbying efforts of people like Robert Troutman, a local tree farmer and de-facto spokesman of

“Beavers,” or locals who supported the BRP. The NCNR, in concert with the Conservation

Council of North Carolina, worked to pack the meeting halls with their people, even if it meant bringing in people from “nearby counties” who took an interest in the case. The hearings showed the Committee flexing its organizational muscle, with simple straw polls showing the Beavers being vocal, but vastly outnumbered.84 Next, the NCNR took its message to Raleigh. Standing before the General Assembly, the newest NCNR officer Polly Jones gave a stirring speech describing the emotional connection between her family and what they identified as “our river.”

Overcoming some initial hiccups, the legislature passed a bill in May to ensure state management of the New River should Congress match this effort and make it part of the federal system of wild and scenic rivers.85

Soon after this victory, the NCNR leadership announced plans for the Festival of the New

River to be held in July 1975. More than just a cultural celebration of the area’s scenic beauty, it came to embody a core political message of the New River campaign: that it grew out of the soil

83 Joe D. Robertson, NC Department of Natural and Economic Resources, Press Release, March 28, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January-April, 1975;” Schoenbaum, New River Controversy, 107-110. 84 Conservation Council of North Carolina memo to the National Committee for the New River, January 6, 1975; Edmund Adams to Jessie Burchette, April 8, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January-April, 1975.” 85 Polly Jones Oral History, August 22, 1999, in Cooper and Cooper, eds., People of the New River, quote on 245; Hamilton Horton to Thomas Fowler, March 18, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January-April, 1975.”

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it sought to defend. Along with obligatory canoeing trips, artwork, and especially music highlighted the festivities. Local performers offered songs of protest replete with pastoral symbolism. One by Ronnie Taylor of nearby Fleetwood lamented how “the old homeplace” and

“green fields” would only exist “in the memory of my mind.” Virginian Elizabeth McCommon penned “The Ballad of the New River,” mocking APCO’s hollow promises of “more jobs more dough— I’ll conceed [sic.] it & then I’ll go.”86 To quantify the river’s broad appeal, organizers counted cars from over twenty different states. With “all these people coming together,” Polly

Jones remembered, the festival marked a “turning point” since it both convinced valley residents that “they had so much outside support” and highlighted the incredible stakes of the fight for non-local allies.87 In doing so, it reinforced the narrative that this was a local movement with national reach. More than just a celebration of local culture, the festival embodied a core political message of the New River campaign: that it grew out of the soil it sought to defend.

However, the national profile also brought new problems. Buoyed by the festival’s success, the NCNR secured resolutions backing their cause from a litany of environmental groups including the Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth, and Sierra Club.88 However,

Lorne Campbell worried that the Roanoke Times would pounce on these announcements.

Privately, NCNR activists drafted pointed responses assuming APCO and its allies would promote the public involvement of such groups as clear proof that fringe, outside

86 The Rev. Hal Eaton, Statement from the Virginia Chapter of the Committee for the New River, June 12, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “May-August, 1975,” Ronnie Taylor, “Mouth of Wilson Town,” November 1974, NCNR Records, Subseries F, Box 17, Folder: “Citizens Responses, 1974-1976;” Elizabeth McCommon, quoted in Schoenbaum, New River Controversy, 115-116. 87 Polly Jones Oral History, 247-249. 88 Wilderness Society, “Group Endorses North Carolina’s New River Application,” Press Release, August 5, 1975; Friends of the Earth to Hon. D. Kent Frizzell, August 14, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1, Folder: “May- August, 1975.”

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environmentalists pulled the strings of local people opposing the dams. To some extent, their concerns proved correct. In early 1976, AEP published a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal,

Washington Post, and Time Magazine with a foreboding message: “The welfare of this entire nation is endangered by an energy shortage… No selfish group which stands in the way can remain unchallenged—be they privileged elitists or a prejudiced press.”89

Dam supporters in the valley picked up on this rhetoric. One Grayson County businessman interviewed by the Chicago Tribune blamed opposition to the dams on “hippies” from California and Boston, among other places, who moved into the area to buy cheap land and sell dulcimers and banjos. To the Tribune reporter, this proved that “environmental crusaders,”

“nature lovers,” and “phonies” who couldn’t hack it in the big city were flocking to the New

River’s aid.90 Such statements indicate how the language of rural virtue became contested terrain. While the NCNR tried to promote their campaign’s populist bona fides through the

Festival of the New, their opponents rebutted such claims by associating dam opposition with elitist, urban environmentalism.

Even as it gained a national following, the NCNR worked to dispel the claims that outsiders pulled their strings. In subsequent press releases, the group pushed the claim that their concerns for the agricultural and social consequences of the BRP mattered just as much, if not more than the environmental ones. For example, they touted the endorsement of the National

Farmers Organization.91 In response to the company’s full-page ads, Lorrayne Baird of the

89 Lorne Campbell to Joe Matthews, August 5, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “May-August, 1975;” American Electric Power, “The Truth About the Blue Ridge Project,” Time, February 2, 1976, NCNR Records, Subseries F, Box 17, Folder: “Citizens Responses, 1976.” 90 Bob Wiedrich, “People Here Get Quilts From Sears,” Chicago Tribune, August 23, 1976. 91 Charles Frazier to Hon. Kent Frizzell, August 15, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “May-August, 1975.”

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NCNR sent a letter to the magazine arguing, “the ‘elitists’ whom the AEP attacks are mountain farmers and concerned citizens,” then to drive home the point, she added, “These ‘elitists’ do not have $100,000 for ads.”92 As debates heated up in Congress over the New River bill, attorneys for the state and the NCNR leadership made every effort to secure data and public comments from the state Commissioner of Agriculture and other “farm-related organizations and individuals” to buttress their claims about the BRP’s drawbacks.93 In letters and statements that flooded the offices of editors and legislators alike, anti-dam activists never missed a chance to mention that the BRP impoundments would wreak havoc on farmers and farmland. However, for some New River defenders, countering this narrative required more than just information campaigns.

While the North Carolina legal team continued to delay the FPC, the NCNR considered how to get the maximum impact out of their “homegrown,” pro-farmer campaign. As the group debated whether to hire a lobbyist on Capitol Hill, one Durham-based member dismissed the idea as a waste of money. Instead, he suggested that it would be more effective to send “a couple of bus-loads of overall-ed farmers to the committee votes and to the floor votes.” In a separate meeting, Peter Crow, a professor from Virginia and prominent APCO critic, advised the

Committee not to “underestimate the value of gimmicks in [gaining] publicity.” Furthermore, he suggested a “tractor march” by local farmers on the Grayson County office of pro-BRP Virginia

Congressman William Wampler’s offices would embarrass the opposition.94 These suggestions,

92 Lorrayne Y. Baird to Time Magazine, January 30, 1978, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January 16-31, 1976.” 93 John S. Curry to the Committee for the New River, January 27, 1976, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January 16-31, 1976.” 94 Douglas Henderson to Hamilton Horton, April 21, 1976; Peter Crow to Joe Matthews, April 14, 1976, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 2: “Correspondence,” Folder: “April 16-May15, 1976.”

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while never acted upon, illustrate how far the NCNR considered going to reinforce the notion that they spoke for a grassroots, rural movement. Moreover, they embodied another, ironic truth about the New River campaign. To challenge the BRP, the dam fighters highlighted the local nature of this grassroots insurgency. But to defeat it, they relied on the national resources and networks of media, politicians, environmental groups and their legal teams.

In addition to claims that they were the unwitting agents of elite environmentalists, the

NCNR also took exception to any news report or testimony that portrayed the area as a den of poverty, unemployment, and backwardness. In a 1975 story on the New River controversy,

Walter Cronkite reported that unemployment reached twenty percent in the New River Valley.

Almost immediately, the NCNR worked with environmental groups like David Brower’s Friends of the Earth to submit a “60 Minutes” story to turn the spotlight back on the region’s rich culture and natural beauty.95 When APCO officials made similar claims, the NCNR cited letters like one from Everett Newman Jr., an army officer and area native. Mocking the company’s promise to rescue the region “from certain ruin and poverty,” Newman predicted that the company planned to give precious construction jobs over to “strong labor union forces” who would, in turn, “rape our land” before “scurry[ing] back to their suburban sanctuaries far away.”96 In each of these examples, the river’s defenders tried to disentangle the links between rurality and poverty, since pro-dam forces used such assumptions to claim the mantle of local support.

As 1975 came to a close, a series of media reports brought good news to defenders of the

New River. In addition to paying homage to the river and landscape, these stories fed into the

NCNR’s narrative that corporate arrogance and greed lay at the heart of the BRP. First, thanks to

95 Friends of the Earth to Hamilton Horton, August 1, 1975, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: May-August 1975.” 96 Everett Newman Jr., Letter to the Editor, Galax Gazette, April 8, 1976.

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a tip from a professor at the University of Virginia, activists discovered that both APCO and the

FPC ignored, or perhaps buried, a series of archaeological studies detailing historic arrowheads and pottery found in the New River Valley. Although pro-dam locals like Robert Troutman rolled their eyes that the opposition tried to make hay out of “all this historical crap,” they struggled to reclaim the rhetorical high ground.97 To support the area’s claims to a unique, yet now imperiled heritage, Governor Holshouser quickly directed State Historic Preservation

Officer Larry Tise to conduct an inventory of historic sites in Ashe and Alleghany Counties. By the time Tise submitted his report in Spring 1976, he identified and submitted thirty-three places for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Sites.98 This perception that APCO ignored, or worse didn’t care for, the history of the area further turned the tide against the dam project.

Second, the few APCO critics in Richmond began to call attention to the shady dealings of Franklin Realty. It turned out that Franklin, the real estate arm of APCO and its parent company AEP, had been buying up thousands of acres of land along the New River at below- market rates. By 1974, with the first scenic river bill under debate in Congress, it had already purchased around 20,000 acres, half of the total area covered by the BRP. Although this fact became clear in Congressional hearings that year, many critics of the company made sure

Franklin’s land-grab became widespread, public knowledge.99 Democratic State Senator Virgil

Goode Jr., a powerful member of the Virginia legislature, raised concerns about how APCO used similar tactics in previous projects at both Smith Mountain and Claytor Lakes. In those cases,

97 Bob Poole, “New’s Archaeological Resources Were Not Protected,” Winston-Salem Journal, August 31, 1975; Schoenbaum, New River Controversy, 103. 98 Larry E Tise, Report of Larry E. Tise to Governor James E. Holshouser Jr. And Participants in Preservation Conference, Salisbury, NC, May 3, 1976, NCNR Records, Subseries F, Box 17, Folder: “Group Preservation Efforts.” 99 Virginia Attorney General Andrew Miller, Statement Before the House Subcommittee on National Parks and Recreation, Hearings on H.R. 11120: To Amend the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, June 3, 1974, 73.

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after the impoundments went in, Franklin Realty, as APCO’s proxy, sold new lakefront property for a hefty profit. Although not on board with the scenic river bill, Goode hammered away at

APCO’s top brass, asking whether they would build “the dam as a source of energy or merely as a real estate investment.” NCNR allies in Virginia took heart from these reports and charged that

APCO, if given its license, would continue to take “extensive advantage of its privileged position as a utility to make profits at the expense of the ratepayers.”100 These revelations not only buttressed the narrative that the BRP would provide both private and public benefits but further eroded public trust in the company at a time when it could ill afford that.

As a result, many Virginians living near the river felt betrayed by their elected officials’ willingness to toe the company line. By 1976, letters poured into local newspapers with dam fighters continuing to hone their message. R. Howard Carpenter of Independence wrote to the

Winston-Salem Journal, “I am for the people, the people who live and whose ancestors lived close to the land… the good religious people who are for the sound dollar and good, clean government.” Meanwhile, the NCNR publicized straw polls held at high schools in the Virginia river towns of Fries, Independence, and Galax as each showed that the overwhelming majority of local students opposed the dam project. For the NCNR, this was welcome publicity.101 Jim Todd, who spearheaded the Grayson County opposition with the Rev. Hal Eaton, spoke for many in the valley when he lamented that the dams “would take my home which has been in my wife’s

100 Virgil Goode Jr. To Peter Crow, January 12, 1976; Peter Crow to Ham Horton, January 18, 1976, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January 16-31, 1976.” 101 R. Howard Carpenter, “Shameful,” Winston-Salem Journal, April 13, 1976; Independence High Students Vote ‘No’ to Dam Question,” Galax Gazette, February 17, 1976; Lorne Campbell to Joe Matthews, February 18, 1976, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 2: “Correspondence,” Folder: “February 10-28, 1976.”

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family since before 1800.”102 Letters like these paired issues of local heritage and national citizenship in ways that made the New River controversy more than a parochial debate.

Virginians who moved away from the area also lent their voice to the cause. In turn, the

NCNR promoted their testimonies as evidence of the unique way of life in the river valley. For example, one Atlanta woman named Paula Anderson Green owned farmland in Grayson County that had been in her family for eight generations, and she challenged Senator Byrd to defend the river as a “priceless heritage of the American people.” In her letter, Green distinguished between

“the typical highly-mobile, often-transferred Americans” and the valley residents who were

“Americans deeply rooted to their farms, whose values are in the land itself.”103 Another former resident living in New York warned the readers of the Galax Gazette that letting the dams be built would transform this “perfect region of Virginia” into a “gigantic construction camp” that resembled the industrial Northeast with all the “smell and sight of industry.”104 Meanwhile Earl

Hamner Jr., a Virginia native and creator of The Waltons television series, also came to the aid of the New River. In an open letter and radio ad entitled “A River is a Holy Thing,” Hamner derided the BRP as threatening to turn the New into an “antiseptic river… a sluggish stream contained in concrete walls of no use to anyone” like the Los Angeles River where he lived at the time.105 Against these sordid depictions of urban life, activists constructed images of the New

River as a pastoral place with an increasingly rare blend of culture and nature.

102 Charles P. Smith to Jim Todd, July 7, 1976, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 2: “Correspondence,” Folder: “July 1976.”; Todd, quoted in Bob Wiedrich, “Some Old Settlers Fight to Save River,” Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1976. 103 Paula Anderson Green Letter to Senator Harry Byrd, May 24, 1973, NCNR Records, Box 1, Folder: “January 1971-December 1973.” 104 Aura Lea Curtis, Letter to the Editor, Galax Gazette, January 15, 1976. 105 Earl Hamner Jr., “’River is Holy Thing:’ Do Not Modify It,” Winston-Salem Journal, March 12, 1975, NCNR Records, Series II, Subseries A, Ed Adams Papers, Box 27, Folder: “Serial Publications, 1967-1975.”

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Backed by fresh political headwinds, the anti-dam forces turned their attention to

Washington. In 1976, with ongoing legal battles going nowhere, representatives from North

Carolina and West Virginia introduced a new bill to designate the New as a “wild and scenic” river. New Democratic Representative Stephen Neal, who defeated Wilmer Mizzel in large measure due to the post-Watergate backlash, wasted no time defending his district and voicing support for the cause. Another newcomer, Senator Robert Morgan of North Carolina, replaced

Sam Ervin in the Senate. Unlike Neal, Morgan required some cajoling from both his predecessor and the governor before eventually signing on to the New River legislation. After he submitted an amendment to protect landowners from possible rezoning, Ervin responded with a public tongue lashing, asking why Morgan would side with APCO and “[deprive] North Carolinians of their property for the benefit of nonresidents.”106 The junior Senator soon relented and rescinded his amendment.

The 1976 bill also received a welcome boost from the North Carolina presidential primaries of 1976. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford all lent their support to the cause. As Wallace Carroll wrote to the President’s advisor Robert Hartmann, the New River represented a “home-run” issue with which to blunt the Jesse Helms-led Reagan surge in the state. Assuring him that the issue would help, not harm the Ford campaign, Carroll described the effort as “a native conservationist movement… under the leadership of conservative businessmen,” not environmentalists.107 Although environmental groups and legal avenues proved essential to protecting the New River, the swirling cultural discourses of rural virtue and

106 Carl Stepp, “Ervin Scolds Morgan for Delaying New River Bill,” Charlotte Observer, April 17, 1976. 107 Wallace Carroll to Hon. Robert T. Hartmann, February 9, 1976, Sam Ervin Private Papers, Subgroup B, Folder 944: “New River,” SHC, UNC.

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victimhood gained bipartisan support as it became tied to other, conservative defenses of white rights to property and to place in the early 1970s.

Despite growing public support, the scenic river bill went nowhere initially as the House

Rules Committee held it up. In response, the NCNR tried a new public relations gimmick to dislodge them. Hundreds of valley residents from the valley traveled to Washington to make their appeals. Hamilton Horton organized a press conference alongside what amounted to another Festival of the New, only this time in the Senate Caucus Room in the Capitol. There, around four hundred people from the valley made the trip to Washington bringing their words, but also local culture. Local musicians offered bluegrass tunes, while displays featuring handmade quilts, cheeses, and canoes created a veritable living museum of the way of life that could be lost. Sam Ervin proved the star of the show, as he made a booming speech that concluded, “there’s only one New River in the world and if it’s destroyed and the country turned into mud flats, the Lord God Almighty with the assistance of the AFL-CIO and all the power companies in the world cannot replace it.”108 The legislation remained in committee as an

“unholy alliance” of organized labor and APCO continued to draw the ire of Ervin and his supporters.

Undaunted, New River activists continued to write letters, make calls, and pray if need be. Governor Holshouser declared July 18th a “Day of Prayer for the New River.” Support continued to flow from all corners of the nation. Newspaper editorial boards from Los Angeles to

Philadelphia, St. Louis to Seattle stood in solidarity with the New River and what one described as the “proud community of countryfolk whose forebears tended the land before the American

108 Louise Sweeney, “Waterway vs. Power Project: Ervin ‘Campaigns’ to Save River,” Christian Science Monitor, June 24, 1976; “Ervin: Dam Backers An ‘Unholy Alliance,’” Winston-Salem Sentinel, June 22, 1976.

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Revolution.”109 By August, the formidable lobbying efforts of George Meany’s AFL-CIO broke down and the scenic river bill cleared its final legislative hurdle. On August 10, 1976, the hard work of the dam fighters paid off. By a vote of 311-73, the House revoked the Blue Ridge

Project’s license and declare the New River a “wild and scenic” waterway. The Senate soon followed suit, advancing the bill by a margin of 69 to 16. Days later, President Ford signed the bill that protected the New River from dam construction.110 Defeated, the AEP board cut their losses and abandoned the project.

Dam Building and the Rivers of the South in the Late Twentieth Century

The hard-won wild and scenic designation brought both opportunities and challenges to the New River in the last half-century. Preserving these scenic waterways and historic river valleys soon transformed a form of cultural equity, buttressed by the rhetoric of residents and politicians alike, into real estate equity. Indeed, the appeals of the natural landscape brought more residents, more visitors, and more pollution. Real estate companies swooped in to pick up the properties left behind by APCO’s Franklin Realty. By the early 1980s, a Miami-based corporation called Ecological Developments became the largest landowner in Ashe County. New golf course communities like Jefferson Landing soon sprouted up along the New River.111

Although the state of North Carolina established scenic easements along the river, new vacation homes brought more pollution. Zoning remained unpopular even as local activists lamented in 1991 that “a tour of homes” replaced a tour of a “scenic river.” The pollution

109 Carl Stepp, “Tempest Over the New River,’ Charlotte Observer, June 6, 1976; “Editorial: New River- 16 Men Control Its Future,” Charlotte Observer, July 6, 1976; Philadelphia Inquirer, quoted in Schoenbaum, New River Controversy, 172. 110 Austin Scott, “Ford Signs Bill to Save New River,” Washington Post, September 12, 1976. 111 Bret Wallach, “The Slighted Mountains of Upper East Tennessee,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 71: 3 (September 1981): 359.

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entering the river is not merely residential. Christmas tree farms soon became a household industry in the region. With so many perched atop the rolling hills above the river, runoff from pesticides grew so excessive that by the 1990s the NCNR called a meeting with local farmers to try to find solutions.112 The need to protect the New River has not diminished, but only evolved since the days of the Blue Ridge Project.

To look across a map of the South’s mountain landscapes today, the region’s rivers all exhibit some mark of human action, whether destructive or preservative. The New was not alone in being successfully defended by grassroots activists. Other rivers like Kentucky’s Red River and the upper section of the French Broad River in North Carolina fought off similar projects.

Beyond Appalachia, Arkansas’s Buffalo National River also received federal protection in the

1970s. Both the Red and the Buffalo received special, recreational visits from Supreme Court

Justice William O. Douglas, which proved crucial to making their appeals less in terms of ecological damage and more in terms of human consequences.113

Moreover, the advocacy of state and federal politicians proved crucial to effective anti- dam campaigns in the South. For example, the TVA’s building of Tellico Dam on the Little

Tennessee River in this same period depended on its deep inroads with Tennessee politicians.

APCO, for one, enjoyed no such luxury. Additionally, in the view of one lawyer on the New

River case, the NCNR succeeded where anti-Tellico activists did not because they put enough distance between themselves and the environmentalists, avoiding charges of “elitism” or being

112 Frank Tursi, “No Saving Grace,” Business North Carolina, April 1, 1991; Edmund Adams Interview, in Cooper and Cooper, eds., People of the New River, 225-227. 113 Edwin Sharke, “Operation Build and Destroy,” Sports Illustrated, April 1, 1968; Neil Compton, The Battle for the Buffalo River: The Story of America’s First National River (Fayetteville; University of Arkansas Press, 1992).

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narrow-minded to care more about a fish than the local economy.114 Although this claim is speculative, to say the least, it nonetheless speaks to the intentional messaging employed by groups like the NCNR.

The fight over the New River stands out for its nearly fifteen-year battle and the mass support it garnered from across the United States. The NCNR fused the defensive language of modern conservatism with nostalgic, sentimental appeals to a vibrant rural life, all in the service of environmentalist goals. It did so through connections with national media, an uncompromising appeal to preserve local heritage, and a successful legislative lobbying effort. Bringing together farmers, retirees, “back-to-the-landers,” along with Democrats and Republicans constituted no small feat.

Within its time, the New River controversy represents an important moment in the histories of Appalachia, the South, and American environmentalism. In an age of energy scarcity and declining rural political power, the combined efforts of grassroots environmentalists and bipartisan political elites defeated a massive hydroelectric project backed by the lobbying prowess of large labor unions and power companies. Yet, in the final analysis, it also shows how parts of the Southern Mountains underwent a kind of cultural rehabilitation outside of the War on

Poverty. The recognition given to the New and other rivers like it was built on a discourse of rural virtue and agrarian nostalgia. Terms like “rural slum” and “backward area” faded with the

War on Poverty. The austerity of the 1970s undoubtedly influenced this shift. But just as importantly, rural activists like those in the New River Valley and their political allies asserted a right to protect their localities and ways of life.

114 Peter Matthiessen, “How to Kill a Valley,” New York Review of Books 27: 1 (January 1980): 32; Schoenbaum, New River Controversy, 184; On these larger issues, see: Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living? Work and Nature,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995), 171-185.

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Lastly, the New River controversy reinforced the discursive connections between rurality, whiteness, and citizenship. In the hands of white mountaineers who opposed the BRP, their apparent vulnerability enhanced their status as undeserving victims of geography. Taking the language of the Silent Majority out of its suburban confines, these rural activists presented their lives and homes as evidence of a status that knew no poverty and required no outside help.115

These grassroots struggles also help explain how areas that were once considered blighted are now considered prime tourist attractions for their rich cultural and natural landscapes. At a time when rural areas of Appalachia and the South as a whole lost legislative representation alongside human and economic capital, their precarious position as white mountaineers gave them a form of political power. By understanding these interconnections between race, place, and power, we are reminded of the ways that our society continues to assign value to these intangible measures.

115 On the Silent Majority as rooted in the suburban communities of the metropolitan Sunbelt, see: Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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Figure 3-1. Map of New River Basin, National Committee for the New River, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, Appalachian State University, https://tcva.appstate.edu/exhibitions/1988 (accessed November 9, 2019).

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Figure 3-2. Photo of Pasture in Ashe County, 1945, ConDev6621B, Conservation and Development Photo File, Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.

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Figure 3-3. Map of Appalachian Power Blue Ridge Project, U.S. Department of the Interior, Final Environmental Impact Statement: Proposed South Fork New River National Wild and Scenic River (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, March 1976), 244.

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Figure 3-4. Map of Proposed Blue Ridge Project and National Wild and Scenic River Area for New River Valley, 1976, Senator Harry F. Byrd Center, https://www.byrdcenter.org/byrd-center-blog/clearing-the-path-for-the-new-river- gorge-national-river.

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CHAPTER 4 MOUNTAIN LAND GRAB: TENSIONS OVER LAND USE AND TOURISM IN LATE- TWENTIETH CENTURY APPALACHIA

We cannot look to the hills and find strength if all we can see is a landscape of destruction. —bell hooks Belonging

Land Use and Population Change in Southern Appalachia, 1929-1970

At the height of the French Broad dam controversy, a reporter for the New York Times asked ninety-year-old farmer W.L. Jones of Brevard what happened when TVA officials set foot on his land. After they asked Jones to sign some papers, he recalled between spits of tobacco juice, “I thought I was going to have to fight him.” For him and many others, offers by the TVA or other developers to buy their farmland constituted an offense unlike any other. When asked years later why she joined the fight against APCO and its dam project, Polly Jones (no relation) offered a similar story. As she recalled on a few different occasions, when APCO officials knocked on her door with an offer to buy her family’s farm, Jones reacted with disgust and joined the opposition. For both Joneses, the pressure to sell their lands became the driving force behind their environmental activism.

The decline of dam-powered regional planning did not bring a cessation to the pressure to sell the family homestead across Appalachia. Many people like the Joneses faced similar challenges in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Efforts to boost tourism led to more second-home sales, more gated subdivisions, and rising property values. The appetites of coal, timber, and other industries for land and commodities continued to prove insatiable during this time. Although the anti-dam campaigns brought national sympathy for the threatened displacement of mountain communities, the coalitions and publicity that emerged during these controversies struggled to address the scale, intensity, and capital reserves that other, potential land buyers brought to Appalachia.

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More broadly, land represented a central fault line in dam building campaigns as well as earlier rural conservation projects. As historian Sara M. Gregg points out, increased federal management of Appalachian lands meant that “for the first time, the state exercised the right to eminent domain for conservation and recreational development.” The infamous, forced relocation of Blue Ridge residents from what became Shenandoah National Park in Virginia existed alongside the dam-building campaigns of the TVA and other utilities as examples of the lesser-known costs of New Deal public works projects.2 In Western North Carolina, the completion of the TVA’s hulking Fontana Dam in 1944 not only reshaped the Upper Little

Tennessee River, but its deluge also left behind lost communities like Judson, Proctor, and Japan.

In advance of Fontana’s gates closing, the mostly white inhabitants of these small, farming towns joined small populations of Cherokee who remained in the area in the search of new homes.

Although the circumstances differed over centuries and across racial and geographic boundaries, communal displacement remained a traumatic experience for thousands of Appalachian residents.3

By the early 1970s, the legal and regulatory frameworks associated with the EPA provided recourse for many Appalachian residents who feared that they would be displaced from their homes and their communities erased from the map. Thus the grassroots mobilizations against the TVA and APCO should be understood as one response to broader, structural issues of changing land ownership in Appalachia, of which dam projects constituted one of the most

2 Chapter epigraph from: bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2008), 33; Roy Reed, “TVA Plan Angers Carolina Farmers,” New York Times, July 13, 1971; Polly Jones Oral History, Cooper and Cooper, eds., People of the New River; Sara M. Gregg, Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), quote on 2, on the removal and relocation of residents from Shenandoah National Park, see also: 122-139. 3 According to the small historical record of the Japan community, the town’s name was pronounced “Jay-pan.” Paul A. Webb, Cultural Resource Existing Conditions Report, North Shore Road Environmental Impact Statement, Graham and Swain Counties, North Carolina (Durham, NC: TRC Garrow & Associates, 2004), esp. 32-37, 67-103.

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visible examples. As the previous chapters detail, much of the leadership for these anti-dam, citizens’ groups relied on recent migrants who saw the mountains as an idealized, “authentic” landscape of retreat. Such “back-to-the-landers,” retiree migrants, and deeply-rooted locals forged a narrative that rejected the “hustle-and-bustle” of urban life while projecting a life close to nature as a return to the traditional, agrarian roots of previous generations.4 In doing so, their efforts to preserve the pastoral aesthetic of Southern Appalachia represented the vanguard of a sustained period of wealthy migrants that streamed into the region through the early 2000s.

Yet, such environmentalist transplants struggled to reckon with a new, larger wave of mountain migrants who followed in their footsteps. From the 1970s to the 1990s, communities across Western North Carolina saw substantial increases in both net population and per capita income driven by factors including amenity-based migration, the region’s growing status as a destination for wealthy retirees, and greater public investment in local, tourism economies. In the southwestern corner of the state, Jackson County’s growth exemplifies this trend. As the home of

Sapphire Valley Ski Resort and the exclusive subdivisions around Cashiers, Jackson experienced population growth of forty-five percent from 1960 to 1980 and then fifty percent from 1990 to

2010.5 Although the growth there and in other areas, like those around Boone, were aided by the expansions of Western Carolina and Appalachian State Universities, respectively, other data points show the clear impact of retirees and in-migration on the Southern Mountains. As

4 On the role of authenticity in cultural discourses about the American landscape, see the works of Sharon Zukin, namely: Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011); on authenticity and rural gentrification, see: Jesse Abrams, John Bliss, Hannah Gosnell, “Reflexive Gentrification of Working Lands in the American West: Contesting the ‘Middle Landscape’” Journal of Rural and Community Development 8: 3 (2013): 144-158. 5 Jackson County Planning Department, Jackson County, NC: Demographic Information (April 2013), 3 https://www.planning.jacksonnc.org/pdfs/April-2013-Jackson-County-Demographic-Data-Report.pdf (accessed December 12, 2019); Peter B. Nelson, Alexander Oberg, and Lise Nelson, “Rural Gentrification and Linked Migration in the United States,” Journal of Rural Studies 26: 1 (2010): 343-345.

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economist Michael L. Walden details, since 1970, the median age in nearly all of North

Carolina’s mountain counties far outpaced the state mean. More specifically, in 2000, the median age of the Asheville area exceeded the state average by five years and its in-migration rate remained one of the highest for any metropolitan center in North Carolina.6

Such trends help center Southern Appalachia within the larger national movements that demographers term the “Rural Renaissance” or “Rural Rebound” in the last four decades of the twentieth century. However, with each wave of mountain transplants, many came to resent the successive group of new residents as threatening the natural bounty that attracted them both. In doing so, environmentalists in groups like the NCNR and UFBDA came to emulate what geographers call “Last Settler’s Syndrome.”7 According to this logic, adopted by many retirees and residents of the mountains, the arrival of more outsiders threatened to re-create the urban and suburban landscapes that many of these migrants tried to escape from such an exurban setting.

As a result, many “settlers” within successive waves of new transplants hoped that once they secured their place in the mountains, that they could close the proverbial roads behind them to prevent more and more from following them.

Despite a revival of land management efforts at the state and federal levels in the 1970s, such policy changes did little to curb, and in some cases propped up, the growth of residential

6 Michael L. Walden, North Carolina in the Connected Age: Challenges and Opportunities in a Globalizing Economy (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2008), esp. 108-158. 7 As historian Jack Davis describes a similar phenomenon among both longtime Floridians and migrants to the Sunshine State in the mid-twentieth century, “A strange continuum materialized: native Floridians complained about planners and developers paving paradise so that new people could move to Florida, and those new people complained about paving more of paradise so that newer people could come, and the newer people complained about…and before long, no one knew what paradise was anymore” See: Jack Davis, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea (New York: Liveright, 2017); On “Last Settler’s Syndrome,” see: W.E. Riebsame, H. Gosnell, and D.M. Theobald, “Land Use and Landscape Change in the Colorado Mountains I: Theory, Scale, and Pattern,” Mountain Research and Development 16: 4 (November 1996): 395-405; and Kristian Cockerill and Peter Groothius, “Last Settler’s Syndrome and Resource Use in Southern Appalachia,” The Journal of Rural and Community Development 9: 3 (2014): 319-336.

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and tourism development in the Southern Mountains. Having received a jump-start from the work of numerous New Deal agencies, Appalachia’s recreational economy in the latter half of the twentieth century continued to benefit from federal road-building, wilderness management, and the expansion of nearby national parks. However, trying to capitalize on this public support, private homebuilders and real estate agents created a favorable market for second-home building in the region. For example, Buncombe County, North Carolina—which includes the city of

Asheville and surrounding rural communities—saw over 2000 new second-homes built between

1970 and 1990, or about a four-fold increase over those twenty years.8 With most Americans having realized the dream of homeownership, many now looked for second-homes as either investment opportunities or as another marker of their affluent status.

Concerns about land ownership and land use became potent political issues in late twentieth century Appalachia because of changes to the market for rural land. Developers— namely power companies, private homebuilders, timber corporations, and the federal government—saw mountain land as valuable because it was cheap, available, and marketable.

The decline of the traditional farm economy in the South left acres of cleared land in what could be portrayed as “pastoral” settings. For example, in rural Swain County, North Carolina—near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park—the amount of land available for agricultural use declined from nearly thirty percent in 1939 to just under three percent in 1974. Such trends continued into the late 1970s and 1980s. In the seventies alone, the state’s mountain counties as a collective saw three times as much farm acreage be removed from production as compared to the

8 Gordon McKinney, “The Fractured Land of the Sky: The Image of Western North Carolina During the 1986 Nuclear Waste Controversy” North Carolina Historical Review 82: 3 (July 2005), 329-331. Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 188-201.

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state as a whole.9 Like other parts of the rural South, the rise of new tourism economies rested on the irony that underdevelopment represented an opportunity for development.

While most historical studies of land issues in late-twentieth-century Appalachia put a rightful emphasis on the extractive economy by which outside energy and timber companies exploited the region’s resources, the lands of Western North Carolina and other parts of the

Southern Mountains experienced different pressures from developers, both from within and outside the region. The Appalachian land boom of the late twentieth century saw real estate developers swoop in and subdivide large swaths of the rural landscape.10 In response, activists like those at the NCNR worked in concert with staff at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School and scholars like sociologist John Gaventa to shine a harsh light on the changes wrought by coal barons and resort owners alike. However, for these and other environmentally-inclined citizens groups, waging a campaign against a plethora of development groups and real estate agencies, some of which had local roots, entailed an altogether different challenge than federal agencies or power companies.11 New subdivisions, golf courses, and gated neighborhoods with golf courses popped up in nearly every county across Western North Carolina. Even with such a diffuse, gradual development, environmentalists struggled to rally public outcry behind the defense of a particular place, when seemingly every place faced an onslaught of building activity.

9 Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 143-144; C. Brenden Martin, Tourism in the Mountain South: A Double- Edged Sword (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 186. 10 See: “The New American Land Rush,” Time, October 1, 1973; U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, et. al, Subdividing Rural America: Impacts of Recreational Lot and Second Home Development (Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976); Robert Healey and James Short, The Market for Rural Land (Washington D.C: Conservation Foundation, 1981). 11 As Steven Noll and David Tegeder point out in their study of the successful campaign to kill the Corps’ Cross- Florida Barge Canal project, grassroots activists found it difficult to make political hay out an issue of population growth and so-called “people pollution,” in the same way that bulldozers intent on destroying a specific place did. See: Noll and Tegeder, Ditch of Dreams.

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However, some boosters, politicians, and even grassroots activists who defended the New or French Broad Rivers did not fear the growth of the region’s tourism economy. Rather, they welcomed it. Driven by the belief that the region’s exurban communities offered a landscape of retreat, the anti-dam campaigns of the 1970s also drew an even-closer link between nature and real estate in the Southern Mountains, even as the organizations they spawned tried to protect rural communities from the excesses of development. For example, the North Carolina Travel

Department wasted no time trying to cash in on the successes of the New River campaign. A full-page advertisement in a 1979 issue of Southern Living opened with the words: “Come See the State That Kept the World’s Second Oldest River From Dying of Unnatural Causes.”12

Across the border in Virginia, towns like Galax promoted recreational opportunities associated with the river and hiking at nearby Mount Rogers, the state’s highest peak. For communities up and down the river, promoting “natural” tourism like canoeing the New continued to be a feature attraction. But they also brought new residential pressures.13 Fears of dam-powered displacement subsided, but in their place came similar concerns about economic and cultural changes, although they differed in both scale and form.

Although certain cities or resorts in Southern Appalachia—like Asheville—had long been considered an arcadian playground for America’s wealthy, three factors drove the previously unseen spread of real estate and recreational development in the late twentieth century. In addition to cheap, available land, the growing impact of automobility on American tourism combined with more opportunities for year-round recreation or retirement helped to encourage a spree of home-building and real estate sales in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the three

12 North Carolina Travel Department Advertisement, Southern Living Vol. 14, no. 1 (January 1979). 13 Will Sarvis, “The Mount Rogers National Recreation Area and the Rise of Public Involvement in Forest Service Planning,” Environmental History Review 18: 2 (Summer 1994): 53-58.

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decades from 1950 to 1980, Western North Carolina saw a nearly fourfold increase in the number of seasonal homes, growing from 6,986 to 26,721 in that span.14 Whereas previous land booms remained concentrated in urban areas like Asheville, North Carolina or areas with unique amenities, expanded rural infrastructure combined with clever marketing helped attract more visitors and second-home buyers from the suburbs and other, growing metropolitan regions. In

North Carolina, especially out-of-state developers from South Florida, Atlanta—both new centers of Sunbelt prosperity—and the Washington, D.C. suburbs brought capital and ready buyers to the mountains in search of a recreational oasis away from the congested nature of metropolitan existence.

The first factor behind changes in Appalachian land ownership—the availability of cheap property—became a flashpoint in the dam controversies of the 1970s. That both the TVA and

APCO put such an emphasis on land acquisition for so-called “shoreline development” points to the fact that real estate throughout Appalachia was becoming an increasingly valuable commodity. As Bruce Wheeler and Michael McDonald document in their study of the TVA’s

Tellico Dam project, the agency’s top brass saw the purchase of large tracts of non-reservoir land for “land enhancement and recreation” as a means of inflating the benefits in their cost-benefit ratios, often beyond reasonable expectations.15 Yet, this selling point also carried great risks.

Behind closed doors, TVA officials worried that purchasing, condemning, and reselling of land miles away from the planned lakes both opened up the agency’s plans to fierce political criticism, while also exposing it to further legal jeopardy. For reasons that seem inexplicable only with hindsight, anti-Tellico groups did not exploit the “takings issue” to the extent feared by

14 Martin, Tourism in the Mountain South, 186 15-Wheeler and McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam, 91-94.

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the TVA. However, it did become a major sticking point for dam builders in Western North

Carolina. NCNR activists proved adept at using revelations of APCO’s past shoreline development scheme at Smith Mountain Lake alongside its growing landholdings along the river to support their argument that the company came to the valley as rapacious destroyers, not benevolent saviors.16

Like the real estate agents that marketed mountain views for residential construction, the

TVA and other dam builders understood that Appalachian communities’ land and water were no longer merely sources of energy for homes or factories. Following the examples of the back-to- the-landers who fled or retired to the New and French Broad River Valleys and became dam fighters, the aesthetics of rural life mattered just as much to developers as it did to environmentalists. The shift from industrial to real estate capitalism, from manufacturing to tourism, from chasing smokestacks to raising rooftops, took hold in post-1970 Appalachia as it did across other parts of the South.17

Private utilities and homebuilders were not the only land buyers to seize the opportunities presented to buy mountain real estate. Indeed, federal agencies also got in on the act. Amid the

New River controversy, the federal land footprint grew in Grayson County, Virginia, where the creation of Mt. Rogers National Recreation Area aroused protests from local landowners and citizens groups. The controversy revolved around more than just the protection of Virginia’s highest peak for hikers, climbers, and horseback riders. To displaced around one hundred

16-Wheeler and McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam, esp. 129-131; Virgil Goode Jr. To Peter Crow, January 12, 1976; Peter Crow to Ham Horton, January 18, 1976, NCNR Records, Series 1, Box 1: “Correspondence,” Folder: “January 16-31, 1976.” 17 On the commodification of Appalachian scenery and viewscapes, see: Swanson, Commodifying the Mountains.

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families in the late 1960s.18 Although the federal government remained the biggest landowner in much of Southern Appalachia, the real estate boom of the late twentieth century ensured that private developers gobbled up much of the remaining land, often at below-market rates. As a

1975 report from scholars at the University of North Carolina’s Urban and Regional Planning

Department described the situation, since “most of the land supply of Western North Carolina tied up in national forests and parks… much of the privately-owned land quickly fell into the hands of outside speculators and second home owners.”19

Growing networks of state highways along with the federal Interstate Highway System made vacations or residences in the mountains more accessible. The building of Interstates 26 and 40 helped facilitate tourists’ access to the Asheville area and the French Broad River Valley.

With the completion of I-26’s southern route in 1969, the journey from the North Carolina mountains to the coastal areas along I-95 became much faster.20 The city of Asheville responded to these developments by making an urban freeway that encircled the city. To construct what would become I-240, the city worked with North Carolina’s Department of Transportation

(NCDOT) to destroy much of Beaucatcher Mountain. Despite some neighborhood opposition to this “mountain cut,” its completion refashioned the landscape of urban Asheville to meet the demands of the mobile, suburban residents and tourists intent on bypassing the city on their way to other area attractions.21

18 Si Kahn, “The Forest Service and Appalachia,” in Helen Matthews Lewis, Linda Johnson, and Donald Askins, eds., Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case (Boone: Appalachian f Press, 1978), 85-109, esp. 102- 103. 19 Benjamin Orsbon, “A Comparison of Land Use Legislation in Western North Carolina and Vermont,” Carolina Planning Vol. 1: 1 (Summer 1975), 14. 20 John C. Dills, “Tennessee Waits for N.C. Section of Interstate 40,” Asheville Citizen, January 2, 1966; “221-Mile I-26 Longest Of State’s Freeways,” Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC), February 28, 1979. 21 Perry Deane Young, “Goodbye, Asheville,” Harper’s Magazine, March 1, 1975, 68; Wayne King, “Open Cut in Mountain for Road Opposed,” New York Times, December 1, 1975

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The Beaucatcher affair, for many in Asheville and Western North Carolina, represented the continual human desire to reshape nature to make it more amenable to automobiles and expanding the possibilities for scenic drives. Subsequent interstates like I-77—which cut across much of western North Carolina and Virginia—helped further this pattern. As reporters from the

Institute for Southern Studies described the new road’s impact melodramatically, “the advent of

I-77 is going to open North Carolina up probably more than any single thing… North Carolina is prime meat.”22 The real estate boom across much of Southern Appalachia relied on the efforts of road-builders to reshape an often imposing, treacherous landscape into one that made leisure easier for prosperous consumers intent on breathing the fresh mountain air.

Lastly, the creation of artificial snow machines for ski resorts represented a more minor, yet still notable factor in creating new recreational-based communities across Southern

Appalachia. Much as interstates, cheap land, and strategic marketing helped expand the possibilities for seasonal, especially summertime residence, the ability to produce artificial snow ensured that winter recreation need not depend upon the capricious nature of the region’s weather.23

Although these three factors—cheap property, infrastructure, and new technologies— helped create the potential for rapid real estate investments in the Southern Mountains, they did not make it an inevitability. Rather, the determined efforts of developers, both from inside and outside the state, turned the land, water, and scenery of the mountains into prime real estate.

Although numerous communities across Southern Appalachia promoted themselves as

22 Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky. 23 Michael Gannon, Florida: A Short History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 77-86.

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playgrounds for the wealthy, the cascade of land buying in the latter half of the twentieth century stands out for its scope and volume.

Retreat from Subtropical Suburbia: “Florida People” and the Remaking of Western North Carolina

Real estate and tourism economies linked Western North Carolina and South Florida since the 1920s. Then, land booms in each region not only mirrored each other in the aggressive marketing of a tourism economy but also shared the same investors and banks, thus tying their economic fates together. When Florida’s land values went belly-up in 1926, the risky bets placed by the once-confident boosters and salesmen inflicted widespread economic pain for communities across both states.

Coupled with the stock market crash three years later, mountain banks found themselves unable to lend while tax revenues dried up, leaving local governments struggling under the crushing weight of mounting debts. In Asheville, the total property valuation fell by half from

$100 million in 1930 to just over $50 million in 1933, contributing to a public debt burden that reached 71% of assessed valuation. Hampered further the flight of white residents and businesses to the suburbs beginning in the 1950s, the city would not pay off its Depression-era debts until

1976.24 As the region’s urban hub, Asheville’s slow economic revival, compounded by the decline of small-scale farming operations, ensured that any impetus for regional planning and development in the second half of the twentieth century would require outside help.

After World War II, many of the developers who cashed in on Florida’s unprecedented postwar growth or “Big Bang” brought their prodigious marketing repertoire as well as their fat wallets north to invest in the mountains’ tourism economy. As historians Raymond Arsenault

24 Gannon, Florida: A Short History, 77-86; Chase, Asheville: A History, 173-181.

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and Gary Mormino write, underneath the umbrella of the American dream of “a car, a house, and a vacation,” adherents of “the Florida dream” followed the “California dream” and the “Hawaii dream,” in the belief that individual ambition could bring prosperity and happiness through a mere change in geography and climate.25 Yet, when millions of migrants and immigrants secured their slice of the Florida dream, where would they vacation or retire? A sense of restless prosperity combined with the stifling heat and evermore-crowded communities in Florida led both temporary “Snow Birds” and full-time residents to seek relief in the cooler air of the mountains, especially during the summer months. The real estate developers who reshaped the tourism industry in Western North Carolina took the back to the land impetus of the late 1960s and infused it with a capitalist logic, thus transforming the landscape of retreat itself into not just a place to be defended, but a commodity to be sold and enjoyed.

As the expansion of the Wolf Laurel Resort in Madison County in the early 1970s demonstrates, the pioneer nostalgia that brought many of the retirees-turned-dam fighters to the mountains also served as a key selling point to attract other, non-local residents. As mentioned in

Chapter 1, Madison County held the distinction of being one of the region’s poorest counties.

While local leaders and boosters jeered the defeat of the TVA’s dam project, they saw other opportunities to expand tourism and land development efforts already underway. For longtime area residents and businessmen like Sam Wheeler and his grandson Clay Jenkins, the abandoned home of the decaying, farm economy could be re-purposed to create an “authentic” mountain

25 Raymond Arsenault, St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream, 1888-1950 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996); Gary Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), esp. 1-12, 371 n1, quote on 11.

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retreat. Jenkins and Wheeler became some of the first employees of Wolf Laurel Resort in

1963.26

However, the expansion of a recreational economy in Madison came slowly. Working out of an old barn, locals like Jenkins found themselves joined non-locals like Sam Parker in disassembling, moving, rebuilding, and then selling log cabins to tourists, retirees, and seasonal residents. Although a native of nearby Knoxville, Parker and his wife Paula saw themselves as children of the suburbs, who became infected with what he called “the old back to the earth feeling.” They moved to Madison County in 1967 as outsiders who found a slice of “pleasant living” in this rural community some considered a backwater.27 Learning from local craftsmen,

Parker and others saw in Wolf Laurel a resort that stayed true to its cultural roots while still adapting to the budding market for mountain real estate. This approach was both practical and strategic. As Clay Jenkins bragged a reporter for the local newspaper about Wolf Laurel’s

“Settler’s Village,” his crew—which he noted included descendants of famed nineteenth-century pioneer Daniel Boone—used only logs from cabins that were at least eighty years old and rebuilt them according to “the signs of the moon,” which ensured that they would be free of termites.28

With the first dozen cabins of “Settler’s Village,” Wolf Laurel grew into a retreat that offered a rustic, mountain atmosphere with the conveniences of modern living plus a golf course, ski slopes, and gated entrances.29

In its first decade, Wolf Laurel grew from a small, bucolic collection of mountainside cabins, owned by mostly local buyers, into a massive resort controlled by a South Florida real

26 Bob Terrell, “Rebuilder of Log Cabins,” Marshall News-Record, March 15, 1973. 27 Interview with Sam Parker, by Rob Amberg, 5 December 2000, K-0252, SOHP. 28 Bob Terrell, “Rebuilder of Log Cabins,” Marshall News-Record, March 15, 1973. 29 “Homesites Opened at Resort,” The Yancey (Burnsville) Journal, June 17, 1976.

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estate powerhouse. When Sam Parker came to the resort in 1967, it included a few cabins but lacked the feature amenities—ski runs and a golf course—that would make it attractive. But, he recalled years later, Wolf Laurel did have the good fortune of owning “2,500 acres of just gorgeous mountain Eden.” Within three years, it added the skiing area, golf course, and extensive infrastructure as it more than doubled its land holdings for a total acreage around

6,000. In April 1970, Dynamic Systems Inc. of Melbourne, Florida acquired Wolf Laurel for an undisclosed amount.30 Dubbing it “The Great Escape,” the new owners continued to expand

Wolf Laurel into a sprawling enterprise. By 1976, it opened a new section of one to two-acre, wooded lots priced at a minimum of $6,500 that promised stunning views of the mountains as well as access to numerous amenities, including a “fully stocked Trout Pond.”31 With hand- crafted log cabins bearing the names of peoples and places like “Cherokee,” “Pisgah,” and

“Unicoi,” not to mention the trout ponds, and a restaurant serving self-proclaimed “good ol’ mountain food,” Wolf Laurel offered the veneer of authenticity to tourists and seasonal residents seeking respite in the wilds of Appalachia.32 Indeed, the vernacular architecture of this resort indicates how at both a material and symbolic level, the well-preserved ruins of the old farm economy became re-purposed as aesthetic fixtures of the Southern Mountains’s new, recreational economy. With a name like “The Great Escape,” Wolf Laurel mirrored other resorts in promoting Appalachia as a place of retreat, rather than one of poverty or crowds and pollution.

In the early 1970s, Florida-based development companies like the one that bought Wolf

Laurel snapped up vast swaths of land across the mountains and then sold this “North Carolina

30 Interview with Sam Parker, by Rob Amberg, SOHP; “Wolf Laurel Development Acquired by Florida Corp.,” Marshall News-Record, April 16, 1970. 31 “Homesites Opened at Resort,” The Yancey Journal, June 17, 1976. 32 “Wolf Laurel Open House,” Yancey Record, July 9, 1970.

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Dream” to eager investors and second-home buyers. For example, a Fort Lauderdale company known as Realtec became one of the most prominent land buyers in the region. In 1971, it announced plans for Connestee Falls, a 4000-acre golf course and resort community near the headwaters of the French Broad River. This occurred while farmers, retirees, and local boosters locked horns with the TVA. Touted as a “Un-City,” Realtec marketed this community as a foil and an antidote to the various ills of urban life. In its promotional fliers featuring Eddie Albert, star of the television series Green Acres, the company promised an “uncrowded, unhurried, unpolluted” lifestyle.33 To “Snow Birds” fleeing either the industrial cities of the North and

Midwest or the rapidly overcrowding suburbs of South Florida, a mountain vacation or residence offered simplicity above all else. In addition to “uncrowded, unhurried, unpolluted,” the company could have added “undeveloped,” since the legacies of displacement and poverty helped make such developments possible.

In short order, both native Floridians and “Snow-Birds” alike flocked to the planned community. Relying on time-tested strategies from selling Florida real estate, Realtec advertised in Miami-area newspapers, promising opportunities for those who wanted to make a quick profit by moving to the mountains for the summer to enjoy the “cool mountain breezes” while “selling to the thousands of Floridians who know and love Western North Carolina.”34 Such sales schemes projected confidence that Connestee Falls’s homes would sell themselves, which they did for the most part. Realtec and similar companies pitched mountain vacations and residences

33 James Branscome and Peggy Matthews, “Selling the Mountains,” Southern Exposure Vol. 2 (Fall, 1974), 122- 123. 34 “If You Can Really Sell, You Can Really Earn!” Miami Herald, July 4, 1971; On the buying and selling of the “Florida Dream,” see Mormino, Land of Sunshine, 44-75.

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as more than escapes from the sweltering heat of summer. Now, amenity-rich vacation areas could recreate the exclusive and convenient nature of the suburbs in verdant, rural settings.

Realtec’s entry into the mountain real estate market signified a larger trend where pockets of so-called “Florida people” emerged in the 1970s. Within months of breaking ground on

Connestee Falls, Realtec purchased and began expansion on the historic Sapphire Valley ski resort nearby. Having been taken over by a Palm Beach family in the 1950s, the company expanded the resort beyond the prominent inn that had stood there since 1896 to include condominiums and single-family homes.35 By 1974, Realtec and two other Florida firms possessed a total of 26,000 acres in Transylvania County.36 However, the growth of the second- home industry in the French Broad River Valley offered little to longtime residents. For example, one report found that “at Connestee Falls, one-third of an acre sold for about $7,900, and half of an acre cost up to $15,500.” Once built, the Realtec’s condominiums sold for somewhere between $30,000 and $55,000. Meanwhile, advertisements for non-resort properties in the Miami

Herald promised “hobby farm[s]” with several acres for at least $15,000.37 In an area with a median family income under $5,000 per year, the rise of such luxurious homes not only reshaped local tax bases but further incentivized the selling of farms and homes by longtime residents.

Further north, in the New River Valley, the shift in land ownership proved not as dramatic as some resort areas near the French Broad. Even with the growth of both

35 “Sapphire Valley Inn Purchased,” Miami Herald, May 30, 1971. 36 Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, 171. 37 James Russell, “New Frontier for Developers: NC Hills,” Miami Herald, August 8, 1971; In drawing from this report, I use the median levels because, as its authors point out, the “mean of $6072 is pulled up by a number of very high incomes,” Western North Carolina Regional Planning Commission, Economy of Brevard, N.C. (Raleigh: Western North Carolina Regional Planning Commission, 1964), 18-19, North Carolina State Documents Collection, North Carolina State Library, http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p249901coll22/id/42487/rec/47 (accessed January 12, 2017).

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manufacturing and the Christmas tree farming industry in the former, out-of-state developers and tourists made their presence felt in similar ways as the latter.38 As mentioned in the previous chapter, a South Florida company called Ecological Developments Inc. (EDI) became the largest landowner in Ashe County by the mid-1980s. In one subdivision the company built on a mountain overlooking the North Fork of the New River, they crammed just under two hundred lots on a land area of around sixty-seven acres.39 In its short time building subdivisions in communities across the mountains, EDI became infamous for cutting corners and racking up fines for failing to control erosion and degrading the water quality in rivers like the New through sedimentation pollution. In 1985, the state’s Department of Natural Resources won a record- setting civil penalty of $68,500 from EDI for repeated violations at its Three Top Mountain subdivision in Ashe County.40 In this way, the second-home industry inflicted irreparable, although often not immediately obvious, damage to the environment of the Southern Mountains.

Although most Florida-based developers operated on corporate scales with the goal of wringing substantial profits from Appalachian real estate, other Floridians saw in Western North

Carolina the opportunity to escape the summer heat and continue their lives as either retirees or resort operators. The Rubin family of Miami and the Blackwell family of Fort Lauderdale both fell into this category. In the former case, Joe Rubin bought and ran the Osceola Lake Inn since

1941, a then-forty-year-old lodge with private lake and beach just outside Hendersonville, near the southern headwaters of the French Broad River. As family members commented after sixty

38 For a brief summary of the history of the Christmas tree farming industry in North Carolina, see: Jill Sidebottom, “The Christmas Tree Industry in North Carolina,” USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-58 (2009), 71-73, https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs/rmrs_p058/rmrs_p058_071_073.pdf (accessed July 20, 2019). 39 Wallach, “The Slighted Mountains of Upper East Tennessee,” 359. 40 Water Resources Institute of the University of North Carolina “Record Fine for Sediment Control Violations,” News Bulletin No. 231 (November 1985), 3-4.

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years of running the inn, they catered to people like them, estimating that their clientele drew hailed primarily from the Jewish communities in and around Miami. In the 1950s, for example, ads in the Miami Herald touted the chance to dine on the “Finest Jewish-American Cuisine” while enjoying “cool, relaxing vacations” at the Osceola Lake Inn.41 The sizable presence of

South Florida’s Jewish and (later) Latinx populations indicates the increasingly diverse population of new mountain residents. For many, retreating to a vacation home in Appalachia represented a statement about the good life as predicated on the enjoyment of nature’s bounty just as much as it marked the privileges of class or racial identity for others.

Other Florida families like the Blackwells continued this trend further north near the

North Carolina-Virginia border. In 1995, hotel owner Etson J. Blackwell Jr. told reporters from the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel that happenstance thirty years earlier ensured that a brochure for the quaint, mountain village of Blowing Rock, North Carolina caught his eye in the local

Chamber of Commerce office and “[it] just looked so inviting.” When he and his wife visited the town located just ten miles south of the New River’s headwaters, they found it lived up to the brochure. There, the Blackwells happened upon a cash-strapped inn with an owner eager to sell, and they jumped at the opportunity. Soon, they split their time between running a restaurant in

South Florida during the winter, before heading up to Blowing Rock to look over the refurbished

Farm House Inn, where visitors could enjoy Florida-themed decor while dining on traditional, mountain dishes like fresh trout and country ham.42

In the estimation of the Blackwells and local officials, both print advertising and word-of- mouth among wealthy Floridians helped Blowing Rock grow into a booming summer retreat. By

41 “Vacation Accommodations: North Carolina,” Miami Herald, July 6, 1952; Jennie Jones-Giles, “An Inn’s Re- birth,” Hendersonville Times-News, June 27, 2004. 42 E.A. Torriero, “Snow Birds Add Second Roost: North Carolina,” Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, August 6, 1995.

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1980, its year-round population had increased from a few hundred to over 1,000 with a seasonal peak of nearly 10,000 residents in the summer months. The presence of Floridians proved so strong there—one local realtor declared in what may be an apocryphal story—in the 1980s a man running for public office in Broward County bought a billboard in Blowing Rock to promote his campaign.43 Other resort-based communities saw similar, if not larger, increases in population thanks to seasonal residents, primarily from Florida and elsewhere. In Macon County, the once sleepy town of Highlands experienced its population jump from a non-summer count of a few thousand to nearly 20,000 each season beginning in the 1970s.44

However, the real estate boom also offered clear benefits to local communities, namely propping up the tax bases of small mountain counties with once-declining populations. And new or seasonal residents, developers, and tourism officials made sure longtime mountaineers did not forget this. Retirees like Charlie Udell, who left the Miami area to take in the view high atop

Sugar Mountain, understood, or perhaps overestimated, the economic impact of “halfbacks.” In an interview, Udell boasted, “I don’t give a damn what people around here think. If it wasn’t for people from Florida, these people would be starving.”45 By the end of the 1970s, the growing popularity of the mountains as a destination for both part-time as well as yearlong Florida residents, area natives found themselves torn between welcoming or despising the obvious changes in their midst. The Blackwells, like the Rubins before them, represented a smaller, yet critical wave of Florida vacationers, who saw existing mountain resorts as both vacation spots

43 E.A. Torriero, “Snow Birds Add Second Roost: North Carolina,” Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, August 6, 1995; Henry Leifermann, “The Ugly Floridian: They Came, They Saw, They Developed. And North Carolina’s Native Sons Are Restless,” Sun-Sentinel, July 6, 1986. 44 Branscome and Matthews, “Selling the Mountains,” Southern Exposure 1: 2 (July 1974), 122-129, key statistics on 126. 45 E.A. Torriero, “Snow Birds Add Second Roost: North Carolina,” Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, August 6, 1995.

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and business opportunities. Their efforts helped ensure that a critical mass of interested, wealthy buyers from Florida and beyond would invest market for multi-lot, second home construction.

On the flip side, many longtime residents of the mountains viewed Floridians with a mix of ambivalence and disgust. As anthropologist Stephen William Foster noted when doing his fieldwork in the New River Valley in the 1970s, “outsiders are just ‘tourists’ or ‘Floridians’— rather pejoratives terms for many Ashe County people.”46 As Mary Lou Rawlins—a middle-aged white woman who lived in the area her whole life—told Foster, “I just hate to see people movin’ in, these Floridians. The outsiders bring a lot of changes which many times are not for the best.”

However, in the next breath, she qualified that statement by saying that a couple from Florida who moved next door to her, “are real nice,” before adding, “you couldn’t find nicer people anywhere.”47 In distinguishing between outsiders as an abstract group and individual neighbors who came from Florida, Rawlins’s statement echoed the sentiments of other native mountaineers. For those who did protest or lament the land sales and new construction, they directed their anger at the companies that bought and built, more than those moved to the area.

This distinction reflected the deeper memory of trauma at land-grabbing and displacement throughout the Southern Mountains.

To be sure, Floridians were not alone in buying up properties for mountain vacations or residences. To take one example, many resorts and subdivisions like Lake Toxaway in

Southwestern North Carolina—with its proximity to Georgia—saw an influx of wealthy

Atlantans, including members of the prominent Allen and Woodruff families.48 Also, many

46 Foster, The Past is Another Country, 51. 47 Mary Lou Rawlins, qtd. In Foster, “Identity As Symbolic Production,” 254. 48 James Russell, “New Frontier for Developers: NC Hills,” Miami Herald, August 8, 1971.

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residents and landowners in Western North Carolina welcomed and tried to cash in on the tourism boom. In Ashe County, the Colvard family saw little downside in selling their sprawling farm on the South Fork of the river to a real estate company based in the Blue Ridge that built a planned community called Jefferson Landing there. Interviewed years later, Dr. Dean Colvard— a native of the region who became chancellor of UNC-Charlotte—described with some pride how his uncle’s farm became “the location for the beautiful golf course and clubhouse designated as Jefferson Landing.”49 However, the documented use of “Florida people” as a pejorative term applied to most tourists and summer residents indicated the preponderant influence of Sunshine State residents, retirees, and developers on the mountain communities of

Western North Carolina. In short, they became an easy scapegoat for those concerned residents, journalists, and politicians who sought a target on which to vent their frustrations and express a sense of indifferent powerlessness about the region’s expanding tourism economy.

Growth and its Discontents: North Carolina and the Politics of Land Use Management

“Our mountains are just being ruined,” farmer Mack Higgins bemoaned in an interview in the early 1970s. Having just denied an offer from a Florida tourist to buy his land, Higgins grew angry with his neighbors’ willingness to sell their farms.50 Although some mountaineers, like Higgins’s neighbors, recognized the simple, economic benefits provided by the arrival of new tourists, others treated their arrival with a mix of alarm and disdain. Falling in this latter camp, Richard Jackson, a writer who grew up near Hendersonville, published a 1974 essay entitled “Come Frost,” a sarcastic reference to the seasonal migrants who fled at the first signs of winter. In it, Jackson goes further to rebuke the whole logic of resort development, positing that

49 Dean W. Colvard Interview, in Cooper and Cooper, eds., People of the New River, 80. 50 Mack Higgins, quoted in Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 142.

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the drive to create gated subdivisions reflected an “escapism” on the part of wealthy Americans

“running from the anger of blacks and Chicanos, and poor whites in the urban areas.” No longer content with their suburban enclaves, he wrote further, developers imposed “the same mentality that built those treeless, monotonous suburbs… are doing the development up here.”51 Although he exaggerates in reducing migration to escape, Jackson’s critique of the appeal of a landscape of retreat for disaffected suburbanites and city dwellers still illustrates growing resentment among mountain natives at the exclusionary nature of the recreational economy.

With diminishing marginal lands for agriculture, most mountain farmers sold portions or all of their properties to residential developers rather than being bought out by larger, agricultural operations as in other parts of the South. A 1975 study of land sales by the North Carolina Public

Interest Research Group (NCPIRG) found a 120 percent increase from 1968 to 1973 in the number of land tracts under fifty acres in Avery and Watauga Counties. These smaller lots saw a jump in non-local ownership of 164 percent during the same time.52 The NCPIRG—a consumer watchdog and state affiliate of Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group—initiated a wave of studies over the following decade that would heap withering criticism upon the architects of the mountain land boom. For example, journalist Jim Branscome described for readers in periodicals like Southern Exposure and The Mountain Eagle how companies employed aggressive and underhanded tactics to convince landowners, especially those that were elderly or illiterate, to sell or sign over their properties. These concerned observers also drew attention to the fact that Floridians drove much of the impetus behind the boom in the real estate market. In

51 Richard Jackson, “Come Frost,” in Laurel Schackelford and Bill Weinberg, eds, Our Appalachia: An Oral History (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 370-381, quotes on 376. 52 William Cary, Molly Johnson, Meredith Golden, and Chip Van Noppen, The Impact of Recreational Development (Durham: NC Public Interest Research Group, 1975), reprinted in Steve Fisher, ed., A Landless People in a Rural Region (New Market, TN: Highlander Center, May 1979), 138-143.

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the area surrounding Beech Mountain—then the largest ski resort in the Southeast and located just outside Boone—tax records indicated that Florida buyers accounted for one-fourth of all home sales between 1968 and 1975.53 These developments raised alarms for mountain activists out of concerns that the influx of new residents and capital threatened to displace longtime residents from their homes while inflicting grave environmental harms.

The Highlander Folk School, a haven for dissent and progressivism in the South, and similar institutions took note of these developments. Over the following decade, Highlander backed studies like A Landless People in a Rural Region and produced other materials documenting the problem. These efforts culminated in the formation of the Appalachian Land

Ownership Task Force (ALOTF) and the publication of its report in 1981 detailing the massive extent of land loss in the region.54 In each of these studies, the authors asserted that the recreational and industrial economies in the Southern Mountains continued a pattern of absentee ownership and economic colonialism that offered little to mountaineers themselves. Whereas coal and timber companies often benefited from land holdings appraised at below-market rates, the growing demand for resort and second-home construction increased rural land values, often pricing out longtime residents from single-family homes.55

Although most state leaders ignored such concerns, choosing instead to promote tourism development as both a job creator and boon for local tax rolls, other state officials worried about the environmental consequences of these trends. Randy Cotten, an employee at the state’s

53 Robert R. Gottfried, “The Effect of Recreation Communities on Local Land Prices: The Case of Beech Mountain,” The American Economist 32: 1 (March 1988): 59-65, relevant statistic on 60. 54 Steve Fisher, ed., A Landless People in a Rural Region (New Market, TN: Highlander Center, May 1979); Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force, Who Owns Appalachia? Land Ownership and Its Impact (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); Lewis, Johnson, and Askins, Colonialism in Modern America. 55 See: Healey and Short, The Market for Rural Land, 226-245.

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Division of Land Resources described the problem as one “caused by out-of-state development companies which are often based in Florida,” who would “buy whole mountainsides, and quickly cut miles of substandard roads that quickly wash out” contributing to erosion and pollution.

Another state employee, interviewed anonymously by the magazine Wildlife in North Carolina, begged the publication’s readers for their help in reporting environmental violations.56 Even with mounting evidence of the social and environmental costs of second-home construction few legislative mechanisms existed to regulate it outside of small fines for erosion violations.

For all the hand-wringing about the loss of Appalachian lands, most mountain legislators and county commissions had little appetite for substantive changes to land use laws. Also, critics of land development often had few pragmatic solutions themselves. To take one example, journalist Jim Branscome proposed the very unrealistic ordinance that “resort complexes that serve only middle class skiers and other kinds of intruders… should be prohibited.”57

Meanwhile, other events signaled the difficulties of passing laws to regulate the use of mountain lands. For instance, the rejection of the TVA’s attempt at planned development in Western North

Carolina signaled a growing distaste for vast, regional planning schemes. In its place, leaders like the UFBDA’s own Jere Brittain emphasized the importance of local knowledge as the first step in the process of land use planning. In a 1972 letter to the Asheville-Citizen, he argued that the

TVA plan advanced as far as it did only because the Upper French Broad area lacked sufficient leadership. Instead, Brittain and the UFBDA suggested that “if land use policy and planning are to be effective, especially in rural areas, the policy must originate with the people.”58 However,

56 Mark Taylor, “They’re Tearing Up the Countryside,” Wildlife in North Carolina 48: 1 (January 1984): 10-14, quotes on 10. 57 Jim Branscome, “Land Reform is a Must if Appalachia is to Survive,” The Mountain Eagle, January 4, 1973. 58 Dr. Jere Brittain, “Next Logical Step in a Regional Plan,” Asheville Citizen, December 24, 1972.

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as became clear in the following years, Brittain’s opinions resonated with only a small, but passionate band of mountaineers.

Ironically, the push for the Blue Ridge Project, at least, illustrated the promises and perils of Brittain’s wish. Interested only in running a profitable operation and being a good corporate citizen, APCO had no pretenses in devising a plan for orderly, regional development as the TVA did. However, their proposal forced local governments to consider adopting comprehensive zoning to prevent the very haphazard sprawl that the NCNR and other citizens groups promised would follow if the dams were built. For example, officials in the three-county region targeted by the Blue Ridge Project shelved plans for zoning shortly after President Ford signed the scenic river bill. Absent the dams, local leaders saw no reason to raise the hackles of landowners and developers so long as the region maintained an economy based on so-called “low-impact” industries such as agriculture and tourism.59 Still, such an explanation did not satisfy everyone.

Recognizing the need for land use planning to regulate the growth of “fragile” and unique areas like the river valleys, North Carolina leaders tried to exert some measure of state oversight even amid the battle with APCO.

At the state level, Governor Holshouser pushed for two, nearly identical land use planning bills beginning in 1973. One targeted the mountains, while the other addressed North

Carolina’s coastal areas. The proposed Mountain Area Management Act (MAMA) addressed the ethical tensions that lay at the heart of the dam-building controversies. As one state official put it, for many Carolinians, the goals of “growth, progress, and broadening the tax base… to break the chain of poverty,” collided with the reality that “uncontrolled growth, like a cancer, is not

59 James F. Shepherd, “The Effect of Turnaround Migration on the Rural Landscape: A Study of Grayson County, Virginia,” M.A. Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (1986):

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progress.” Concerned over the “increasing pressures” on mountain communities, legislators in the General Assembly cited the “conflicting needs of a society expanding in industrial development, in population, and in the recreational aspirations of its citizens,” as the rationale behind coordinated land use between local and state governments.60

Holshouser and the bill’s authors set out a legislative strategy that prioritized the Coastal

Area Management Act (CAMA) before seeking passage of MAMA. If all went according to plan, the Governor and his aides reasoned, a statewide law for managing growth could be passed to establish a path-breaking triumvirate of environmental protections for a Southern state.61

Spearheaded by the bipartisan duo of Republican Ham Horton of Winston-Salem and Democrat

Willis Whichard of Durham, the push for land use management came ostensibly from legislators within the metropolitan areas of the central part of the state. Fresh of his work to help vanquish the New River dams, Horton tried to recruit legislators from all parts of North Carolina behind these bills. In a fiery speech defending these proposals, he exhorted his colleagues to see that

“land use legislation is a shield against the smash and grab materialism which we in the South have so long despised!”62 Drawing on his experiences defending the New River, Horton saw government as a protector for agrarian lifestyles and communities against the predatory land- grabbing of corporations, whether for hydroelectric dams or mountain real estate. In the rural imaginary constructed here, the simple life enjoyed by white mountaineers meant they knew neither poverty nor greed.

60 David Klinger, “Protective Laws Urged,” Daily Tar Heel, November 12, 1973; Mountain Area Management Act, quoted in North Carolina Reports: Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of North Carolina Vol. 295 (1979): 707-708. 61 Barry Jacobs, “How CAMA Was Born,” North Carolina Insight 5: 1 (May 1982): 9. 62 Hamilton Horton, quoted in Lamm, “So You Want A Land Use Bill?” 61.

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Like his Republican colleague, Whichard saw the issue in similar, regional terms. In an interview with Southern Living magazine, the Durham legislator predicted that if left unchecked,

“the inducements that are drawing projected growth to the South—social amenities, natural resources, available labor, and viable communities—are the very things that will be destroyed by this growth.” Planning, in Whichard’s mind, would help North Carolina “avoid repeating

Northern mistakes in a Southern setting.”63 In other words, without geographic limits to industrialization and residential sprawl, the rural South would cease to resemble its former self.

Echoing the concerns of environmental activists in the mountains, Horton and Whichard saw river valleys in the mountains not as depressed areas, but as potential causalities of exurban migration. To most state legislators, the overriding intent of these bills seemed clear and admirable. However, the mechanism to accomplish the goals of orderly planning proved difficult to swallow for many North Carolinians.

Local governments objected to the land use bills on the twin grounds that it represented a power grab by state bureaucrats and it threatened to impose undue restrictions on any development or industrial activity. Namely, both CAMA and MAMA proposed the creation of regional commissions with members appointed by the Governor to establish basic guidelines for proper land use management. However, in debating the coastal bill, local officials from the eastern part of the state protested that their voices would be left off the commission, essentially making it a rubber-stamp for Holshouser or any subsequent executive’s environmental agenda.

Backed by bankers and developers, among other groups, they inserted an amendment establishing that most appointees to the resource commissions be from a list of nominees

63 Senator Willis P. Whichard and William D. Workman Jr., “On Using Land Well,” Southern Living (January 1977), 28a.

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submitted by local governments. Furthermore, one seat would be guaranteed for a “financier” or person with business experience.64 This would the first of many concessions that Whichard and company would make to ensure CAMA’s passage.

Second, officials from both the mountains and the coast also took issue with the rigorous permitting process that provided “teeth” to the land use bills’ enforcement provisions.

Essentially, this section required “major developments”—or those that covered more than twenty acres—taking place in “areas of environmental concern” to go through what one legislative aide called “full-scale, quasi-judicial procedures” before being granted a permit from the regional resource commission. Meanwhile, “minor developments” could receive permits from local agencies provided that their governments received state approval to do so.65 As the Marshall

News-Record in Madison County lampooned the provision in a February 1974 editorial, since any mountain land might be an “area of environmental concern,” they reasoned that “a permit could be required to erect or modify a building, to excavate or fill, or even to cut a tree.”66

Certainly hyperbolic, since critics soon carved out numerous exemptions for what constituted

“development,” this editorial hinted at the broader, rhetorical problem behind the land use bill push. Whether in the mountains or along the coast, the specter of outside institutions imposing their will on unwilling populations—this time in the form of the General Assembly rather than the power companies or real estate developers—reared its head. And in doing so, it undercut the model of local-state cooperation that proves successful in the New River dam fight.

64 Milton S. Heath Jr., “A Legislative History of the Coastal Area Management Act,” North Carolina Law Review 53: 2 (December 1974), 360-365; Ernest Messer, “Raleigh Report,” News-Record, February 28, 1974. 65 Heath, “A Legislative History,” 381-382. 66 Ernest Messer, “Raleigh Report,” News-Record, February 7, 1974.

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However, the political capital spent passing CAMA would cost Holshouser and the pro- planning forces in the end. Mountain Republicans, who usually backed the Governor as one of their own, abandoned him on MAMA. Heavy lobbying from local officials, backed by the timber industry and other area boosters, put the screws to mountain legislators. For example, the

Southern Appalachian Multiple Use Council—a political group organized by local timber interests formerly known as the Southern Hardwood Producers Association—proved vociferous opponents of MAMA.67 In a shrieking letter to the Marshall News-Record in Madison County, this council described the bill as seeking to “eliminate development, destroy property values, create artificial barriers to resource management and increase the overbearing layers of government.” Claiming to represent the majority of locals, the group made the point that such efforts ran against the “basic independence and conservative attitude(s)” that mountaineers cherished.68

Such strident rhetoric put the pro-planning forces on the defensive. Again, Senator

Whichard and others, mostly urban legislators, denied charges that MAMA would utilize the dreaded mechanisms of zoning or “public acquisition” of land to accomplish its goals. In the mountains, business and community leaders remained unconvinced. Phil Templeton, a realtor in

Boone, chided the bill’s architects as well-meaning, but having “no experience what[so]ever in developing land,” while possessing the naïve, “utopia[n]” goal of allowing people to live among the unspoiled beauty of nature while still providing enough jobs and income for everyone else.69

While Templeton seemed to at least empathize with the goals of MAMA, other mountaineers

67 Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons, 167. 68 “Council Voices Opinion on Area Management Act,” Marshall News-Record, June 5, 1975. 69 Phil Templeton, Interview with Jane Efrid, November 20, 1975, Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1966- 1995, W.L. Eury Collection, ASU.

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rejected it as another in a series of land grabs. As one county commissioner from the area told

Whichard at a 1975 hearing, “I’ll tell you what I want to want to do with my land—I want to do what I damn well please with it!”70 Localized resistance, this time backed by corporate interests, again felled the specter of a land takeover by an outside entity in Western North Carolina.

The failure to pass MAMA demonstrated that environmental politics in Southern

Appalachia had clear limits. Looking back on his term in office, Holshouser lamented that it represented one of the most glaring missed opportunities of his one term as governor.71 Zoning in the western part of the state would not occur only on a piecemeal basis. For much of the late twentieth century, it would be limited to the region’s major municipality Asheville.72

Like other parts of the South, residents of Southern Appalachia looked with suspicion upon attempts by any government to regulate or oversee the management of land. In explaining grassroots resistance to MAMA, Governor Holshouser would describe it in retrospect as rooted in “that populist thing about a man doing what he wanted to with his own land.”73 Although such anti-government or anti-elitist feelings no doubt contributed to the opposition, the motivations behind mountaineers’ opposition to land use planning were not always so byzantine. As historian

Kathryn Newfont notes in her study of environmental politics in southwestern North Carolina, local mountaineers protested clear-cutting by timber companies and wilderness protections with equal ferocity, as both seemed to limit access to recreational “commons.”74 In communities like

70 Whichard and Workman, “On Using Land Well,” Southern Living (January 1977), 28a 71 Note: Until that point, North Carolina Governors could not succeed themselves. This would change with Holshouser’s successor, Jim Hunt. James Holshouser, Interview with Jack Fleer, May 9, 1998, Interview C-0328, SOHP. 72 Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky; Martin, Tourism in the Mountain South. 73 Governor James Holshouser, Interview with Jack Fleer, May 9, 1998, Interview C-0328-3, SOHP. 74 Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons.

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these, decisions about land use had little formality to them. Instead, they relied on generations of local knowledge and experience to imbue meaning in a process similar to what cultural geographer J.B. Jackson famously termed the “vernacular landscape.”75 Memories of land grabs, whether by corporations or by the state, ran deep in Southern Appalachia.

For all its sincere intentions to protect mountaineers and their communities from the unyielding bulldozers of development, MAMA would have struggled to achieve its lofty goals, even if it passed. Critics and supporters of the bill alike admitted this in hindsight for two reasons. First, it carved out significant exceptions for the timber industry as well as private utilities. Both these industries would be largely exempt from the guidelines that would be established by the proposed Mountain Resources Commission. The NCPIRG, the consumer group that expressed concerns over the rise of land ownership changes with its concomitant study, backed MAMA but made clear that it proved insufficient in challenging corporate land ownership. Building its report on tourism and mountain development, the group noted that companies like APCO and Duke Energy, not to mention the lumbering operations of Champion

Paper and others that owned tens of thousands of acres across Western North Carolina.76 These exceptions indicated the power of geography in dictating public policies. As of the bill’s architects, Milton S. Heath Jr. wrote in 1974, state leaders considered zoning or pollution abatement policies to be urban solutions to urban problems, thus making them non-starters for rural industries or communities. “The North Carolina General Assembly,” Heath said, “has not yet shown itself willing to treat water pollution from agricultural activities or stream siltation

75 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 76 “PIRG Ends Year With Action,” The St. Andrews Lance, May 15, 1975.

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from lumber company operations on par with industrial contamination of the environment.”77

Heath’s statement illustrated the ongoing tension mountain communities faced between protecting the natural resources of the region for tourism and environmental health and allowing businesses to run profitable operations.

Although it is unknowable whether MAMA would have smoothed the roughest edges of residential growth in Western North Carolina, its failure marked the limits of environmentalism in Southern Appalachia. Despite the political momentum of the anti-dam campaigns and their clear concerns therein about development, regional boosters and politicians balked at the prospect of land use management, even as a public-private partnership. Furthermore, the conservative tendencies of many dam fighters contributed to MAMA’s defeat. Criticizing and fighting off one massive, industrial project represented an easier sell than trying to support regulation writ large. As defensive rather than proscriptive movements, they never claimed to offer a way forward for local or state governments. Instead, environmental activism in the mountains continued to maintain this reactive posture based on preserving an agrarian vision of rural landscapes.

In 1983, mountain leaders found themselves reunited with environmentalists for a brief moment. Unchecked by lax or nonexistent zoning ordinances, developers often cut obvious corners to boost their profit margins. At that point, the U.S. Capitol Corporation erected a ten- story resort on the top of Sugar Mountain, just outside Boone, that by most standards, excluding their own, constituted a monstrous, unsightly blight on the local landscape. As the builders of the

Sugar Top Resort—as it became known—doubled the five stories its original plans called for, it became a monument to arrogance for many natives of the region. By most estimates at the time,

77 Heath, “Legislative History of the Coastal Area Management Act,” 387.

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Floridians made up somewhere between fifty and seventy percent of the initial residents at Sugar

Top’s condominiums.78 Ten miles to the southeast, Hugh Morton—who regarded himself as a responsible developer for protecting much of nearby Grandfather Mountain as a state park— looked at his neighbors at Sugar Top with a kind of territorial disdain.79 Morton headed up a group called WNC Tomorrow (WNCT) that criticized Sugar Top and counted among its members former TVA backers Kermit Edney and Congressman Roy Taylor of Asheville. As

WNCT’s founding documents show, the organization grew out of a concern with the “lack of land use policies” in North Carolina, and the belief in “balanced, orderly growth which is not highly disruptive to the social structure of the region and which seeks to preserve those elements of the traditional culture which are of value.”80

In 1983, the North Carolina legislature mustered the will to pass the Mountain Ridge

Protection Act (MRPA). Less comprehensive than MAMA, this bill won widespread support from mountain legislators, including House Speaker Liston Ramsey of Madison County, who helped sink the management bill ten years before. As political scientist Milton S. Heath Jr. observed at public hearings, “the aesthetic objections of both residents and tourists… were obvious from the early developmental stages of the bill.” Concerns about the safety of such buildings in high winds, among others, mattered less than the desire to preserve mountain

78 Henry Leifermann, “The Ugly Floridian: They Came, They Saw, They Developed. And North Carolina’s Native Sons Are Restless,” Sun-Sentinel, July 6, 1986. 79 On Hugh Morton, see: Drew A. Swanson, “Marketing a Mountain: Changing Views of Environment and Landscape on Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina,” Appalachian Journal 36: 1-2 (Fall 2008/Winter 2009): 30- 53; Anne Mitchell Whisnant, Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2006), esp. 265-269, 297-324; Christopher Eklund, “’Making the Mountain Pay:’ Hugh Morton’s Grandfather Mountain and the Creation of Wilderness,” (2011), M.A. Thesis, Appalachian State University. 80 WNC Tomorrow, “Western North Carolina Tomorrow Position Paper on Conservation and Development of Natural Resources," 1979, Folder 1, WNC Tomorrow Position Papers Collection, Collection M79.14.1, UNCA- SPC.

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scenery.81 As Governor Jim Hunt stated at the time, “our mountains are too valuable, too important and too beautiful to be damaged by inappropriate construction. The beauty of these mountains is the very basis of the vast tourist industry in the western part of our state.”82

Having learned from this failure a decade before, the MRPA’s backers provided a little role for the state bureaucracy in regulating construction on mountain ridges. Instead, the law provided local governments with four primary options to regulate building construction over forty-feet tall: enact a total ban on development on ridges above 3000-feet elevations, extend such a ban to ridges above 500-feet elevation, establish a stringent permit system on these ridges or opt-out of the law’s requirements through a local referendum. With nearly all mountain counties adopting either a ban or permit system, the MRPA helped address the specific problem its designers hoped it would.83 Taking its passage together with MAMA’s failure, the campaign for MRPA shows how rural environmentalism in the Southern Mountains coalesced around both the protection of individual property rights and the construction of a landscape of retreat.

Legacies of Displacement and Preservation in Southern Appalachia

The land boom that swept Western North Carolina in the late twentieth century built on the same trends and forces that shaped the anti-dam campaigns to create an amenity-based, recreational economy. As mountain farmers sold off or considered leaving behind their small homesteads, they helped create both an opportunity and a crisis. With cheap land ripe for the picking, outside land buyers came in many forms to Southern Appalachia. First, many retirees

81 Milton S. Heath Jr., “The North Carolina Mountain Ridge Protection Act,” North Carolina Law Review 63: 1, Article 10, (November 1, 1984), 183-196, quote on 185. 82 Gov. Hunt statement. quoted in Jack Igleman, “The View From the Top: The Battle Over Mountaintop Development in WNC,” Carolina Public Press, January 27, 2014, https://carolinapublicpress.org/17499/the-view- from-the-top-the-battle-over-mountaintop-development-in-wnc/ (accessed August 7, 2019). 83 Counties had until the May primaries of 1984 to hold such a referendum. Only Cherokee County did so and successfully opted out of the law. Heath, “The North Carolina Mountain Ridge Protection Act,” 183-189.

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and back-to-the-landers like Sam Parker at Wolf Laurel or the Dehon family at the Audubon

Colony in Chapter 1, they adopted the mountain landscape as their own. With varying levels of concern, they tried to ward off large-scale development that threatened the landscape of retreat— with its unique blend of nature and culture, leisure and work—that brought them to the region in the first place. Second, following behind them, corporate builders and resort developers jumped at the chance to re-make Western North Carolina in the image of Florida and similar tourism hotspots. In doing so, both groups forged a shared vision of the mountain landscape that could be both preserved and sold, places that sat on the fragile fence of being undeveloped and on the verge of overdeveloped.

Although these trends helped tip the scales of the regional economy toward tourism, it did mean Western North Carolina lacked industrial plants and manufacturing investment. Indeed, mountain communities continued to possess a relatively small, but still significant industrial presence for much of the twentieth century. As seen in Chapters 1 and 2, the furniture, textiles, and electronics factories in places like the New River Valley became the linchpins of rural economies, absorbing much of the farm losses of the fifties and sixties. However, beginning in the mid-1980s, the footing underneath the region’s furniture and textile industries began to give way to the forces of global trade and the national downturn of the following decade. In late 1983, the Melville Footwear Company announced plans to close one plant in both Macon and Madison

Counties. At the latter plant located in the town of Hot Springs, thirty miles west of the Wolf

Laurel resort, the company laid off 445 workers. When reporters from a local newspaper interviewed one of the newly unemployed, he mourned “it’s like a nightmare, or a death in the

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family. You just keep hoping you’ll wake up and it's not true.”84 Two years later, Graham

County—in the southwestern corner of the mountains—saw its largest employer, United Globe

Furniture close its Robbinsville plant in January 1986, laying off around 500. When reporters from South Florida visited Robbinsville the following summer, they highlighted the stark disparities between two high school dropouts (one wearing a shirt saying “I’m Not From Florida) and the cabins they maintained for wealthy Floridians.85

The next two decades brought more layoffs in North Carolina’s furniture and textile industries, spurred on in large part due to the passage of the North American Free Trade

Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. As plants closed in small towns across Western North Carolina, much of the region has come to resemble what historian Robert Hunt Ferguson describes as the

“Southern Rust Belt.” To illustrate this point, in four mountain counties (Yancey, Mitchell,

McDowell, and Burke) located between Boone and Asheville, the local impact of manufacturing textiles, furniture, and apparel declined from a combined 27 percent of Gross Local Product

(GLP) in 1990 to 12 percent by 2004.86

As second-home construction grew and manufacturing declines, mobile homes proliferated throughout the mountains, replacing farmhouses and mill villages alike. As structures borne out of economic necessity, they became recent symbols of destitution and desperation in Southern Appalachia. Beginning with a series of housing studies after the 1970

84 Robert Koenig, “Melville Shoe Co. to Close: 445 Workers to Lose Jobs,” Marshall News-Record, December 7, 1983. 85 “United Globe Files New Sales Agreement,” Asheville Citizen, January 2, 1986; Henry Leifermann, “The Ugly Floridian: They Came, They Saw, They Developed. And North Carolina’s Native Sons Are Restless,” Sun-Sentinel, July 6, 1986. 86 Robert Hunt Ferguson, “The Rivers of Eden: Environmental and Economic Decline in the Rural South,” Paper presented at the Southern Historical Association, November 9, 2019; Walden, North Carolina in the Connected Age, 150, 241.

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Census, local officials noted with some alarm that “the proportion of duplexes, apartments, and particularly mobile homes is rising” in the New River valley. Just across the border in

Southwestern Virginia, researchers found that trailers made up eighty-four percent of the new, single-family homes purchased between 1970 and 1976.87

The mobile home industry boomed alongside the second-home industry in the mountains.

In an interview with students from Appalachian State University in the 1970s, a longtime, Avery

County resident named Larry Campbell explained the connection between tourism and trailer parks. Lamenting the situation facing young families, he described how conventional, single- family homes that rented for $150 each month in the past could now be given only slight upgrades and then rented to tourists for around $200 per week. The stark reality, as Campbell conveyed to his collegiate interviewers, was that “if you want to live around here, you’re going to have to buy a mobile home.”88 To prove his point, one economist found that a flood of out-of- state land buyers at nearby Beech Mountain increased the average price of a non-resort, ten-acre property by four times its previous amount to around $878 per acre. Trailers became so common, so quickly that Hugh Morton—with the same righteous indignation leveled at Sugar Top resort—sought to rid the mountains of this “visual pollution” by suggesting that banks be barred from lending to potential mobile home buyers.89

Although the de-industrialization of Appalachia owed little, if anything, to the rise of tourism and environmentalism in the region, its arrival nonetheless brought a revival of mountain

87 Alleghany County Planning Board, Housing Element Update: Alleghany County (March 1972), 2, State Documents Collection; Tom Schlesinger, “Trailers: The Business,” Southern Exposure 8: 1 (Spring 1980), 20. 88 Larry Campbell, Interview by Brenda Hicks, Box 10, Tape 329b, Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1966-1995, W.L. Eury Collection, ASU. 89 Robert R. Gottfried, “The Effect of Recreation Communities on Local Land Prices: The Case of Beech Mountain,” The American Economist 32: 1 (March 1988): 59-65, esp. 60, 63-64; Branscome and Matthews, “Selling the Mountains,” Southern Exposure 1: 2 (July 1974), 125.

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ecotourism that transcended rural and urban divisions. This latest marketing of the mountain landscape to new residents built upon and re-purposed the discourses of arcadian, Appalachian landscapes forged in the 1970s controversies over dam-building and land use. Today, the closing of heavy-polluting plants near riverfront cities like Chattanooga and Asheville helped clean up the waters of the Tennessee and French Broad. This post-industrial environment in such urban areas helped revitalize riverside commercial districts, attract water-dependent industries like breweries, and increase recreational activities like canoeing and tubing.90

While urban centers like Asheville have been able to capitalize on the ruins of the post- industrial economy through high-end manufacturing, tourism, and new service jobs, a recreation- centered economy continues to serve rural areas poorly. Low-wage jobs in the prison and agribusiness industries continue to expand across Southern Appalachia. For example, as Western

North Carolina’s Christmas Tree operations continue to find prosperity in recent years, they did so primarily on the backs of immigrant workers, many of whom held undocumented status. One member of the state Farm Bureau commented in 2005, “If it weren’t for immigrants, there wouldn’t be an agriculture industry in North Carolina… because picking tobacco is hot and hard, and harvesting Christmas trees is cold and hard. Farmers can’t hire enough local people to do the work anymore.”91 To attract better-paying jobs, local leaders continue to recruit outside industries. In 2008, communities in the New River valley cheered the arrival of a new Virginia state prison in Grayson County, near the North Carolina border. After environmental groups like the NCNR’s successor, the New River Conservancy, helped defeat a proposal to locate the prison

90 Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky, 188-189; Nancy Cook, “The Secret to Chattanooga’s Revival Was There All Along,” CityLab, August 20, 2013, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/08/secret-chattanoogas-downtown- revival-was-there-all-along/6597/ (accessed November 9, 2019). 91 Quoted in William A. Link, Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region, Vol. II: Since 1877 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 580.

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within a few hundred feet of the river’s edge, local leaders remained steadfast in their belief that the area needed the precious jobs and government funding provided by the facility.92

Today, the “two Appalachias” identified by historian Drew Swanson and others derive from the creation of two different landscapes in the region over the last sixty years. The situation in the Southern Mountains mirrored transformations in other parts of the country as well. As geographer J.B. Jackson predicted in 1966 that the “revolution” of rural land use ensured that areas like these would see either the separation or intermingling of “the city dweller’s landscape of play” and the landscape of modern agribusiness or industry, underpopulated and nearly devoid of opportunities for “pleasure or recreation.” In Appalachia, the geographies of coal mines, tree farms, and dwindling industrial plants compete with those of scenic vistas, sprawling countrysides, ski resorts, and recreational waterways in ways that are at once common and haunting.93 As a result, movements to preserve the agrarian aesthetic of the mountain landscape continue to shape contemporary imaginings of Appalachia and should be understood alongside the more well-known, historical narratives about economic exploitation and the cultural myths surrounding backwoods “hillbillies.”

These linkages between eco-tourism and preserving rural places as landscapes of retreat suggest that rather than declining into obsolescence, the Southern Mountains maintained a firm grip on the American imagination. Places like the New River and French Broad River valleys become endowed with symbolic value, both culturally and politically. These values derived from a strain of intellectual agrarianism, revised and re-purposed for the Sunbelt South. In the

92 Tim Thornton, “Prison Won’t Be Built on River,” Roanoke Times May 4, 2007, https://www.roanoke.com/news/prison-won-t-be-built-on-river/article_935bcc9e-261d-579b-9343- 58038f558117.html (accessed June 11, 2018); Hall, Mountains on the Market, 271 n86. 93 J.B. Jackson, quoted in Robert G. Healy and James L. Short, The Market for Rural Land: Trends, Issues, Policies (Washington, D.C: The Conservation Foundation, 1981), 227.

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discourses that defined the pitch battles over dam-building and land use planning, these river valleys represented warm communalism in contrast to the seeming sterility of the suburbs and the supposed unpredictability of urban centers.

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CHAPTER 5 POVERTY AS PRESERVATIVE: LAND, HUNGER, AND BELONGING IN LOWCOUNTRY SOUTH CAROLINA, 1964-1969

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call. —Pat Conroy The Prince of Tides

Migration and Injustice in the Rural South, 1945-1965

In the March 3, 1962 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, a photo appears of a well- dressed, white man sporting a fedora and carrying an umbrella while walking stride-for-stride with an alligator a few feet from his side. That iconic photo of developer Charles E. Fraser has since been immortalized as a bronze statue in Compass Rose Park on Hilton Head Island, South

Carolina. In the decade after that Post photo, Fraser became primarily responsible for molding the island into one of the East Coast’s premier tourist destinations. Yet, at the time of his sudden death in 2002, Fraser only vacationed in his beloved Hilton Head, while spending most of his time in his second, adopted home of Brevard, North Carolina.1 The centuries-old, summertime tradition of splitting time between the coast and the mountains—first taken by wealthy antebellum planters from the Lowcountry and followed by wealthy Floridians—also attracted the founder of Hilton Head Island’s twentieth-century “plantation,” the gated resort community known as Sea Pines Plantation. 2

In addition to prominent resorts on Amelia Island in Florida, Kiawah and Hilton Head

Islands in South Carolina, Fraser’s company amassed thousands of acres in Western North

1 Chapter epigraph from: Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 1; “Wilderness Tamer,” Saturday Evening Post, 235 (March 3, 1962), 24. 2 Douglas Martin, “Charles E. Fraser, 73, Dies; Developer of Hilton Head,” New York Times, December 19, 2002.

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Carolina and Virginia before the economic downturn of the mid-1970s.3 Like so many wealthy landowners who moved there in the late twentieth century, Fraser’s love for the mountains and coasts of the American South grew out of an appreciation of its landscape aesthetics and a desire to own and protect the integrity of that land.

A figure at once reviled and lauded, enigmatic and maddeningly ambitious, Fraser understood how to sell outsiders on Southern vacations. Natural beauty was destiny in his mind.

Arguably, as historian William D. Bryan notes, one of the nation’s first “green developers,”

Fraser represented the exception more than the rule when it comes to resort building in the 1960s and 1970s. As he told the reporters for the Saturday Evening Post that day, “I’m interested in making money, but I’m also interested in history, architecture, trees, and birds.” In a somewhat distressing metaphor, one journalist commented in 1975 that Hilton Head’s landscape gave its visitors “a sense less of rape than seduction.”4 Yet, as in much of the rural South, Fraser and his developer ilk grappled with the reality that ugliness clung to the beauty of the Lowcountry landscape like Spanish moss on its trees.

Like the Southern Mountains, the landscape of the Lowcountry South is varied in its appearance. From the bright lights of Myrtle Beach to the pungent aromas of Georgetown’s belching factories, down U.S. Highway 17 to the stately, steeple-dotted skyline of Charleston then through miles upon miles of loblolly pines and live oaks flanking the road to the Georgia border, where the area surrounding Beaufort County represents a microcosm of this diverse

3 After buying over 7,000 acres on Nantahala Lake in Macon County, Fraser’s ambition to create the first privately- owned “national park,” never came to fruition. Branscome and Matthews, “Selling the Mountains,” 148; John Underwood, “No Shadows on the Beach,” Sports Illustrated, January 27, 1974, 70. 4 William D. Bryan, “The First Green Developer,” Edge Effects (October 20, 2016), https://edgeeffects.net/green- development/ (accessed August 7, 2019); “Wilderness Tamer,” Saturday Evening Post, 235 (March 3, 1962), 24; Ross Drake, “Developer Charles Fraser Learns the Secret of Turning Beaches into Gold,” People 3: 21 (June 2, 1975) https://people.com/archive/developer-charles-fraser-learns-the-secret-of-turning-beaches-into-gold-vol-3-no- 21/ (accessed August 7, 2019).

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environment. Located about thirty miles north of Savannah, Georgia and around fifty miles south of Charleston (Figure 5-1), these communities combined the ecology and geography of the coast with the socio-political conditions of the Black Belt. Since the 1950s, Beaufort saw the trappings of the Old South’s coastal economy—farms, fishing boats, and canneries—attempt to coexist with those of the new, Sunbelt economy, namely: fighter jets, factories, and resorts.

Outsiders flocked to the area in the decades since 1945. Travel writers from major, national newspapers raved about its lush vegetation and the timeless charm of historic towns like

Port Royal and the county’s eponymous county seat. According to one account in a 1953 issue of the Christian Science Monitor, Beaufort represented “a part of Dixie where the spirit of the Old

South is more than just a haunting memory.” Three years later, a journalist for the New York

Times found himself enraptured by Hilton Head Island—then only accessible by ferry—with “its wild yet gentle beauty…perhaps unmatched in the northern part of this hemisphere.”5 Even with the addition of new resorts and hotels on Beaufort’s islands by the mid-1960s, a travel writer for the Chicago Tribune gushed about the area’s “picturesque little offbeat towns and villages where nothing ever happens,” set among “plain, ‘unimproved’ islands without habitation, automobiles, neon signs, trucks, billboards, tourists, and discotheque(s).”6 These effusive accounts had a penchant for hyperbole. Still, they helped construct a powerful myth that the islands held sacred landscapes where vacationers could commune with the human and natural past, unperturbed by the anxieties and crises of modern life. Instead, the Lowcountry South—like its Appalachian counterpart—symbolized for the postwar, suburbanized American imagination an imagined, idealized South as pastoral, hospitable, and uncomplicated.

5 Henry Lesesne, “Historic Old South Lies Along South Carolina Coast,” Christian Science Monitor, December 5, 1952; Fritz R. Simmons, “Island Frontier Off Georgia’s Coast,” New York Times, April 29, 1956. 6 Ken Ferguson, “Lovely Beaufort-South Carolina’s Island Paradise,” Chicago Tribune, April 18, 1965.

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The journalists and tourists who came to the Lowcountry missed or refused to acknowledge its most obvious problems. For all its aristocratic trappings, Beaufort’s “Old South” charm bequeathed to it a stormy, racial present. Despite vignettes about its history as the sites of early Secessionist movements and the Union occupation during the Civil War, Beaufort’s status as the epicenter of black land ownership during and after the war received scarce mention.7

African Americans in the Lowcountry appeared in these accounts as “Gullah Negroes,” worthy of mention mostly for their “strange dialects” and “exquisite manners,” among other qualities.8

Confronting land loss, out-migration, and continued oppression, black communities fought to secure their rights to remain here as equal citizens, not merely as quaint sights for vacation-goers to observe. While media reports did note that Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists held strategy sessions at the Penn Center on the county’s St. Helena Island, a more granular story about land, poverty, and the promise of freedom played out along the South Carolina coast.9

There, the resources of the national Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty presented an opportunity to confront an ongoing social crisis that sapped much of the rural South of human and economic capital.

By 1968, the deprivation that circumscribed the lives of black Beaufortonians captured the nation’s attention. At that point, white news reporters descended on the area and produced stories about the dire poverty, widespread hunger and malnutrition, and persistent out-migration

7 For examples, see: Wayne Phillips, “Sleepy Town By the Sea,” New York Times, May 5, 1957; Eugene Warner, “At Sea a Little Bit South in South Carolina,” New York Times, September 12, 1965; On the African American movements for emancipation, land-holding, and mutual uplift in Beaufort during and after the War, see the magisterial work of Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 8 Henry Lesesne, “Historic Old South Lies Along South Carolina Coast,” Christian Science Monitor, December 5, 1952; Fritz R. Simmons, “Island Frontier Off Georgia’s Coast,” New York Times, April 29, 1956. 9 Lawrence S. Rowland and Stephen R. Wise, Bridging the Sea Islands’ Past and Present, 1893-2006: The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, Vol. 3 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015), 386-387.

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that plagued coastal South Carolina. As NBC News reporter Fred Briggs explained, Beaufort became a symbol of an “unknown hunger,” where immense human misery lived next door to

“antebellum mansions, plantations, resorts, and resident millionaires.”10 This national fixation on the destitution of mostly African American families in this area helped jolt the state’s

Democratic Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings into action. Taking up the cause of expanding federal food stamp programs, both feelings of compassion and a desire to avoid negative publicity motivated Hollings and his allies.

Throughout the 1960s, Black Carolinians waged a grassroots war against poverty before and after federal antipoverty agencies died slow deaths of a thousand cuts at the hands of the

Nixon Administration. Even as African Americans organized to vote, established farming and fishing cooperatives, and fought for better jobs and wages, they ran into entrenched, structural resistance from white leaders at the local level. The traditional power structure erected barriers to keeping land, receiving public benefits, and finding high-paying jobs, especially those outside of military bases. Moreover, new economic and social pressures turned the land and waters of the

Lowcountry into a valuable commodity. Manufacturing operations and homebuilders alike, as they did in Appalachia and other parts of the rural South, touted new industries as the solution to the impoverished and underdeveloped stretches of the South Carolina coast.

The struggle to secure economic justice and political power in the rural South rested on the fulcrum of black counter-urbanization. For previous generations of black southerners in

Beaufort, like the rest of the Lowcountry and the Black Belt, migration represented a form of political protest against the inhumanity of Jim Crow. Yet, by the 1960s, the combination of more

10 David Brinkley, Fred Briggs, NBC Evening News, December 5, 1969, VTNA, https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/broadcasts/444032 (accessed January 21, 2017).

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capital-intensive agriculture and the slow erosion of southern apartheid ensured that the movement of a mostly black agricultural labor force to the North became a net plus for white planters. As the recent work of historian Greta De Jong shows, thanks to the twin revolutions of civil rights and agricultural mechanization, many conservative white southerners cheered the

Great Migration.11 African Americans in Beaufort County knew the trauma of coercive displacement all too well. When the psychiatrist Robert Coles visited the area in 1968, one black fisherman provided a sobering description of this dilemma. “It’s bad here. A lot of people

[living] here, they’re gone. They’re as good as dead,” he said before continuing, “A lot of others, they go north—and then white people down here laugh, because they’ve got rid of us.”12

“Heaven, Hell, or Baltimore:” Reversing the Great Migration, 1964-1970

The economic pressures—namely the rise of industrial agriculture combined with urban industrialization—that kick-started the northern migration of African Americans continued apace into the late 1960s.13 However, buoyed by the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 and the initial collapse of Jim Crow’s legal structures, local civil rights movements settled into longer struggles for economic justice. African Americans across the South worked to secure the benefits of their new “place” in society within the places and spaces that had long defined that status through law and violence.

11 Greta De Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice After the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2017). 12 Robert Coles and Harry Huge, “Strom Thurmond Country,” The New Republic, December 30, 1968 https://newrepublic.com/article/99653/strom-thurmond-south-carolina-poverty (accessed January 17, 2017). 13 For example, see: De Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2016); Alec Fazackereley Hickmott, “Black Land, Black Capital: Rural Development in the Shadows of the Sunbelt South, 1969-1976,” Journal of African American History 101: 4 (2016): 504-534.

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As a result, economic justice in places like Beaufort County became bound up with the right to remain in place. Perhaps for the first time since the days of Emancipation and

Reconstruction, the South once again became a land of opportunity. The soil, rivers, and landscape of the Lowcountry that black hands had worked once out of bondage and coercion, now could be re-claimed as symbols of belonging and independence. William Grant Jr., an insurance agent in Beaufort, recalled that he returned to the area in the late 1960s after spending time in Boston for college because “This is my home…I could do more here than in Boston.” As individuals and as communities, African Americans in the rural South spoke of their ongoing activism in terms of a basic right to remain in a particular place.14 As one cooperative of black farmers in nearby Clarendon County declared in their founding document, “let us stay here in

South Carolina, work hard, stick together and make it the best place in the world to live. It can be done.”15 Similarly, one black minister in Georgia told a crowd at the opening of a catfish farming cooperative, “Heaven is no longer in New York or New Jersey. There is trouble everywhere now… Let’s stay here and make this a good place for everybody. This is our home.”16 Across the

Lowcountry and the rural South, black southerners committed themselves to a strategy of counter-urbanization based on claims to political and economic power.

In this fight, African Americans found support in some corners of white society. Yet, as mostly white outsiders re-discovered poverty in the rural South, they offered piecemeal, therapeutic solutions to fulfill only one small goal of a broader local movement for economic justice. Figures like Senator Hollings, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, and South

14 William Grant Jr. quoted in Bruce Galpin, “Free Stamps Can’t Erase Beaufort’s Deep Misery,” Washington Post, March 9, 1969. 15 Harold Rogers, “Pilot Cooperative Set Up to Aid Low-Income Farmers,” The Greenwood Index-Journal, January 3, 1969. 16 “On Replacing Cotton,” New South 25: 3 (Summer 1970): 71.

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Carolina Governor Robert McNair all expressed concern for rural poverty and malnutrition in places like Beaufort out of mixed motives. Their public sympathy for the plight of rural African

Americans was dwarfed by immense fears that a growing rural exodus could increase the scope and intensity of the nation’s urban crisis.17 Much like the planners and politicians who supported dam-powered development in Southern Appalachia, white politicians grasped for solutions to the problem of “linked migration,” based on the haunting prospect that a depopulated countryside would create even more overcrowded and crime-ridden cities.18

Civil rights groups and white politicians expressed shared concerns over the human and economic costs of continued out-migration by black southerners from rural communities. With financial and logistical support from organizations like the National Sharecroppers Fund, the

Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC), and Beaufort County’s own Penn School (later Penn

Center for the Sea Islands), black activists turned Beaufort County and eastern South Carolina into a microcosm of the perils and possibilities of the War on Poverty. Empowered by the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, local civil rights groups tried to leverage this publicity into securing the previously-denied benefits of rural industrial development. As states like South

Carolina continued to recruit (or poach) outside firms to invest new manufacturing in places like

Beaufort, many African American leaders here recognized it as a chance to undermine years of

17 For an example of this attitude among white liberals, see Southern Regional Council staffer Pat Watters’s reflections on the issue of rural poverty in 1969. In it, Watters lamented with a sympathetic, albeit patronizing tone that “it was the fate of the Negro Southerners to show in extremes—in his rioting in the ghettoes of the North, in his piteous condition, worsening by the year, in the rural South—what a harsh thing, cruel thing, had been done by the impersonal forces of economics and history to all of a nation which had once been predominantly agricultural.” Watters, The South and the Nation (New York: Pantheon, 1969),106. 18 On “linked migration,” see: Lise Nelson and Peter Nelson, “The Global Rural: Gentrification and Linked Migration in the Rural USA,” Progress in Human Geography 35:4 (2010): 441-459.

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what geographer Clyde Woods and others describe as “industrial redlining.”19 Although embracing the “smokestack-chasing” strategy of recruiting outside industrial investment entailed compromises with white politicians, it nonetheless showed how black southerners shaped ideas about rural development in the postwar South. In their rendering, uplifting supposedly forgotten communities meant more than stemming the tide of urbanization, as it did for so many white southerners. Rather, their fight sought to restructure local power structures through community preservation.

The Great Migration left an indelible mark on the social and natural landscape of

Lowcountry South Carolina by 1960. The exodus of black Carolinians peaked in the two decades after 1940 when African Americans’s share of the statewide population declined by eight percent from around 43 percent to just under 35 percent. Moving forward, between 1950 and 1970, a total of around 400,000 African Americans left the state.21 Beaufort County represented a slight exception to this trend. The mass exodus of African Americans from the countryside here began in 1910 when nearly 10,000 black residents (about one-third of the county’s total population) departed over the next decade. Although the black exodus there bottomed out by 1950, it remained stagnant as Beaufort County’s white population quadrupled in the thirty years after

World War II, thanks in large part to the military-industrial complex and the transformation of

19 On industrial recruitment or “smokestack chasing” policies and strategies, see: Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sun Belt; For a more in-depth explanation of industrial redlining, see: Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (London: Verso, 1998), 23-24. 21 1960 Census of Population, Volume 1: “Characteristics of the Population,” Part 42: “South Carolina,” Table 3 in “Graphic Summary;” Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 530; To address the eastern part of the state more specifically, Sociologist Carol Stack estimates that between 1940 and 1970—when the Great Migration peaked—nearly all of the eastern, black-majority counties of the Carolinas, saw “net [out]-migration,” with many of them became majority-white in that time. See: Carol Stack, Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 41-42.

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Hilton Head Island into a tourism hub.22 Even as the out-migration crisis slowing down in this part of the state by the late 1960s, the collective trauma it inflicted on African American families remained palpable for the civil rights generation.

For the first half of the twentieth century, traveling north offered African Americans an escape from a regime of white terrorism, further sweetened by opportunities to live in the security of full citizenship and enjoy the full fruits of their labor. On Hilton Head, black youth like Emory Campbell and Thomas Barnwell Jr. knew, from personal experiences, the attraction of leaving Jim Crow behind. Although he went to Boston temporarily to attend graduate school,

Campbell’s sisters stayed there long-term. Meanwhile, Barnwell saw numerous friends and relatives head to New York. When he returned from the Air Force and tried to find work in

Beaufort County, “the only thing that was available,” he remembered outside of farm labor, “was digging holes.”23 Even as military installations—namely the Marine base at Parris Island located near the town of Port Royal—expanded to meet Cold War demands, local blacks found themselves shut out of stable, good-paying jobs.24

Other African Americans found a similar lack of opportunities in rural South Carolina. In testimony submitted to the National Commission on Rural Poverty, two young, black families from the Palmetto State lamented that they found “low wages back home no matter what we do.”25 In Bishopville, a small town in the northeast part of the state, locals lamented that area

22 Data from: Burton and Cross, Penn Center, 128-129; On Congressman L. Mendel Rivers’s successful efforts to secure federal military investments in coastal South Carolina, see: Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sun Belt, 146. 23 Campbell Interview; and Barnwell interview. 24 Paul Good, “Sometimes Dropouts Drop Out,” New South 23: 1 (Winter 1968), 94-95. 25 United States National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, Rural Poverty Hearings, Volume 3 (1967), 460- 461

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youth graduated “with a diploma in one hand and a bus ticket north in the other.”26 As Charlotte

Observer journalist Dwayne Walls and a team of NBC News reporters documented, by 1970, out- migration took an immense economic and emotional toll on black families and rural communities up and down the Eastern Seaboard. In a particularly telling piece of testimony, a white welfare officer in eastern North Carolina said that “Heaven, Hell, or Baltimore” served as the only places where local African American youth believed they had a future. And as Walls predicted, for most “gradually it became clear that Baltimore and Hell often were the same place.”27

Other white journalists and politicians shared Walls’s concerns about the effects of urbanization on rural migrants, especially African Americans. In effect, the problem of what one report by Fortune magazine termed “the rural roots of the urban crisis” made poverty in the southern countryside an issue of national concern.28 For the New York Times, eastern South

Carolina sat in the middle of “the rural slum [which] spreads in a large crescent from southern

Virginia, [then] sweeps along the coastal plain across Georgia and Alabama into the Mississippi

Delta and the Ozarks.” As in the Appalachian case, one government official quoted by the Times commented, poverty in the rural South was “a mile wide and a foot deep.”29 In this estimation, the diffuse nature of poverty in the rural Black Belt ensured that it did not attract the notoriety and anxiety that urban poverty did.

26 Bruce Galphin, “S.C. Venture Trying to Keep Hope Alive,” Washington Post, November 13, 1969. 27 Dwayne E. Walls, The Chickenbone Special (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 23; “Leaving Home Blues: An NBC News White Paper on Rural Migration,” 1971, Peabody Awards Collection, 71025 EDT 1 of 1, Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection, University of Georgia, Athens, Ga http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/peabody/id:1971_71025_edt_1 (accessed January 7, 2017). 28 Roger Beardwood, “Southern Roots of Urban Crisis,” Fortune 78 (August 1968): 80-84. 29 John D. Pomfret, “A Rural Slum Cuts Across South,” New York Times, March 3, 1964.

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Along similar lines, when national political figures like Secretary of Agriculture Orville

Freeman along with Michigan Governor and Republican presidential candidate George Romney wanted to find the source of urban unrest, they came to eastern South Carolina within weeks of each other in September 1967. Freeman reflected on his visit by saying “to fail to understand the cause of ghetto frustration and violence… is to perpetuate more frustration and violence… We in rural America have a responsibility to help alleviate the pressures that we have imposed on our cities.”30 These reports from the frontlines of the War on Poverty attempted to re-direct the spotlight away from scenes of urban unrest and to the less riot-prone rural poor.

Along with the strange mix of white sympathy and fears of negative attention, white politicians like Romney and many journalists like Walls justified the need to ameliorate rural poverty as an insurance policy against further urban unrest. Since 1965, names like Watts,

Newark, and Detroit became more than just geographic signifiers. They symbolized, in the minds of many white Americans, the kind of growing urban decay and unrest that could be visited upon any city at almost any time. As the Moynihan and Kerner Commission reports debated the root causes of these problems as located in the structure of black families or urban centers, other white observers looked to rural America. In its 1967 report The People Left Behind, the

President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty described a nationwide trend that included black southerners and white mountaineers fleeing to the cities represented the problem and the solution to urban America’s problems. In particular, the Commission worried that

“industrial development within urban ghettos may trigger more senseless migration of the rural

30 “State of the Southern States: South Carolina,” New South Vol. 22, No. 4 (Fall 1967): 103; John Herbers, “A Sharecropper Tells Romney of Eking Out Living in Carolina,” New York Times, September 28,1967; “A Company Stems Negro Migration,” New York times, September 10, 1967; Paul Good, “Poverty in the Rural South,” New South 23: 1 (Winter 1968), Freeman quote on 1.

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poor to equally depressed and socially isolated urban ghettos.”31 By connecting social isolation and city life, such reports bolstered the discursive scaffolding that linked race, urbanity, and criminality in the white mind.

The white myth that life in the urban “ghetto” brutalized southern blacks constituted a misleading narrative transmogrified from the reality of disillusionment with life in the North. As numerous migrants found, life in the “Sweet Land of Liberty” brought them face-to-face with new challenges. As historians like Thomas Sugrue and others point out, employment discrimination and public school segregation, among other issues, followed black southerners into the urban North.32 As African American writer Claude Brown wrote in his autobiographical work Manchild in the Promised Land, his family’s move from eastern South Carolina to Harlem brought them “from the fire into the frying pan.”33 By the late sixties, black southerners in counties like Beaufort faced a difficult choice. An unnamed African American woman near

Beaufort told Robert Coles that since her husband couldn’t find work, they couldn’t buy food stamps or secure any kind of welfare. “I guess you go north or you starve,” she sighed, “If it wasn’t for the little [food] we grow and the fact we all try to look after each other, we’d be dead right now.” Yet, having seen his neighbors “leaving here all the time,” a fisherman on nearby

Hilton Head told Coles, “in the north, they get angry with us, and they forget it was down here that they treated us like this, and drove us so hard that we’re half-dead, more than half-dead, by

31 President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, The People Left Behind (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1967), 115. 32 Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2009); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 33 Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 8.

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the time we get up there.”34 As these testimonies illustrated with excruciating honesty, both new and old challenges confronted black residents on the Sea Islands.

The combination of few, good-paying jobs paired with intractable white resistance helped ensure that many black South Carolinians struggled to break the chains of poverty and oppression that long ensnared them. By the late sixties, around half of all black families in

Beaufort County lived on incomes of $2000 or less a year. About one-third of Beaufort’s African

American population and forty percent of nearby Jasper County’s took in less than $1000 each year.35 The decline of traditional livelihoods in farming and fishing contributed to this economic situation. For one, between 1952 and 1960, military facilities and tourism development contributed to a 65,000-acre decrease in total farmland across the county.36 Also, the ongoing shift toward a more mechanized, capital-intensive farm economy forced many smaller-scale farmers to abandon their operations in the fifties and sixties. As historian Pete Daniel shows, white control of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) offices, state agencies, and agricultural schools at land-grant colleges often worked in concert to stonewall black farmers’ attempts to secure crucial subsidies and loans to buy the kind of equipment needed for modern operations. To take a localized example, the number of African American farmowners in

Beaufort County declined by around seventy percent from 1964 to 1969.38 As white planters took bulldozers to tenant houses and black landowners struggled to scale up without access to

34 Coles and Huge, “Strom Thurmond Country.” 35 “Of Hookworms and Spanish Moss,” New South 23: 1 (Winter 1968): 85. 36 Margaret Anne Shannon, “From Tomato Fields to Tourists: Hilton Head Island and Beaufort County, South Carolina, 1950-1983,” (M.A. Thesis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1996), 7. 38 Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013); The seventy percent mark is consistent with an average between the decline among part- owners (71.25%- from 80 to 23) and the figures for the reduction of full owners (69.4%- from 252 to 77). Bureau of the Census, 1969 Census of Agriculture: Part 27: South Carolina (Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Commerce, June 1972), 57.

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federal lending services, places like Lowcountry South Carolina contributed to the continuation and ramping up of the Great Migration into the early 1960s.

To make matters worse for black farmers and sharecroppers, white landowners and their allies in the county government often tried to put the squeeze to them to expedite out-migration.

After Congress expanded the minimum wage to include large agribusiness operations in

February 1967, Beaufort County whites protested to South Carolina’s Governor Robert McNair that these changed “would virtually ruin larger farmers in the area and would skyrocket food prices to the consumer.” When their efforts came to no avail, the white power structure employed other, nefarious means to limit the independence of African Americans in the county.

That same year, those black farmers who owned land but struggled to live on meager wages found themselves targets of white bureaucratic power. As Ebony magazine reported, Beaufort

County’s welfare officials required them to sign over land titles in order to qualify for public assistance.39

Amid these dire economic conditions, African Americans in the Lowcountry saw small glimmers of hope with the potential growth of the federal government’s footprint through both military investment and the War on Poverty. With funding from the federal government’s

Neighborhood Youth Corps (NYC), black leaders like John Gadson helped local youth—many of whom dropped out of high school to support their families—find jobs at Parris Island (PI) as carpenters and secretaries. However, beyond that, few opportunities remained for steady, well- paying jobs in private industry. As Norma Wilson, a young African American woman who worked as a typist at PI, told a reporter in 1968, “maybe a company around here would hire a

39 “State of the Southern States,” New South 22: 2 (Spring 1967): 103; Jack E. White Jr., “The Unchanged South,” Ebony 26: 10 (August 1971), 128.

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Negro girl,” before tempering that optimism with the reality that “none have, but I think they might.”40 Although the growth of such military installations, driven in large part by the Vietnam

War buildup, provided a temporary boost to local employment, civilian jobs at PI and elsewhere remained elusive for many black workers.

When African Americans could not find jobs off the bases, many turned to the growing tourism industry in Beaufort and especially on Hilton Head Island. In the three years after 1965, the area’s labor market saw nearly five hundred, mostly black domestic workers leave their jobs.

Although their reasons for doing so are unclear, what is evident is that many African American women found slightly better wages working as cleaning or food service staff in Hilton Head’s new resort communities.41 Yet, these developers’ claims to provide a livelihood for so-called

“chambermaids” felt flat. Resort-sponsored programs to allow these mostly female workers to finish their high school diplomas and develop job skills did little to prove opportunities for advancement as long as barriers to meaningful employment and higher wages remained. At best, these almost entirely black, female workers could garner somewhere between $25 to $50 week for usually forty to fifty hours of work. Overall, the vast majority of tourism workers made less than $3500 a year, better than many of their neighbors but far below the state’s relatively meager average.42

40 “Sometimes Dropouts Drop Out,” New South 23: 1 (Winter 1968): 85. 41 South Carolina Employment Security Commission, South Carolina’s Manpower in Industry (Columbia, SC: State Auditor’s Office, April 1969), Chart V. 42 Paul Good, “Of Hookworms and Spanish Moss,” New South 23: 1 (Winter 1968), 85-97; McGill & Company, Report Prepared for the South Carolina State Development Board: Beaufort County Population and Economics- Past, Present and Projected (Columbia, SC: McGill, 1970), xvii; see also Oliver Wood, “Economic Profile of the Beaufort Economic Area,” in Wood, et al. The BASF Controversy: Employment vs. Environment (Columbia, SC: Bureau of Business and Economic Research, University of South Carolina, 1971), 32-36.

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Although racism, poverty, and out-migration continued to circumscribe the lives of

African Americans in Beaufort County, rapid changes in the society and economy of the area gave it the glittering facade of Sunbelt prosperity to disguise the Old South reality. The traditional farming and fishing economies still held symbolic value, but they offered little in the way of stable employment with decent wages. Meanwhile, the benefits from Hilton Head’s growth remained concentrated in a few, white hands. For these reasons, Jonathan Daniels, a newspaper editor from North Carolina who vacationed in Hilton Head before moving full-time in

1969, described Beaufort County as a “community of light and shadows.”43 Lowcountry boosters sold outsiders on its image of being underdeveloped, promising a high quality of life on the cheap. However, this very narrative came at a cost for all involved. Growing inequality along racial lines created an ironic morality tale about a landscape that exuded wealth and beauty.

Hunger and Magnolias, Hookworms and Spanish Moss: The Anti-Malnutrition Movement in Beaufort County, 1967-1969

Beginning in November 1967, the shadows that Daniels identified became objects of national debate. Thanks to the efforts of black activists and a white doctor named Donald Gatch, stories of parasite infestations, rampant malnutrition, and general human misery replaced the sunny images of the Lowcountry’s natural beauty and historic charm. At a hearing in the state capital of Columbia before the Citizens’ Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition—an activist group backed by the Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty and major foundations—the young, Midwestern doctor castigated white America for the rampant disease, hunger, and poverty he found while practicing medicine in the Lowcountry. Walking the audience through painful stories of eight black children who died in Beaufort from parasites, his voice rose in

43 Jonathan Daniels, “Year’s Happy Ending,” The Hilton Head Island Packet, December 30, 1970.

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anger declaring, “There’s no damn sense in people going hungry in this country,” noting that “if eight white children…had died of parasites, something would have been done eons ago.”

Working with medical staff from the University of South Carolina, Gatch estimated that intestinal parasites affected somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of the county’s poor population. These revelations set into motion a series of events that saw eventual food relief arrive in the area while also forcing Gatch out of South Carolina.44

Although Gatch is often credited (or blamed in the case of local whites) for bringing the issue to the attention of Congress and the national media, he followed established, grassroots efforts to expose and rectify the punitive denial of public services to African Americans in

Beaufort County. Along with local NAACP chapters, Penn Community Services (PCS)—a source of communal pride and uplift since its 1862 founding as a “normal school” for freed slaves by Northern missionaries—led the initial efforts to address the debilitating poverty existing in the area.45 Led by an African American fisherman, activist, and Hilton Head native named Thomas Barnwell Jr., PCS created pilot projects across the county to work with black neighborhoods in identifying and addressing their development needs. In conversations with local school principals, Barnwell learned that numerous black schoolchildren became sick simply

44 Jack Bass, “Hunger? Let Them Eat Magnolias,” in Ayers and Naylor, eds., You Can’t Eat Magnolias, 273-275, quote on 274; Some notable leaders of the Citizens’ Board of Inquiry included Benjamin Mays and Leslie Dunbar of the Southern Regional Council as well as Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers (UAW). For their original report on hunger as a national problem, see: Hunger U.S.A.: A Report (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); see also: Benjamin Mays, “Hunger is Nation’s Shame,” Chicago Defender, March 8, 1969; and Watters, The South and the Nation, 105 45 Penn School ceased to be a normal school in 1948. With its new form and new name, PCS built its reputation as a meeting center for civil rights leaders and, just as importantly, a non-profit dedicated to increasing the economic and political power of black Sea Islanders. Today, it is known as the Penn Center for the Sea Islands. As then-Director Emory Campbell expressed in a 1980 interview, over time Penn became more of a “local institution” rather than an institution imported from the outside. See: David Bushman, “Penn Center is ‘Something Special,’ Campbell,” The Island Packet, January 22, 1980; For a comprehensive history of its work, see Orville Vernon Burton, Penn Center: A History Preserved (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014).

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because they had to stand out in the rain at their bus stops.46 Although this problem proved easily fixable, getting the students to the few health clinics where Dr. Gatch and others saw them revealed the incredible harm wrecked upon black bodies by years of state-sponsored oppression and neglect.

Barnwell and Gatch worked with local educators, clergy, and community members to form the Beaufort Welfare Rights Union (BWRU) and the Organization to Prevent Hunger and

Malnutrition (OPHM). At monthly meetings in local churches, these groups planned a public relations offensive to force state officials to address a problem of their own making.47 As

Barnwell recalled, Gatch’s reports helped establish the sheer depths of Beaufort’s public health crisis. With an intimate view of the Lowcountry’s crushing poverty, he claimed that the county held the notorious distinction of “the highest patristic infestation in America.” On multiple occasions, Gatch reminded reporters and public officials that encountering diseases like “rickets, scurvy, beriberi, and pellagra” as he had made this an unprecedented case since “medical students are taught…no longer exist in America.” By reviving the old narratives of the South as a starving, diseased backwater that had more in common with the non-industrialized world, Gatch won himself both acclaim and enmity.48

Subsequent investigations confirmed Gatch’s findings. With funding from Harvard

University, famed child psychiatrist and Harvard faculty member Robert Coles joined attorney

46 Thomas Barnwell Jr., Interview with Robert Korstad, 1992-1994, Southern Rural Poverty Collection, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, Duke University. 47 Marjorie Hunter, “To the Poor in South Carolina, Free Food Stamps Are a Source of Satisfaction and Embarrassment,” New York Times, May 18, 1969. 48 Barnwell Interview with Robert Korstad; Paul Good, “Of Hookworms and Spanish Moss,” 86; “Poverty Rife in Rural S.C.,” Washington Post, November 23, 1968; on the Progressive-era discourses about the “benighted” or “problem south,” see George B. Tindall, “The Benighted South: Origins of a Modern Image,” Virginia Quarterly Review 40: 2 (Spring 1964): 281-294; Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (Athens: UGA Press, 2012).

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Harry Huge on a trip to Beaufort and Jasper Counties in late 1968 to study the sources of poverty there. Coles and Huge announced their findings at a press conference followed by an in-depth report published in the New Republic. As the pair told reporters “We found nothing in any northern city like this, nothing where people don’t have electricity and clean water to this degree.” Although such a statement no doubt dismayed many white politicians in South Carolina for its implication of rural backwardness, many ignored or dismissed the involvement of Coles and Huge as another example of unwanted lecturing from Northern elites.49 Yet, white reporters from the South found the same issues. An investigation by the Southern Regional Council’s

(SRC) Paul Good described with particular alarm how in the town of Bluffton, just over the bridge on the mainland from Hilton Head, a nearly all-black community called “Lowbottom” lacked access to running water simply because the county water authority refused to run pipes there. Further studies found similar circumstances on nearby St. Helena, Warsaw, and Lady’s

Islands.50

With only a few notable exceptions, these reports elicited howls of protest from South

Carolina’s political establishment. In the first three months of 1969, the U.S. Senate would establish a Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs to investigate the problem of hunger in America. When pressed for a response in advance of the Committee’s hearings,

Republican Senator Strom Thurmond commented dryly, “You had them [the poor] back in the days of Jesus Christ, you have got some now, and you will have some in the future.” The

49 “Poverty Rife in Rural SC,” Washington Post, November 23, 1968; Coles and Huge, “Strom Thurmond Country.” In his testimony at the Senate’s hearings on hunger and malnutrition, Senator Hollings admitted that the combination of “[recruiting] industrial development plus state pride” led South Carolina’s leaders (himself included) adopt a “policy of covering up the problem of hunger.” See: Senator Ernest Hollings Statement, February 18, 1969, Hearings Before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs of the United States Senate, Part 4: South Carolina, February 18, 19, and 20, 1969 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1969), 1165 [hereafter “Hollings Statement Before Select Committee”]. 50 Paul Good, “Of Hookworms and Spanish Moss,” 87.

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Beaufort area’s Democratic Congressman expressed similar antipathy. “I have no intention of immortalizing poverty or dishing out food stamps,” Mendel Rivers told reporters.51 When pressure continued to mount in early 1969, other white politicians responded by proposing more radical, punitive solutions. For example, state Republican Party chairman Ray Harris called for the creation of “semi-military” camps where the state’s poor, including many children, could voluntarily move to mobile homes and learn “a better way of life” through daily marches, training, and other exercises.52 Such a program never became anything more than a talking point.

Instead, working in Congress, the state’s Democratic Senator, Fritz Hollings questioned Gatch’s methods, but still took the reports as an ill-advised attempt to get Congress to address a significant gap in America’s social welfare system.

For his part, Hollings struck a populist tone to win political support for expanding the federal food stamp program. Having received letters from white constituents that mocked the poor in crass terms as “reproducing parasites” given handouts by “Whore Corps,” Hollings emphasized in Senate hearings that despite the state’s job growth, “the people I saw couldn’t possibly work due to malnutrition and disease.53 In response, he pierced such “hunger myths” by noting the racial double standards inherent in federal welfare policies. Pointing out how forty white farmers in one small community in eastern South Carolina received over $40,000 each year in agricultural subsidies “for not working,” Hollings then mocked claims that giving “the poor, little hungry child a 40-cent breakfast” would lead to a society of “drones” and

“Communists.” The true freeloaders in America were not the poor. In trying to get to the

51 Coles and Huge, “Strom Thurmond Country;” Scott and Susan Graber, “Health Care in the Rural South,” The Nation, June 26, 1976. 52 “Semi-Military Life Offered South Carolina Hungry,” Washington Post, March 16, 1969. 53 Hollings Statement Before Select Committee, 1166.

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solution, he declared that “the Federal red-tape-worm must be exterminated,” again chastising both state and federal bureaucracies for their inability to aid the neediest populations.54

With Hollings’s backing, local groups continued to pressure Congress to provide free, food relief to the Beaufort area. Hazel Frazier, a single mother and head of the BWRU, appeared alongside other anti-poverty activists. Addressing the committee, they presented case after case of poor families whose low incomes—mostly seasonal workers in agriculture and tourism—or meager welfare payments made it difficult to purchase enough food stamps for their children.

Confronting that issue, civil rights groups including the NAACP, National Sharecroppers Fund, and Penn Center called on Congress and the Department of Agriculture to allocate food stamps at no cost to needy households in Lowcountry South Carolina.55 Although most white leaders rejected the hearings’ premise—that Beaufort represented the epicenter of America’s hunger problem—Hilton Head resort developer Charles E. Fraser did appear and defend the findings of

Gatch and other doctors. Although motivated in large part by concerns about ensuring a healthy labor force for the island’s tourism industry, Fraser framed poverty and destitution as the result of limited infrastructure and inefficient bureaucracy. Upon hearing testimony from Fraser comparing the availability of federal funds for treating agricultural pests versus providing clean water, Senator George McGovern, chair of the committee, noted the “intolerable situation” that

“we have placed so much higher priority on eradicating worms and parasites from our livestock than we have from our children.”56

54 Hollings, quoted in Jack Bass, “Hunger? Let Them Eat Magnolias,” in Ayers and Naylor, You Can’t Eat Magnolias, 276-277; Hollings Statement Before Select Committee, 1166. 55 Hearings Before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs of the United States Senate, Part 4: South Carolina, esp. 1247-1277, 1414-1424. 56 Statement of Charles E. Fraser, February 20, 1969, Hearings Before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs of the United States Senate, Part 4: South Carolina, 1278-1288, McGovern quote on 1287 [hereafter Fraser Statement Before Select Committee”].

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The hearings highlighted both the magnitude of the problem and the deep mistrust of local black leaders toward white politicians like Hollings and McGovern who promised change.

In the former Senator’s well-publicized “hunger tour” of his state in late 1967, Thomas Barnwell

Jr. confronted him saying, “I hope you’re not just here to talk.” Again, as a witness before the

Select Committee, Barnwell admonished its members for their delays in addressing the problem.57 For Barnwell, this testimony grew out of a movement dedicated to the preservation of black communities in a county governed by hostile whites who threatened their very existence in that place. Through a combination of bureaucratic neglect and oppression,

By Summer 1969, three months after the hearings, more funding began to flow to other anti-poverty organizations working in the area. The Department of Agriculture designed a pilot program for Beaufort and Jasper counties to distribute free food stamps to the area’s poorest families. In the program’s first two months, over two hundred households qualified for the no- cost stamps within this two-county area.58 Despite ongoing cuts by the Nixon Administration, funding from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) helped establish a community health service known as the Beaufort-Jasper Comprehensive Health Services (BJCHS) with a seed grant of $654,373. Other anti-poverty groups followed suit by increasing their presence in the area. Whereas twice in the previous four years, Governor McNair rebuffed the efforts of

Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) to send staff into the county and state, by late 1969

VISTA workers arrived in the Lowcountry.59

57 Statement of Thomas Barnwell Jr. and William Grant, February 18, 1969, Hearings Before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs of the United States Senate, Part 4: South Carolina, 1184-1189; Barnwell, quoted in “Hollings Assails U.S. Over Hunger,” New York Times, February 2, 1969. 58 Marjorie Hunter, “To the Poor in South Carolina, Free Food Stamps Are a Source of Satisfaction and Embarrassment,” New York Times, May 18, 1969. 59 “South Carolina Bars VISTA Volunteers,” New York Times, September 3, 1965; Richard Lyons, “McNair Welcomes Food Aid,” Washington Post, February 21, 1969.

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Despite these tangible changes, a few obstacles remained for groups like the OPHM and

BWRU. For one, the daily injustices that resulted from middle and upper-class stigmas about food stamps forced local leaders to encourage participation by poor families. In a few cases, an

African American member of the area’s economic opportunity commission went around to the dilapidated homes of struggling parents and grandparents to remind them that they had a right to food because, in his words, “We worked hard to make these crackers give us this right to government food.”60 Moreover, local activists struggled to keep their demands at the forefront of public debate. For example, in early May 1969, while Beaufort leaders promoted tours of historic, mostly-white homes and gardens, BWRU leaders like Hazel Frazier designed a tour of their own to take visitors to various “poverty homes” throughout the area. Few visitors took them up on the offer, preferring instead to see the area as a lush preserve of antebellum wealth.61

Adding to the obstacles of anti-poverty activists, white leaders refused to confront the roots of hunger on its most human terms. Rather than address the unequal power dynamics at the root of the issue, they treated it as a problem of bad optics. When asked to explain his reversal on food stamps and anti-poverty programs, State Senator James Waddell, a white Democrat, explained it, although “compassion” played some role, ultimately “the bringing to light of the conditions, the bad publicity” motivated local and state leaders to act.62 Still, at a joint press conference in February 1969 with McNair and State Senator James P. Harrellson, who also represented the area, Waddell harbored suspicions that Washington bureaucrats would

60 Robert Barnwell, quoted in Paul Good, “Whatta Ya Mean Get A Job?,” New South 23:1 (Winter 1968): 89-92, quote on 92. 61 Marjorie Hunter, “To the Poor in South Carolina, Free Food Stamps Are a Source of Satisfaction and Embarrassment,” New York Times, May 18, 1969. 62 James Waddell, quoted in David Brinkley, Fred Briggs, NBC Evening News, December 5, 1969, VTNA, https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/broadcasts/444032 (accessed January 21, 2017).

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administer the free food, expressing their strong desire to see “local people who are on top of the problem” organize the program.63 Of course, the problem from the beginning had been created by these same local authorities. Beyond simply seeking to put the proverbial foxes in charge of the hen house, these statements show the extent to which white southerners’ civil rights strategies—to paper over bad publicity with cosmetic changes that limited outside involvement—continued into the late sixties.

In all, the movement to end hunger in the rural South attracted headlines and won political support by challenging central myths about regional progress and American exceptionalism. How could America claim capitalism would uplift the fledgling economies of the so-called “Third World,” if those same social conditions existed in its backyard? At this moment, the imagined geographic boundaries separating the American South from the Global

South became blurred. More locally, the poor sanitation and lack of access to basic health care identified by OPHM and other groups helped to create a powerful re-imagining of the

Lowcountry landscape. Now, the dilapidated surroundings of the area’s tourism economy imposed themselves on the seemingly quaint and tidy scenery of coastal living.

Even with the clear benefits won by local activists and their political allies in Congress, the anti-hunger movement brought clear lessons and new challenges with it. Despite the support from politicians and media at the state and national levels, African American leaders in the

Lowcountry continued to push for economic and spatial justice, with or without the support of white allies. The federally-funded BJCHS clinics would grow to employ dozens of black residents. More than a center for access to health care, it came to symbolize the importance of

63 “McNair Calls for Local Hunger Plan,” Sumter (SC) Daily Item, February 21, 1969.

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black economic and political leadership in Beaufort and Jasper Counties.64 In this way, it also advanced the increasingly attractive ideas of “Black Capitalism” for African Americans here and across the rural South. Emphasizing goals of increasing black independence and purchasing power through access to business and land ownership.

Consistent with this ideology, a group of African American fishermen led by Thomas

Barnwell Jr. and David Jones, one of the county’s two black elected officials, formed the Hilton

Head Fishing Cooperative, Inc. in 1968 with a $66,290 grant from the Farmers’ Home

Administration (FHA). Made up of fifteen African American fisherman, the co-op held out the promise of “a new era of honest-to-goodness black capitalism,” in the words of an Ebony

Magazine profile.65 One year later, on St. Helena Island, the Penn Center appointed its first black director in Beaufort County native John Gadson. Within the first year of his leadership, Gadson called for PCS to develop “a meaningful program of economic development” to eradicate poverty in the area. Both of these institutions attempted to voice the growing concerns among

Lowcountry African Americans about the need for protecting black economic and political power at a time when their share of the area population continued to dwindle.66 Although these ventures both envisioned the creation of a community of black entrepreneurs, they relied on funding from both African American and white donors, as well as government agencies. From their experiences with the anti-hunger campaigns, both Barnwell and Gadson understood the value of pragmatic, biracial alliances to advance their goals.

64 Thomas Barnwell Jr., Interview with Robert Korstad. 65 “Shrimp Co-Op Makes Blacks Their Own Bosses,” Ebony 25: 1 (November 1969): 106-112, quote on 106; Paul Good, “On the Shrimp Docks One Morning,” New South 23: 1 (Winter 1968): 97-99. 66 John Gadson and Courtney Siceloff, Penn Community Services Newsletter, October 5, 1969, in South Carolina Council of Human Relations Records [hereafter SCCHR Records], Topical Files Series, Folder: “Penn Community Services, 1969-1970,” South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, South Carolina [hereafter: “SCL”]

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As Donald Gatch, such alliances could also prove dangerous for white “outsiders.” The backlash against Gatch by white leaders at the local, state, and federal levels showed the danger of challenging the white moderate myth of southern progress, especially as a newcomer to the region. First, his white patients in the Lowcountry left him and his practice saw its rent doubled not long after other local doctors (most of whom continued to maintain segregated practices) and the Beaufort Gazette each published letters deriding his claims as false and defamatory to the community at large. Soon after, Jamie Whitten, Mississippi Congressman and Chairman of the

House Committee on Agriculture, requested an investigation by the Federal Bureau of

Investigation (FBI) against Gatch.67 His trouble continued in the courts. Having staved off charges that he violated state drug laws by agreeing to a $500 fine for failing to keep proper records, the State Board of Medical Examiners then tried to revoke his license. Gatch left the state instead.68 Like an exiled prophet, his sins lay in the fact that he had been an outsider who told the truth about the “new” South Carolina.

For his efforts, Senator Hollings drew clear distinctions between himself and Gatch as part of a broader strategy to make himself, as an insider, the face of the solution to the state’s hunger problem. As Thomas Barnwell Jr. recalled years later, the Senator went to great lengths to avoid the perception of outsiders’ meddling in South Carolina by trying to limit the involvement of his colleagues from Northern states, especially. Although Senators George

McGovern along with Ted and Robert Kennedy had been the initial points of contact for

67 David Nolan, “Letter to the Editor: The Hunger Doctor,” New York Review of Books, March 11, 1971. 68 Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Age of Decolonization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 307-308; It should be noted that local historians continue to regard Gatch and national news media as outside agitators, claiming that they “misrepresented” the local, medical establishment in their reporting on the “perceived malnutrition in Beaufort County.” See: Rowland and Wise, Bridging the Sea Islands Past and Present, 387.

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Barnwell, Hollings “reached some compromise…that if the Kennedys didn’t stay out if,” he would be sure to launch a new investigation into hunger in Massachusetts to embarrass the youngest Kennedy brother.69 These intra-party threats formed a kind of damage control for him to protect the “New South” reputation of South Carolina. In Hollings’s telling criticism of Gatch,

“You don’t catch industry with [hook]worms—maybe fish, but not industry.”70 Instead, his comments hinted at what Governor McNair and others envisioned as the way forward for

Beaufort County. Relying on the state’s tried-and-true strategy of industrial recruitment, South

Carolina boosters cheered outsiders who invested capital and jobs in their state. The opinions of

“outside investors” mattered more than supposed agitators, whether from inside or outside the state.

“The German Invasion:” An Industrial Solution to the Poverty Problem, 1969-1970

For the Governor and local leaders, the hunger controversy initially proved an embarrassment and an obstacle to the state’s headlong efforts to spur economic development by attracting both tourists and industrial growth. But, within a few months, the conditions revealed by the media and government investigations proved an asset in their campaign to woo a West

German chemical company’s new manufacturing plant to the Beaufort area. Beginning in March

1969, on the heels of the hunger and malnutrition hearings in Washington, state officials entered into negotiations with Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF) to locate a new petrochemical plant on Victoria Bluff, a nearly 2000-acre swath of state-owned land situated less than 10 miles west of Hilton Head (Figure 5-2). In discussions with local and state leaders, the company promised to invest at least $100 million over the next ten years. Intended to produce “dyestuffs,

69 Thomas Barnwell Jr., Interview with Robert Korstad. 70 Hollings, quoted in Nolan, “The Hunger Doctor.”

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polymers, and polymers,” BASF officials saw this plant as a producer and supplier of the basic materials its customers needed to fashion finished products in “textiles…paper, leather, [and] plastics,” among other materials.71 After the negotiations concluded in Summer 1969, BASF announced its plans for the Victoria Bluff plant that October.

The timing of BASF’s announcement—within nine months of the hunger hearings— allowed local and state leaders to offer a solution to a problem of their own making. In the celebratory rhetoric of McNair and others, poverty became an abstraction, a talking point in the service of shameless boosterism. In internal memos passed between the Governor’s Office and staff at the State Development Board—the state’s primary industrial recruitment arm—state officials emphasized the need to portray BASF “as a model of enlightened manufacturers” for its willingness to invest “in the midst of a poverty pocket that has received national attention.”72 In subsequent position papers, press releases, and speeches, the state and company sang from the same hymnal when it came to evangelizing for the economic necessity of the Victoria Bluff plant.

For example, the federal policy at the time forced BASF to seek a “liberalization or elimination” of existing, federal quotas on oil imports to make its operation efficient, McNair went to bat for the company. Writing to members of the Cabinet Task Force on Oil Import

Control, he reeled off numerous data points on poverty and the need for “economic stability” to prevent the out-migration of an estimated 50,000 more Lowcountry residents on top of the

71 BASF Press Release, October 1, 1969 and Curtis B. Flory to J.D. Little Jr., July 10, 1969, Governor Robert McNair Papers hereafter McNair Papers], Box 74, Folder: “BASF: March-November, 1969,” South Carolina Political Collections [hereafter SCPC], Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library, Columbia, SC; BASF Press Release, November 10, 1969, BASF Vertical File, Beaufort District Collection, Beaufort County Library, Beaufort, South Carolina [hereafter: “BDC”]. 72 Bob Thompson to J.D. Little Jr., November 12, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: March-November, 1969,” SCPC.

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500,000 that left between 1950 and 1960. “These are the facts, the conditions,” McNair concluded “which motivate us to…[bring] economic development into an area which has been by-passed during our nation’s unprecedented growth.”73 In using the same statistics that indicted

South Carolina as the “hunger capital” of the nation, state and company leaders hoped to appeal to national concerns about out-migration and the popular narrative about the rural origins of the urban crisis. In other documents submitted to the Department of the Interior, both the Governor and the company described Beaufort County as a collection of “severely distressed” and

“poverty-stricken” communities hit hard by “underemployment and the outmigration of

[agricultural] workers.”74 As a mere problem of “underemployment,” rather than a social injustice, statistics on the area’s low per-capita income, poor housing, and high rates of out- migration replaced the disturbing images of parasites, squalid homes, and children with distended bellies.

For similar reasons, the longstanding, white power brokers who governed the town of

Beaufort praised BASF’s announcement as an economic godsend. State Senator James Waddell expressed unequivocal pride that the company chose his district for what he believed would be a

“noble experiment.” Lauding the company’s total, potential investment as one of the largest industrial projects in state history, the Beaufort Gazette editorial staff gushed, “it is hard for us to believe that this is happening to Beaufort County,” as they dreamed that “[this] plant will mean more to the economy and growth of our area than any of us dare believe.” In another editorial two months later, the Gazette reaffirmed the belief that the plant could solve the area’s image

73 Governor Robert McNair to George P. Schultz, November 26, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “March- November, 1969,” SCPC. 74 BASF Corporation to The Honorable Walter J. Hickel and J.J. Simons, November 21, 1969 and E.T. Borda to James Konduros, undated position paper, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: March-November, 1969,” SCPC.

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problem, claiming that the forthcoming jobs could “uplift and…even eliminate the current nationwide image that Beaufort County is the poverty pocket of America.”75

Meanwhile, many of the town’s mostly white business leaders formed a group called the

Citizens for Progress and Job Opportunities in Beaufort County. Much like the Governor, this citizens’ group exuded confidence in a full-page ad in the local newspaper (Figure 5-3) that the

BASF plant “will help us find places of employment for our sons and daughters that they deserve but now have to leave and look for elsewhere.” Such sentiments marked a notable shift from the local politics of migration before the hunger hearings.76 Rather than the implicit coercion that encouraged the county’s poor, especially black, population to move elsewhere, white boosters and politicians now embraced the moderate sensibilities of the New South Democrats. In this view, rural economic development and more robust public education systems provided a means of modernizing the South, without flooding its cities with displaced farmers and sharecroppers from the countryside.77

With the hunger movement still fresh in their minds, some African American leaders in northern Beaufort County welcomed the plant with a cautious embrace. On the one hand, they recognized that white Democrats throughout the state wanted black votes and spoke to their common interests in bringing industrial development for rural communities. Meanwhile, on the other hand, they had little reason to trust that the same people who wanted to help ameliorate the

75 Waddell, quoted in “Troubled Little Island,” Time, January 26, 1970, 55; “A Good Day’s Work,” Beaufort Gazette, October 9, 1969; “An Editorial,” Beaufort Gazette, December 11, 1969, BASF Vertical File, BDC. 76 Citizens for Progress and Job Opportunities in Beaufort County, “Welcome to Beaufort BASF!” Beaufort Gazette, December 11, 1969. 77 For accounts of the rise of the New South Democrats, see: Gordon Harvey, A Question of Justice: New South Governors and Education, 1968-1976 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2009); David T. Ballantyne, New Politics in the Old South: Ernest F. Hollings in the Civil Rights Era (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2016).

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problem of poverty had just denied its severity and reality months earlier. As a native of the area, leader of the local Neighborhood Youth Corps, and Penn Center’s new director, John Gadson understood the underemployment problem first-hand. Reflecting on his difficulty in finding decent-paying employment for Beaufort County’s black youth, Gadson voiced his support for

BASF. “The best way out of poverty,” he explained, “is a good job with decent wages.”78

In the months that followed, many African American leaders backed the plant through their work in local groups like the Beaufort Progressive League, the Beaufort County Voters

League, and the United Citizens for the Poor. At a pro-BASF rally on Hilton Head organized by the latter group the following spring, the Rev. Cornelius Hayes roared before the gathering of activists and reporters, “we would have our friends across the nation to know that we are still poor, we’re still infected with worms…and the awful statistics stated by our distinguished senator [Hollings] are still with us.”79 Despite their undeniable concerns about joining forces with local whites, African Americans in the Lowcountry recognized that their organizing efforts proved decisive in getting the Governor and others to talk about hunger and poverty in the first place. After all, as one black leader told a reporter from a national magazine in the months after the BASF announcement, “until Gatch came, no politician helped the blacks.” Anti-poverty activism led by African Americans and amplified by white doctors and politicians gave a moral dimension to the boosterism promoted by local and state politicians.80 Combined with the

78 John Gadson, Penn Community Services Newsletter, 1970, in SCCHR Records, Topical Files Series, Folder: “Penn Community Services, 1969-1970,” SCL; William H. Whitten, “Job Plan for Blacks Set for Lowcountry,” Savannah Morning News, September 27, 1970. 79 Hayes, quoted in Betsy Fancher, “Special Report: A New Plant Meets a New Age,” South Today, 1970, 4, BASF Vertical File, BDC. 80 Arthur Simon, “The Battle of Beaufort,” New Republic, May 23, 1970, 12.

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ensuing debates over the BASF chemical plant, the realities of rural life in Lowcountry South

Carolina continued to occupy a prominent place on the national agenda.

Still, the issue of pollution from the company’s chemical plant loomed large for other

African Americans in the Lowcountry. When asked about this by reporter Betsy Fancher, Hazel

Frazier of the BWRU replied by noting that black people like her family experienced pollution their whole lives, since the town of Beaufort located its main landfill near African American neighborhoods, including the one Frazier grew up in. “Nobody would want the water polluted,” she agreed before adding, “but a lot of men need work.” Echoing a similar attitude, the head of

Beaufort County’s OEO office, a black man named Charles Simmons, simply shrugged when a reporter asked him about the plant. “I figure you have to give them a chance,” he said, “they promised not to pollute, so let’s hold them to that promise…There’s just no question, we need jobs, and BASF will bring in jobs.” As Frazier and Simmons indicated jobs remained the most important concern for the black activists who formed the bulwark of the local movement to expose the conditions of poverty and malnutrition in the area.81 However, differences in class, occupation, and geography within the Lowcountry’s African American communities created a difficult choice about whether the BASF plant offered hope through jobs or ruin through pollution. For those black residents who lived north of the Broad River, closer to Beaufort and the mainland, economic opportunity through industrial recruitment trumped pollution more often than not. Even in this divergence between seeking economic justice and fighting against environmental injustice, black Carolinians shared an abiding commitment to counter- urbanization through the building up of economic and political power.

81 Frazier, quoted in Fancher, “A New Plant Meets a New Age,” 4; Charles Simmons, quoted in Arthur Simon, “Battle of Beaufort,” New Republic, May 23, 1970, 13.

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Between 1965 and 1970, the national “discovery” of hunger in South Carolina grew out of three, interconnected trends in the history of the rural South. First, the ongoing freedom movements among African Americans in Beaufort County and beyond showed how some communities had yet to secure the gains of both the Civil Rights Movement and the War on

Poverty. Second, the concept of linked migration—in this case, from farm to city—made the issue of rural depopulation not simply a Southern problem, but a national one as well. The discourse forged by journalists and politicians in cities across the nation about the rural origins of the urban crisis extended the geography of America’s “slum problems” into landscapes like those in Beaufort and Jasper County. Third, the expansion of new industries associated with tourism and the military-industrial complex in the South’s coastal areas created the possibilities of future tension over the compatibility of manufacturing and recreational industries to coexist in an area known for its natural beauty.

The impetus toward economic and spatial justice, which lay at the heart of the region’s anti-poverty campaigns, remained a foundational part of African American activism in the

Lowcountry throughout the late twentieth century. However, joining white boosters and politicians in trying to recruit outside industry cut at notions of local self-reliance at a time when

African American landowners saw their properties snatched up by white developers at an alarming rate. In doing so, their efforts set up contentious debates within where collective clamoring for economic justice came to compete with concerns about potential environmental injustices. Even in this divergence, what remained consistent is that Lowcountry blacks built movements for economic and environmental justice that challenged the simplistic conceptions of rural space advanced by both white resort developers and industrial boosters. Rather than a “rural slum,” as some advocates of industrial growth saw it, or a wild, untouched natural retreat, as

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developers saw it, African Americans envisioned communities in and around Beaufort as places where ties to the land became bound up with the causes of equity and justice. At their core, they asserted a sense of belonging within this place through appeals to both longevity and democracy.

When South Carolina’s white political elite framed the BASF plant as a panacea for poverty, their efforts smacked more of putting out a political fire than an intentional, good-faith effort to relieve human suffering. Rather than a novel response to the issue, attracting new industrial investment like this chemical plant followed a well-worn strategy for rural development, only this time with slightly higher stakes. White moderate politicians like

Governor McNair and Senator Hollings—as well as more conservative Democrats like

Congressman Mendel Rivers to a lesser extent—saw improved economic opportunity in the rural

Black Belt as a cause with little downside. They could claim to deliver on promises of providing jobs for all rural dwellers, regardless of color, while also making subtle appeals for black votes.82

While BASF’s planned investment did represent the largest project of its kind in the state’s history, doubts remained about both its economic benefits and its compatibility with the

Lowcountry landscape.

Wooing BASF to Beaufort County came at a cost for South Carolina taxpayers. As part of the agreement with BASF, the state government put itself on the hook by carving out favorable tax incentives for the company and improving local infrastructure to serve the Victoria

Bluff facility. Although white leaders in Beaufort and Jasper Counties lamented their inability to provide black communities in nearby Bluffton with the infrastructure for clean, drinking water during the poverty investigations a few months earlier, the local water authority found it easy to

82 This is very much in line with what Matthew Lassiter describes as the “Sunbelt Synthesis,” in that color-blind politics of improved educational and economic outcomes became increasingly attractive to many white moderates by the 1970s. See Lassiter, Silent Majority.

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“furnish a minimum of five million gallons per day” of water to the Victoria Bluff plant. Not to be outdone, the Beaufort County and South Carolina State Development Boards cooperated with other agencies to ensure that BASF would have access to new rail lines, expanded highways, and upgraded port facilities.83 Most of these agreements came into being around July 1969, about three months before the official announcement.

Providing incentives for new plants built by Northern and international firms to relocate and then provide vocational training programs for local people proved to be the South Carolina way. Since the 1930s, numerous private, international companies built new manufacturing facilities across the state. In particular, West German firms including car companies in the

Upstate to BASF in the Lowcountry found much to like in the state’s anti-union politics and available land.84 Moreover, the state proved willing to roll out the red carpet for industrial jobs.

For example, in Beaufort, the area’s state technical college promised full cooperation in

“manpower training” to give BASF the skilled workers it needed. With this private-public partnership, opportunities for vocational education would help phase out the traditional, agrarian economy and put the unskilled and underemployed on the pathway to prosperity. As one white official in the state government surmised, “when I look at the hungry parents and starving kids, I

83 Beaufort-Jasper Water Authority to Curtis Flory, July 10, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: March- November, 1969,’ SCPC; Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 494-495. 84 Still, it should be noted that a clear imbalance existed between the manufacturing investment in the Upstate and Midlands versus the Lowcountry. As Peter A. Coclanis and Lacy K. Ford show, Spartanburg County (in the state’s northwest) held more jobs in manufacturing than thirteen rural, eastern counties combined. Nearly all of these counties, including in Beaufort, Colleton, Hampton, and Jasper Counties, sat along the Interstate-95 corridor and had large black populations. See: Coclanis and Ford, “The South Carolina Economy Reconstructed and Reconsidered: Structure, Output, and Performance, 1670-1985,” in Winfred B. Moore Jr., Joseph F. Tripp, and Lyon G. Tyler Jr., eds., Development Dixie: Modernization in a Traditional Society (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 93-110, esp. 105-106; On European industries like Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) and Michelin locating plants in the Greenville-Spartanburg area, see Marko Maunula’s study Guten Tag Y’all: Globalization and the South Carolina Piedmont, 1950-2000 (Athens: UGA Press, 2010); see also: Henry Savage Jr., River of the Carolinas: The Santee (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1956, 1968), esp. 372-374; “How Outside Money is Changing South Carolina,” Washington Post, April 30, 1979.

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just don’t believe they want to wait for cooperatives… from a cold dollars-and-cents perspective, these aren’t the type of jobs that pay well.”85 Continuing to invest in localized, often seasonal or low-paying farming and fishing operations seemed unwise from such a utilitarian viewpoint. In encouraging the development of vocational education, white politicians operated on an assumption that poverty resulted from a deficit of opportunity rather than the reality of injustice.

With this logic, white moderates believed the struggles of the rural poor—especially those of color—required greater access to skills, which would then lead to greater access to capital. Such a strategy held out the promise that imported, industrial jobs would provide the best means of livelihood for poor whites and African Americans who wanted to stay in rural areas.

Alongside doubts that BASF would attract the promised industrial boom for the area, doubts persisted about whether the petrochemical operation could coexist with the natural beauty of Beaufort County’s waters, lands, and wildlife. The attraction of the Lowcountry for new residents and tourists from outside the region lay in its seemingly “unchanged” state, thanks to relative underdevelopment. Of course, the idea that this represented a place untouched by a time constituted a myth transformed into a pithy slogan for tourism promotion.86 Beyond the realm of marketing, the media coverage of the hunger investigations, hearings, and tours deployed images of the region’s aesthetic character as foils to the reality of human deprivation. In doing so, these accounts tapped into the growing agrarian nostalgia and back to the land sentiments of the sixties and seventies. Such ideas and images about the region also made their way into popular culture.

Beaufort County writer Pat Conroy’s memoir The Water is Wide recounts his year spent teaching

85 A. Wade Marton to J.D. Little Jr., July 10, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: March-November, 1969,” SCPC; Quote from “The Showdown at Hilton Head,” Business Week, April 17, 1971. 86 For examples, see: Thomas R. Waring, “The Awakening of the Isle of Hilton Head,’ New York Times, December 6, 1959; Ken Ferguson, “Subtropical ‘Rip Van Winkle Island’ is Awakening,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 2, 1962.

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poor black schoolchildren on nearby Daufuskie Island in 1969. In both its book and movie forms

(the 1974 film Conrack), Conroy’s work is a nostalgic paean to both the white liberalism of the sixties and the unique, picturesque qualities of the South Carolina coast.87 As a result, the dominant cultural narratives about this sub-region acknowledged but struggled to address the ironic reality by which squalor and scenery remained intertwined. Poverty was a problem that remained both obscured, but also unsurprising in a unique place that one writer described as an

“island frontier.”88

Taken together, the national spotlight remained on the Lowcountry into the early 1970s because it symbolized the complicated and competing visions that defined Americans’ relationship to the rural South. The aesthetics of the region came to symbolize something unique in American life. With no cities and little industry, it seemed to offer a pastoral, historic setting for the country’s upper and middle-classes to reclaim a simpler life outside the hustle-and-bustle of the modern city. However, at the same time, its underdevelopment affirmed discourses about the prevalence of slum conditions in the rural South.

87 Pat Conroy, The Water is Wide: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1972); “Film Stirs Controversy on Carolina Isle,” New York Times, April 15, 1974. 88 Fritz R. Simmons, “Island Frontier Off Georgia’s Coast,” New York Times, April 29, 1956.

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Figure 5-1. Map of Communities in Beaufort County and Surrounding Counties, South Carolina Information Highway, https://www.sciway.net/maps/cnty/beaufort.html (accessed November 12, 2019).

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Figure 5-2. Coast Guard Map of Plans for BASF Plant at Victoria Bluff. Hilton Head Island is located just beyond the bottom-right corner of the map. Following Highway 278 east from Bluffton, the center of the island sat about ten miles east of the proposed plant. “Location of New BASF Plant,” Beaufort Gazette, October 9, 1969, BASF Vertical File, Courtesy of Beaufort District Collection.

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Figure 5-3. Pro-BASF Advertisement, “Welcome to Beaufort BASF!” Beaufort Gazette, December 11, 1969, BASF Vertical File, Courtesy of Beaufort District Collection.

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CHAPTER 6 THE LORD WILL PROVIDE IF HE IS PERMITTED: HILTON HEAD ISLAND AND THE BASF CONTROVERSY, 1969-1971

Happiness on Hilton Head is something to be eternally sought not merely up the landscaped drive but down the most weed-grown, unpaved road. —Jonathan Daniels Island Packet

Background on Hilton Head’s Tourism Industry

Jonathan Daniels loved Hilton Head Island. A native of North Carolina, Daniels first established a temporary residence in the Lowcountry beginning in 1961. Nine years later, he and his wife Lucy moved to a house inside the lush Sea Pines Plantation resort. On the western end of the island, Daniels settled into a house with magnificent views of Broad Creek and the coastal sunsets as he began—like so many wealthy, white residents of Hilton Head—the final chapter of his life in paradise. As a former aide to FDR and the heir and editor emeritus of the Raleigh

News and Observer, North Carolina’s flagship newspaper, Daniels remained busy in his new abode, founding the island’s only newspaper in 1970. In his time on Hilton Head, Daniels joined thousands of other retirees who moved to the coasts and mountains of the South, who transformed many of the region’s rural landscapes into places of retreat. While the organizing efforts of African American communities helped slow and reverse the Great Migration, decades of steady depopulation in the Lowcountry offered cheap land and an underdeveloped environment for a different group of migrants—mostly white and wealthy—to move from the urban North to the rural South.1

In both public and private musings, the aging journalist cast his adopted home in a loving, but critical light. Primarily, he appreciated Hilton Head as a foil to so many other coastal

1 Jonathan Daniels, “Sojourner’s Scrapbook: Launching the Packet,” The (Hilton Head) Island Packet, July 9, 1970.

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areas in the South. In 1967, Daniels explained his decision to buy a home on the South Carolina coast because “North Carolina’s sea coast had been much misused,” while its southern neighbors

“still possessed unspoiled shores.” He found much to like in the underdeveloped, yet tamed landscape of Hilton Head. Its “coastal frontier” aesthetic distinguished it from places like Florida which Daniels described as “a treeless tundra, a gasoline alley by endless mobile homes…which look like a megapolis mill village with only a few oases of wealth and splendor.” Hilton Head, with its majestic arboreal canopies and low-density housing, represented something an alternative vision of southern tourism.2 Yet, for all its virtues, Daniels also recognized and struggled with its social disparities. More of a white liberal commentator on race relations than an activist, he advised his journalist friends to visit Hilton Head and write about the place where

“some of the worst poverty in the U.S. [is] in almost spitting distance from a Fat Cat refuge.” For

Daniels and so many of his contemporaries—who left the urban centers of the South, Midwest, and Northeast for Beaufort County—Hilton Head offered itself as a new, unique coastal retreat where history and nature seemed to coexist with human habitation in leisurely harmony.3

However, between October 1969 and June 1970, the BASF plant threatened to sever the seemingly stable ties between natural beauty and human leisure on the island. Even more than that, the ensuing controversy exposed the ways that Hilton Head’s sunny, prosperous facade remained inextricably linked with the realities of poverty and racism previously revealed during the hunger hearings. In this brief, but fierce political clash, Lowcountry communities divided

2 Jonathan Daniels to Governor Robert McNair, March 25, 1968, Jonathan Daniels Papers [hereafter “Daniels Papers”], Folder 1715: "Hilton Head, 1968," Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC [hereafter “SHC”]; Daniels to Ned Kenworthy, February 26, 1971, Daniels Papers, Folder 1828: “January 1971,” SHC; On the ways that ideas about incorporating the natural world into real estate development became one of Hilton Head’s primary selling points, see: Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality.” 3 Jonathan Daniels to Henry Fairlie, January 24, 1971, Daniels Papers, Folder 1828: “January 1971,” SHC.

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themselves in ways that defy easy categorization. Although many black leaders like John Gadson supported the plant to ameliorate the stalking poverty that lived in the shadows of Hilton Head, others like Tom Barnwell Jr. dissented out of concerns for industrial pollution’s threat to traditional, maritime economies. By June 1970, a strategic, temporary alliance between the black-led Hilton Head Island Fishing Cooperative and white real estate developers helped defeat the project. Plant opponents argued that the industrial landscape promoted by the company and its backers proved incompatible with the natural heritage of the area that supported both traditional and modern livelihoods, namely fishing and tourism. For white resort developers like

Charles Fraser and Fred Hack, protecting the aesthetic integrity of this unique, Southern landscape would boost the growth of local recreational economies.

In the political tug-of-war over whether heavy industry and vibrant tourism economies could co-exist in Beaufort County, the BASF plant fight helped tip the scales in favor of the latter. However, it also left much unresolved. While many outside journalists, academics, and state bureaucrats framed the issue as one of “employment vs. environment,” the clash between pro and anti-BASF forces represented the escalation of racial, partisan, and geographic divisions within the Lowcountry. In terms of race, African Americans islanders—especially on Hilton

Head—proved more likely to oppose the plant. Meanwhile, those on the mainland and around

Beaufort by and large gave BASF their support. Also, the controversy exacerbated tensions both within Beaufort County and between it and surrounding counties like Jasper, Colleton, and

Hampton. On Hilton Head, retired business types from the Northeast and the Midwest tended to lean more Republican in their political sensibilities, while the old-money, establishment politicians near Beaufort and the mainland still resembled the Democrats of the Old South. As a result, mistrust reigned both between and within the coalitions assembled on each side. African

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Americans took different sides being caught between developers who continued to gobble up their ancestral lands, on the one hand, and the area’s traditional white power structure who inflicted decades of oppression and violence on their communities. Both old-guard and new- guard white Beaufortonians once tried to displace them, but now both welcomed their help in this struggle.

Like the dam controversies in Appalachia, the BASF affair attracted national attention because it brought competing strands of postwar, American liberalism into direct opposition, namely the efforts of the War on Poverty and the growing environmental movement. While the hunger hearings reminded the wider public that poverty remained a daily reality for so many, as historian William Bryan explains, “the struggle over BASF reveals how the environment was beginning to compete with, and even overshadow, many of these issues.”4 At the same time, for all its national implications, the plant controversy signaled important shifts in the cultural discourses surrounding the rural South. For this reason, historians also need to understand the ways that Hilton Head became part and parcel of demographic, political, and economic changes that brought migrants to underdeveloped, rural places. Before, during, and after the BASF fight, it represented one of many landscapes across the region that became re-imagined and re- constituted as a place of retreat, rather than one of decline.

The Bridge and the Damage Done, 1951-1970

Before “The Plant,” there was “The Bridge.” In the fifteen years before the BASF fight,

Hilton Head Island saw waves of new residents drawn to a fledgling resort industry. In the myths created by its developers and new residents, “civilization” sprouted amid a labyrinth of Sabal palms, live oaks, and all the fauna that previously made it an untamed, jungle frontier. Formerly

4 Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 493.

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a site of Civil War naval battles decisive to the Union’s occupation of the coast, nearly all of the white planters on the island fled by the end of the war. Although an accurate count of the island’s population did not come until the 1970s, when its erstwhile developers requested a special

Census taken, probably around 1,000 to 1,500 African Americans lived on the island through the first half of the twentieth century. In that time, a lack of infrastructure or services prevented further settlement. Then in 1951, electric service arrived, followed by a state-operated ferry in

1953, and then a privately-financed toll bridge three years later. After 200,000 visitors came to the island’s small collection of a few dozen cottages within a year of the bridge’s opening, the island’s popularity took off.5 Thanks to residential construction and tourism development by

Fred Hack’s Hilton Head Company and Charles Fraser’s Sea Pines Corporation (Figure 6-1), primarily, the toll would be rescinded in 1959 and the island became a destination. Soon, the trouble for Hack and Fraser would be not how to attract people to the island, but how to protect the island from people themselves.

Despite how new residents and visiting travel writers saw it, Hilton Head was not a “Rip

Van Winkle” island with no history between the Civil War and The Bridge. Before 1953, almost exclusively black residents lived on the island. Census data covering the Bluffton district, of which Hilton Head remained one part, bears this out. Out of a little over three thousand residents in 1960, African Americans represented just over two thousand or approximately sixty-five percent of this geographic area.6 Moreover, as Emory Campbell recalled growing up before the

5 Michael and Patricia Danielson, Profit and Politics in Paradise: The Development of Hilton Head Island (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 13-16. 6 Even with these numbers, the Bluffton Census division was not the most heavily black part of the county. Compare these numbers to St. Helena Island, where in 1960, African Americans still made up 82.6% of the population. Thanks to the massive in-migration of white military personnel and retirees, the countywide population went from 58 percent in 1950 to under 40 percent in 1960. These communities remained concentrated in the areas around Parris Island, Port Royal, and Beaufort. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1960 Census of Population, Volume 1: Characteristics of the Population, Part 42: South Carolina (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, 1961), 42-48, Table 25.

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bridge, around three white families lived there who managed oyster factories and directed welfare programs. The Hilton Head of his childhood contained “self-contained fishing and farming communities.” Islanders did not live in isolation from outside forces or interactions.

Trips to the mainland occurred often in the form of either taking goods to sell in Savannah’s city market (until it closed in 1954), or when the mostly Northern sporting clubs who owned stretches of local woodlands came down to hunt in the winter.7

The presence of hunting preserves on Hilton Head and in Beaufort County more broadly dated back to the collapse of the cotton and rice plantation economies from the end of the Civil

War through the first three decades of the twentieth century. Taking over many of the antebellum plantations, wealthy hunters also expanded their holdings thanks to the first phase of the Great

Migration. Facing disfranchisement, violence, and the ruination of rice cultivation and phosphate industries by the 1893 Sea Island Hurricane, African Americans continued to flee the area in droves beginning in the early 1900s, leaving behind cheap acreage for these sporting estates. By the late 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) estimated that since “practically one third of the taxable land of Beaufort County has been withdrawn from cultivation through sales as hunting preserves to wealthy Northern sportsmen.”8

On both the islands and the mainland, absentee ownership allowed African American communities to create and manage a kind of commons landscape. Again, as Emory Campbell reminisced about growing up on Hilton Head, although most black families owned small plots of

7 Emory Campbell, Interview by Robert Korstad, 1992-1994, Southern Rural Poverty Collection; Fritz R. Simmons, “Island Frontier Off Georgia’s Coast,” New York Times, April 29, 1956. 8 Quote from Federal Writers Project, South Carolina: A Guide to the Palmetto State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941, 1973), 170; Daniel J. Vivian, A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Caroline Grego, “Black Autonomy, Red Cross Recovery, and White Backlash after the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893,” Journal of Southern History 85: 4 (November 2019): 803-840.

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land for farming, they coexisted with Northern landowners “would come down in the winter and they would hunt the entire island. When they were not there, we could use the entire island too for getting firewood or even farming a piece of land.”9 In ways not that dissimilar from white mountaineers, black families like the Campbells developed an environmental ethos by which access to the commons (both the lands and waters of the Lowcountry) became a means of individual and community survival in a place with little habitable land. Yet, unlike in the mountains, the legacies of Jim Crow gave land ownership an elevated status as a bulwark against the ever-present fears of black displacement and communal destruction.

Onto this supposedly “forgotten” island stepped two families who reshaped its landscape from one of a commons to an exclusive retreat. From the ruins of the old plantation economy would come new resort “plantations.” Despite assuming the mantle of leadership for the anti-

BASF movement, the Fraser and Hack families’ roots on the island ran shallow. Both grew up in

Hinesville, Georgia, a small town just south of Savannah and around seventy miles from Hilton

Head. There, General Joseph B. Fraser and Fred Hack Sr. worked together in the timber business. This relationship brought them to form the Hilton Head Company (HHC) in 1949 for the ostensible purpose of securing around 8,000 acres of virgin pine stands from two wealthy

New Yorkers who used it as a hunting ground. Within a year, the Hack family moved to the island taking up what Frederick Hack Jr. later described as “an isolated life” within a “past-by society” where residents traveled around on “marsh tackies” horses and small, flat-bottom boats called “bateaus.” This pioneer mythology of an exotic, quaint frontier existence only grew in hindsight with the massive changes that followed.10 With electricity, a new bridge, and small

9 Campbell, Interview by Robert Korstad. 10 Bill Fields, “Profile: Frederick Hack, A Part of the History,” (Hilton Head) Islander (February 1977), 15-18.

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cottages, the Fraser and Hack families understood, almost from the beginning, that their timber would not be the most valuable commodity on the island. “This land is valuable,” Fred Hack Sr. was fond of saying, “because of its natural elements.”11

Despite the Hinesville partners’ common appreciation for Hilton Head’s beauty, personal and professional disagreements—over who should manage the land and how they should do it— created a growing rift in the company. In particular, the ever-widening split between the Hacks and the Frasers surrounded Joseph’s youngest son, Charles. As he neared graduation from Yale

University Law School in 1955, twenty-five-year-old Charles Fraser developed a detailed set of plans to transform Hilton Head. In short, the ambitious law student who spent summers at his father’s lumber camps drafted plans for an island retreat based on low-density housing developments that preserved the natural essence of the landscape without sacrificing convenience for a well-endowed clientele. The following year, a law degree in hand, he asked his father to let him buy a controlling interest in the company with an advantageous loan of course.

For reasons that remain unclear, the elder Fraser agreed.12 For the other partners in HHC,

Fraser’s unproven plans and stubborn refusal to compromise his vision left little room for dissent. Crowded out by what Fred Hack and others saw as the egotistical delusions of grandeur by an upstart, young lawyer, the company’s holdings would be split between HHC, led ostensibly by Hack, and the breakaway Sea Pines Plantation Company, run by Fraser.13

For Charles Fraser, development on Hilton Head constituted an inevitability. He believed that, under his careful guidance, development could be constructive rather than destructive. What

11 Porter M. Thompson, “Profile: Fred Hack: Farewell to a Pioneer,” Islander (February 1978), 44. 12 Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 495-496; Halfacre, A Delicate Balance, 171-172. 13 Danielson and Danielson, Profit and Politics, 22-28.

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he lacked in experience, he made up for as a voracious reader who consulted numerous experts from universities such as Yale and Harvard to dozens of other developers operating across the

Southeast. Eschewing the neon lights, high-rise hotels, and kitschy roadside attractions that created a landscape of “visual pollution” stretching up-and-down the Eastern Seaboard from

Miami to Myrtle Beach to Atlantic City, Fraser envisioned Hilton Head as a refuge by the sea protected for the over-stimulated, traffic-weary American. The island’s roads would wind seamlessly through well-preserved stretches of woodlands. Reportedly, he refused to cut down trees unless cars hit them more than twice. The names of the roads themselves also called to mind the Arcadian ambiance of island life as many Sea Pines residents lived along ornithological-themed streets like “Belted Kingfisher Lane,” “Black Duck Lane,” and “Brown

Pelican Road.”14

Unlike the oppressive bunching of houses right on top of each other in suburban

America, Hilton Head properties had room to breathe. In its first fifteen years, approximately seventy-seven percent of residential acreage in Sea Pines held less than five lots per acre.15

Despite this unique vision, doubts persisted about whether the not-even thirty-year-old could wring a profit from developing the land in such a tedious way. Skepticism of Sea Pines even came close to home. Privately, Charles’s mother worried he would fritter away his chance for a promising legal career.16 Despite a plan even his mother didn’t love, Fraser made up for his lack of experience as a developer with a confidence rooted in equal parts idealism and careful research.

14 John McPhee, Encounters With the Archdruid (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971), 89-93. 15 The Hilton Head Company, Master Plan for the Hilton Head Company, Phase 1 (March 1971), South Carolina Environmental Coalition Records [hereafter: “SCEC Records,”] Box 4, Folder: “Locations: Hilton Head,” SCL. 16 McPhee, Encounters With the Archdruid, 90-91.

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Within the first decade of breaking ground on Sea Pines Plantation, Fraser saw his dream pay off in spades. In its first three years on the market, his company sold over three hundred lots.

Although inland properties sold for a few thousand, beachfront homes sold for upward of

$16,000. As the island’s first eighteen-hole golf course and other recreational facilities materialized, the price of owning a slice of the island would increase rapidly.17 Despite their less- than-amicable split, Fred Hack and the other HHC partners shared Fraser’s desire to keep the island accessible, while maintaining its aesthetic appeal through landscape preservation.

Although not necessarily imitators of Sea Pines, Hack’s Port Royal Plantation constructed and marketed its properties as maintaining a natural congruence with the island landscape. One brochure even touted the homes there as appearing “not to have been built on the ground but to have grown out of it.” Also, Port Royal homes kept their distance from each other with no more than two lots per acre.18 In the first decade after the Bridge, Hilton Head developers marketed the island for its natural adornments. Timber attracted them to the island in the first place, but the beauty kept them there. With its wide beaches framed by towering, ancient trees and dotted with still-present wildlife, Hilton Head’s transformation into a landscape of retreat represented a delicate, but lucrative proposition.

From the beginning, Sea Pines staff worked to maintain the aesthetic integrity of Fraser’s vision. Stories abound about the developer’s commitment to landscape preservation. In one, he most likely re-shaped the entire plan for the Harbour Town marina at a cost of around $50,000 to protect one venerable live oak. Others, perhaps apocryphal tales, told of Fraser hiring a legion of

17 Ray J. Schrick, “Second Homes, They Spread Rapidly, Provide New Markets for Household Items,” Wall Street Journal, January 19, 1961. 18 Port Royal Plantation Brochure, quoted in Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 496; The Hilton Head Company, Master Plan Phase 1 (March 1971), SCEC Records, Box 4, Folder: “Locations: Hilton Head,” SCL.

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barbers to groom Spanish moss to not weigh down the trees; along with a private security force empowered to defend alligators, deer, and other wildlife from illegal hunting.19 Also, homebuyers agreed to abide by a list of deed restrictions that ran at least forty pages long in the early years. Uniformity ruled as Sea Pines residents could not alter their house’s exterior, mailbox location, or landscaping without Fraser’s approval. As journalist John McPhee quipped after meeting Fraser, “He is Yahweh. He is not merely the mayor and the zoning board, he is the living ark of the deed covenant.”20 Such strict requirements enabled property owners like

Jonathan Daniels to report all manner of violations. To take one example, Daniels complained in a letter to Fraser himself in May 1970 about “the appearance and barking” of his neighbors four large dogs. In addition to his concerns about the resale value of the homes nearby, the editor also worried that the dogs running free in the area would disturb “the undeveloped lands occupied by deer and other wild life on the island,” in addition to his grandchildren who came to visit.21

Across the island, developers found a winning formula in building resorts while striving to preserve its aesthetic integrity. In doing so, Hilton Head Island manufactured the appearance of rural life in a coastal setting for its waves of new residents and visitors.

Whose Hilton Head? Race and Inequality

Not simply a tourist destination, Hilton Head appealed to mostly retirees and professionals from the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and, to a lesser extent, the South. Its status as a community that combined the conveniences of suburban life with the rare, natural beauty of a coastal frontier attracted both white, business types looking for a new opportunity

19 McPhee, Encounters With the Archdruid, 91-92; Halfacre, A Delicate Balance, 172-174. 20 McPhee, Encounters With the Archdruid, 94. 21 Jonathan Daniels to Charles Fraser, May 14, 1970, Daniels Papers, Folder 1800: “F 1970,” SHC.

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and elderly whites looking to settle down in the final years of life. In the former group, families left positions at Dayton, Ohio hospitals and Madison Avenue advertising firms to seize what one called the chance “to live longer and better” on the island. Similarly, having just retired from a bank in Philadelphia, one of Sea Pines’s original residents commented that “some mysterious island makes pleasant people [even] more pleasant.”22 More than just an ethereal sense of the good life, the island’s “magic” also rested on its construction of a unique mix of nature and recreation. Robert Horsey, a retired chemical engineer who lived in one Sea Pines’s beachfront lots on Belted Kingfisher Lane, explained his family’s choice to live there as based on factors like “the lack of industrialization of the area, its almost unspoiled environment, and its great natural beauty.”23 As the island’s developers, visitors, and residents all understood, Hilton

Head’s anti-urban and pastoral aesthetic drew people in the first place. From there, through the mysterious charms of gentle sea breezes, swaying trees, and quiet streets in exclusive neighborhoods took care of the rest.

For this reason, developers and residents alike found the revelation of BASF’s plans in

Fall 1969 so troubling. In their initial, eleven-page memo to Governor McNair, Hack and Fraser reminded him that Hilton Head’s continued depended “upon the visitors confidence in the future of the area,” explaining that “it is not enough that the area look good today.” To prove this point, they cited internal surveys estimating that a minimum of 90 percent of out-of-state buyers purchasing a property in Beaufort County “have unpleasant personal experiences with industrial pollution ‘back home.’”24 While these numbers may be exaggerated or massaged to fit the anti-

22 Danielson and Danielson, Profit and Politics, 100-102. 23 Robert G. Horsey to Governor Robert McNair, December 23, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 75, Folder: “BASF: Letters-Con, 1969,” SCPC. 24 Fred Hack and Charles Fraser Memo to Governor McNair, November 29, 1969, 7-8, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: March-November, 1969,” SCPC.

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BASF narrative, they reflect the larger belief among Hilton Head’s business class that economic development in the Lowcountry depended on the preservation of a rural, landscape aesthetic.

Numerous letters poured into the offices of politicians and major newspapers after the plant announcement wherein retirees, especially, offered desperate reminders of why they moved to Hilton Head. This almost entirely white, wealthy groups who arrived in Hilton Head found themselves confronted with the possibility of finding the industrial, polluted conditions of mostly

Northern cities they retreated from in moving to the South Carolina coast’s unique landscapes.

As journalist Marshall Frady—who lived on the island for a year while writing for Harper’s

Magazine—noted with an air of cynicism, much of Hilton Head offered “sanctuaries for retired executives and industrialists who have fled lands they have laid waste behind them in the

North.”25

Retirees from Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and even nearby Charleston cited their direct experience with pollution as a factor in their decision to move to Hilton Head. One letter writer expressed her family’s great relief at moving to the island with some exaggeration saying, “it was so good to be able to breathe again after we moved here.”26 Certainly, at some level, these justifications for moving to the island became more prominent in the time after the plant’s announcement. Still, the sheer volume of such letters combined with the careful, intentional aesthetic designed by Fraser and others illustrates how retirees and second-home buyers here felt they not only earned the right to property here but the right to enjoy the unique, natural landscape that such wealth afforded them.

25 Marshall Frady, “The View From Hilton Head,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1, 1970, 105. 26 Robert D. Frick to Governor Robert McNair, December 18, 1969; Laurence D. Hicks to Governor McNair, December 18, 1969; Letter to Governor McNair, December 16, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 75, Folder: “BASF: Letters-Con, 1969,” SCPC.

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However, the comforts of Hilton Head came at a price. With the seclusion secured by white migrants, the exclusion of native black islanders soon followed. By 1975—when the best local figures were available thanks to a special census taken for Hilton Head at the request of community leaders—whites constituted about eighty percent of the population on Hilton Head, a near-complete reversal of twenty years earlier when African Americans made up around ninety percent of the smaller population that existed then. Of the 1,299 non-white residents of the island, only fifty-three lived on its south end. Meanwhile, the remainder hung onto land on the northern half of Hilton Head.27

Although many black islanders resigned themselves to accept the new development at first, resentment and distrust lingered over the loss of land and the restriction of access to the forested commons that had been central to life on Hilton Head. It should be noted that these changes resulted from residential construction both in and beyond the former pine forests controlled by HHC, rather than logging. Although the company held substantial timber stock on the island, they carried out only small harvests of the lumber, hiring local black men to work for them in the early 1950s. According to a former planner from the Lowcountry, Charles Fraser exploited the good will that his father gained from many African American landowners to then secure black-owned properties for extraordinarily low prices.28 Once the stately housing developments sprouted up, the subsequent construction of gates for the new “plantations” added insult to injury. Even as development expropriated black land, white businessmen claimed that

27 Thomas, “Blacks on the Sea Islands,” 60-63. 28 Tony Criscitiello, interview with June Manning Thomas, December 5, 1975, in Thomas, “Blacks on the South Carolina Sea Islands: Planning for Tourist and Land Development (Ph.D Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977), 61, n10.

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jobs in tourism promised a better life for longtime residents in the transition away from the traditional, subsistence economy.

Moving beyond those initial affronts to the commons economy, black islanders saw few of the promised benefits from Hilton Head’s growing tourism industry in the first ten years of its existence. First, Charles Fraser and other Sea Pines residents tried to lend a helping hand to the public health problems exposed by activists in Beaufort County. Through Sea Pines’s Pope

Community Health Project, he and another company employee who worked on the project, Mrs.

Landon Butler, testified before Congress in support of Dr. Gatch’s findings. Of course, like other white politicians, they believed that “progressive” local officials would distribute the food if given more federal funds and reduced prices for food stamp recipients.29

Second, across the island’s hotels, white business leaders secured an agreement with

OEO to provide night classes in the winter off-season for cleaning and wait staff to attend and get a high school education. At its best, the program only provided more formal training in the kinds of low-skill, low-pay jobs found in the hospitality industry. At its worst, white teachers worked to undermine black mobility. Mary Benton—a thirty-five-year-old mother of five who commuted to the island from across the bridge in Bluffton—told investigators that at the end of the class as she waited for her certificate that never came because, in her words, the “cracker in charge…never sent them.” By late 1969, when BASF announced its plans, wages in Beaufort

County’s hospitality industry remained barely above the poverty line.30

29 Statements of Mrs. Landon Butler Jr. and Charles E. Fraser, February 20, 1969, Hearings Before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs of the United States Senate, Part 4: South Carolina, 1247-1259, 1278- 1288 30 Paul Good, “Of Hookworms and Spanish Moss,” New South 23: 1 (Winter 1968): 88;

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For this reason, African American community leaders like David Jones formed cooperatives like his Fishing Cooperative. “The Poverty Program hasn’t done anything on Hilton

Head,” Jones commented in 1969, explaining that “people here tried to set up poverty committees to say what should be done, but they never had a chance. No one listened, nothing happened.” As Jones’s criticism attests, the unwillingness of local whites—whether on or off the island—to engage in meaningful community organizing and deliberation with their black neighbors undermined the good intentions expressed by Fraser and others.31

Still, at the time of the BASF controversy, underlying concerns about race and inequality troubled some residents and developers alike. Some liberal-minded whites sought to help raise money and volunteer for community projects in the dwindling black neighborhoods on the island. For example, Emerson Mulford—then president of the Hilton Head Community

Association—partnered with black principal Isaac W. Wilborn to raise private funds for a youth center on the island. Pledges poured in from longtime and recent locals alike. As Jonathan

Daniels explained in a letter to Mulford included with his pledge, “if we are going to be happy here in the Fraser compound, we will need nothing more than the friendship of our Negro neighbors.” The paternalistic reciprocity implicit in Daniels’s view was not lost on him. Later, he noted his hope that black benefactors would chip in to head off the “suggestion that we are playing Lady Bountiful to the ‘deserving poor.’” Such a letter expressed in unusually frank terms how many whites within the plantation gates developed at least a modicum of awareness of the inequality built into the island landscape.32 However, their actual responses to this awareness

31 David Jones, quoted in Paul Good, “On the Shrimp Docks One Morning,’ New South 23: 1 (Winter 1968), 97-98; June Manning Thomas, “The Impact of Corporate Tourism on Gullah Blacks: Notes on Issues of Employment,” Phylon 41: 1 (1980): 1-11. 32 Jonathan Daniels to Emerson Mulford, Daniels Papers, Folder 1715: “Hilton Head, 1968,” SHC; Jim Littlejohn, “Islander of the Month: Isaac Wayman Wilborn,” Islander (March 1971), 23, 34-35.

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showed how new, white residents’ anxieties about maintaining the island’s public image took priority over engaging in genuine, structural reforms to the local political economy.

In addition to the limited training programs for the mostly black chambermaids on the island, other philanthropic efforts also tried to show white good will amid the pain of displacement. Trying to expand on the efforts of the Pope Community Health Project, Sea Pines staff and residents offered some support for parasite eradication through the Hilton Head Health

Project, which did provide another temporary source of employment island’s black population.

At some level, this project also rivaled Thomas Barnwell Jr.’s controversial leadership of the nearby Beaufort-Jasper Comprehensive Health Care center.

Within a year, though, Brown reported that the project’s funding dried up rapidly. In his estimation, the resort companies reallocated monies intended to support the health center to then fund the fight against the BASF plant.33 Indeed, the plant itself became a source of increased hostility among African Americans toward the new occupiers of Hilton Head. As more black workers moved off the island to the town of Bluffton, just across the bridge, a local Progressive

Club formed to back the chemical plant. Consisting of around fifty African Americans, the group praised the plant in early December 1969 while blasting the developers saying, “our labor at low wages have contributed to Mr. Hack’s and Mr. Fraser’s success.”34

These testimonies indicate that Hilton Head’s reputation, like the rest of Beaufort County, did not escape the hunger stories unscathed. First, white developers and residents’ efforts to help

33 Joseph C. Brown to Jonathan Daniels, January 20, 1970, Daniels Papers, Folder 1803: “Hilton Head, 1970,” SHC; The controversy centered around what many Beaufort whites considered to be Barnwell’s “unwarranted high salary” and an exorbitant budget line for staff at the government-funded health center. However, some whites defended Barnwell as evident in correspondence between Jonathan Daniels and local librarian Ruth Smith. Scott and Susan Graeber, “Health Care in the Rural South,” The Nation, June 26, 1976, 785-788; Ruth Smith to Jonathan Daniels, December 3, 1970, Daniels Papers, Folder 1819: "1970-S," SHC; Arthur Simon, “Battle of Beaufort,” 14. 34 Bluffton Progressive Club, “We Need BASF!” Beaufort Gazette, December 10, 1969.

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with the parasite and hunger problem arose from mixed motives. Certainly, they felt some paternalistic sense of compassion. But, ever image-conscious, Hilton Head’s white leadership also understood that stories of worms and malnutrition did not make attractive copy for tourism brochures. Even with their confident statements of personal entitlement to a landscape of retreat, some white developers and residents worried about the exposure of portraying the island as an oasis of luxury and beauty, when not all residents, namely black natives, enjoyed the same living standards as those in Hilton Head’s resorts.

Progress Without Pollution: The Anti-BASF Campaign

As early as March 1969, Charles Fraser and Fred Hack knew the American office of

BASF had its sights set on Beaufort County. Then, State Development Board chairman J.D.

Little Jr. asked Fraser to help make arrangements for the company’s executive committee and state officials to stay at Sea Pines’s William Hilton Hotel the following May. Soon after visiting the island, various possible sites for their operation, and enjoying samplings of local seafood, provided at the request of the Governor himself, BASF agreed to buy the state land on Victoria

Bluff.35 With plans underway to initiate its $100 million investment in the petrochemical plant there, Hack and Fraser put aside past, personal differences and monitored the company and its local allies closely. In June, Hack’s son Fred Jr. and Colonel Charles Rousek of the Hilton Head

Chamber of Commerce attended a county planning board meeting where furtive discussions about an unnamed “Industrial Prospect” locating a chemical plant at Victoria Bluff occurred between state officials, Beaufort town leaders, and longstanding businesses like the Daniel

35 J.D. Little Jr. to Charles Fraser, March 31, 1969; Dr. Hans Lautenschlager to Governor Robert McNair, April 30, 1969 and May 26, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF, March-November, 1969,” SCPC.

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Construction Company.36 The hand-in-glove nature in which these groups worked together suggested to Hilton Head Company officials—who then relayed this information to Fraser—that all their efforts to calibrate the island landscape might be in vain if these outside forces had their way. Even more concerning, state leaders ignored Fraser and Hack’s confidential request, sent within a week of the meeting, to join the negotiations and secure a deed restriction to regulate any potential industrial plant’s pollutants.37

Despite their awareness of the plans afoot for Victoria Bluff, BASF’s first public announcement in October 1969 forced developers and residents of Hilton Head Island to scramble and marshal their forces quickly. The major white resort owners, Fraser and Hack, in particular, made sure that local and state officials knew they would not accept this plant without a fight. In November meetings with the State Development Board (SDB), Hilton Head’s business leadership tried to strike a pragmatic tone. Rather than rejecting the re-zoning proposal out of hand, they made clear that although they wished to see such industry be located elsewhere, they wanted BASF and the state to create a “buffer zone” to protect the aesthetic appeal of the

Lowcountry landscape. In particular, the resort developers wanted to see a line of “trees obstructing the view of the industry” to ensure “the entrance to Hilton Head Island from

Interstate 95 be protected.”38 Yet, this would only be the first salvo in the developers’ larger counter-assault against the pro-BASF forces. Since rejecting the plant altogether would be

36 Fred Hack Jr. and Col. Charles Rousek Memo to Fred Hack (Sr.), June 14, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF, March-November, 1969,” SCPC. 37 Fred Hack and Charles Fraser Memo to Governor McNair, November 29, 1969, 7-8, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: March-November, 1969,” SCPC. 38 Carl B. Watson, Memo to T. Allen Legare, J.D. Little Jr., and James S. Konduros, November 12, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF, March-November, 1969,” SCPC.

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construed as simple NIMBY-ism, the anti-BASF leadership constructed a strategy that linked their cause with the growing environmental movement.

By November, within three weeks of the announcement, Hilton Head residents organized a “watchdog” group that would become the Citizens Association of Beaufort County (CABC).

Starting with a war chest of at least $6,000, local and state leaders monitored the group with concern as they expected it could raise at least twice that each year for the next three years.

Undoubtedly, the Fraser and Hack fortunes helped bankroll the new organization.39 In addition to deep pockets, with a variety of well-connected and well-endowed retirees, anti-BASF citizens groups possessed important links to national media and politicians. Most prominently, the

CABC’s chairman Vice Admiral Rufus L. Taylor moved to the island after retiring as deputy chief of the Central Intelligence Agency.40

Moreover, as Will Bryan points out, beginning in early 1969, Fred Hack cultivated a close relationship with an architect named Nathaniel Owings, who not only subscribed to Hilton

Head’s early vision of “green design,” but also offered a connection to key officials in the Nixon

Administration, namely Interior Secretary Walter Hickel and Russell Train, then Chairman of the

Council on Environmental Quality.41 In addition to national connections, the anti-BASF forces employed the services of Bradley, Graham, and Hamby, a prominent public relations agency led by three white women in Columbia that previously worked on campaigns the state’s most

39 Bob Thompson to J.D. Little Jr., October 24, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “March-November, 1969,” SCPC. 40 Arthur Simon, “Battle of Beaufort,” New Republic, May 23, 1970, 13. 41 Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 504; On Russell Train as a conservative environmentalist, see: J. Brooks Flippen, Conservative Conservationist: Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Environmentalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006).

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prominent politicians, including McNair and both U.S. Senators.42 With deep pockets and a network of prominent supporters, the anti-BASF groups became almost impossible to ignore.

From their inception, citizens groups opposed to BASF sounded the alarm over the plant’s environmental impacts. In particular, they worried about effluents discharged into the

Colleton River and nearby estuaries, air pollution blowing east onto Hilton Head, and potential leakages or spills from oil tankers steaming into the Port Royal Sound to supply the plant. The threat of a legal injunction to delay or stop the plant all together hung over the initial discussions, which ran like informal negotiations between company staff, their politician supporters, and the usual parties representing Hilton Head’s tourism and seafood industries. Within weeks of the announcement, Fraser and Hack leaned on Governor McNair to establish legal mechanisms to protect these sensitive landscapes from the threat of pollution.43

Such mechanisms could take a variety of forms in the developers’ minds. First, Charles

Fraser, Fred Hack, and Tom Barnwell Jr.—representing the black-owned fishing cooperative— asked local and state officials to require BASF sign an ironclad covenant promising to not exploit a loophole in South Carolina’s pollution laws that loosened the standards for chemical companies to treat effluents in areas with substantial shellfish populations, which would include

Victoria Bluff.44 Failing that, the developers presented a series of other solutions. The company could build a “large holding vat” some 5,000 feet underground where the pollutants could evaporate over time rather than spill out as a solid form into local waterways. Or, to raise the

42 Lottie Hamby, Interview with John Duffy, October 5, 1999, South Carolina Political Collections Oral History Project, SCPC. 43 Fred Hack and Charles Fraser Memo to Governor Robert McNair, November 29, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: March-November, 1969,” SCPC. 44 Hortense F. Roach, “Hilton Head Officials Ask Anti-Pollution Agreement,” (Charleston) News and Courier, December 10, 1969, BASF Vertical File, BDC.

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chances of legal retribution for BASF’s operation, they suggested that the state require the company to post a hefty performance bond of somewhere between $25 to $30 million that would provide “monetary relief” to seafood or tourism industries if they suffered harm from the plant.

In the developers’ minds, given the choice between the bond and installing high-end equipment to ease pollution discharges, BASF would see the latter as the cheaper and better option. Lastly, and most interestingly, Fraser suggested that certain real estate companies, the black fishermen’s cooperative, and certain real estate companies, of course, be allowed to purchase one acre each on Victoria Bluff. That way, they would have clear legal standing to sue BASF for any damages incurred after the plant began operation.45

In assembling a coalition of concerned citizens, Fraser and Hack worked to portray the issue as one about broader issues of ecology and public health. At some level, they held environmental concerns in high regard as evident from the meticulous attention they paid to green spaces and tree canopies on the island. Yet, on another level, the island’s cadre of developers resented die-hard preservationists who Fraser referred to as “druids,” for what he considered an elevation of the rights of nature over the rights of human beings.46 In terms of dollars and cents, Hilton Head showed that protecting the aesthetic integrity of the coastal South could be a boon for the tourism industry. Additionally, arguments about quality-of-life for human and animal populations provided political cover for developers and helped blunt certain critics’ efforts to paint them as motivated only by blatant self-interest.

45 George Harmon, “Beaufort Group to Present Pollution Control Request: McNair to Get Proposal,” (Charleston) News and Courier, December 9, 1969; “McNair Gets Appeal on BASF,” (Beaufort) Sea Islander, December 11, 1969. 46 John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid, 95.

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During the last months of 1969, pro-BASF forces found themselves caught off guard by the swiftness and ferocity of the air war directed their way. In coordinating with local officials and company leadership, groups of boosters first doubled down on their message that BASF possessed a sterling record on pollution mitigation and corporate citizenship in general. To prove this, officials from both the state and local governments took highly-publicized trips to West

Germany and Belgium, where they toured plants similar to the one proposed for Victoria Bluff.

Moreover, they also tried to paint Fraser and his ilk as selfish, dictatorial in their opposition to industries they deemed “incompatible” with the island’s tourism industry. At a press conference upon returning from a tour of a BASF plant in West Germany, the area’s State Senator James P.

Harrelson leveled such a charge at Hilton Head developers. “I don’t think they’ll ever find what they call ‘compatible industry,’” he scoffed, “they probably wouldn’t like to see any industry, even an ice cream pie factory!”47 An editorial in the Charleston News and Courier also needled

Fraser and Hack’s situational ethics in less dramatic terms. “When a developer buys a primitive sea island, cuts the timber, drains the marshes…and builds houses, motels and golf courses, the conservationists have a fit,” but “when someone tries to build a factory near the developer’s island, the developer and his new population have a fit.” With little variation, this line of argument remained constant throughout the BASF controversy.48 When confronted with deep concerns from islanders about the company or the state’s ability to limit pollution, proponents of the plant often lashed out at the source of the criticisms, mostly wealthy islanders, rather than the criticisms themselves.

47 For a clear example of the “incompatibility” argument, see Hilton Head Rotary Club President’s letter to the editor of the Beaufort Gazette in the same issue as Harrelson’s statement, William N. Cork Letter; J.P. Harrelson, quoted in “Sen. Harrelson Rejects Fears of Pollution,” Beaufort Gazette, December 11, 1969, BASF Vertical File, BDC. 48 “Ashley Cooper: Doing the Charleston,” News and Courier, January 11, 1970, BASF Vertical File, BDC.

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Such assurances failed to assuage most Hilton Head residents who lived behind the plantation gates. For many island residents who moved from cities in the Midwest and Northeast, the suggestion that heavy industry like petrochemicals could live in peace with coastal tourism seemed impractical. One retired industrial businessman told journalist Marshall Frady, “I’ve lived in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit,” adding “I know the price of industrialization. The threat of pollution is so much easier to prove after the fact than before it.”49 In an ironic twist of fate, many of the retired executives, engineers, and attorneys who joined the fight doubted the promises of BASF’s top brass because they saw pollution from the other side. For example,

William Kenney retired to the island after a successful career as a general counsel for Shell Oil, where he reportedly “never lost a case” to anti-pollution activists. Naturally, he lent his expertise to the Hilton Head Community Association in the BASF fight.50

For other Beaufort County natives and newcomers alike, they did not have to call upon memories of living in urban America to see the costs of industrial pollution. In their initial appeals to Governor McNair, Hack and Fraser argued that industrial pollution near other South

Carolina coastal cities like Charleston and Georgetown retarded the growth of tourism and recreational industries.51 Moving forward, BASF skeptics both on and off Hilton Head raised the issue of the Tenneco chemical plant on the northern edge of Beaufort County as a contemporary example of how pollution ruined area waterways. Although smaller than the proposed BASF facility, reports by ecologists at the University of Georgia about the immense Tenneco’s operation—after only three years of operation—made their way into area newspapers by

49 Marshall Frady, “The View From Hilton Head,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1, 1970, 104 (emphasis in original). 50 Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 499. 51 Fred Hack and Charles Fraser Memo to Governor Robert McNair, November 29, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: March-November, 1969,” SCPC.

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December 1969, much to the German company’s chagrin.52 This revelation concerned local leaders as it indicated that industrial pollution worried not only self-interested Hilton Headers, but those who lived north of the Broad River or even far on the mainland. From the latter camp, a Hampton County farmer and sawmill owner named Oswald Lightsey owned over one thousand acres straddling some of the area’s numerous marshes and tidal creeks. Having seen his concerns about Tenneco confirmed, Lightsey grew concerned both for his coastal properties “as a taxpayer” and for the “black mark” that the BASF plant would place on somewhere so many people considered a “happy, quiet place to live.” Such testimony from Lowcountry natives and newcomers speaks to the ways that the rights to property and place became one and the same.53

Echoing the rights language of the Silent Majority became a way to defend rural communities from the threatened ravages of industrialization.

On the southern edge of the county, black and white Hilton Headers regarded the paper mills in Savannah with disdain. Retirees and newcomers complained about the rotten stench that reached the island when the wind blew in just the wrong direction. Meanwhile, African

American fishermen like Thomas Barnwell’s repeated warnings to “look what’s happened in

Savannah” came from an intimate knowledge of the costs of industrial excess from the Georgia port city. Untreated effluents from the pulp and paper mills there proved singularly responsible for destroying the oyster beds on Daufuskie Island, an island of nearly all Gullah blacks that sat between Hilton Head and Savannah. Rather than suggesting that the plant could coexist with shrimpers and tourists, anti-BASF activists pointed to belching factories just across the Savannah

52 Hugh E. Gibson, “New Alarm: Beaufort Facing Pollution Problem,” Charleston News and Courier, December 20, 1969. 53 Oswald Lightsey to Governor McNair, December 23, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: December 1969,” SCPC.

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and Broad Rivers as evidence that Beaufort County deserved to be a haven of underdevelopment because, rather than in spite, of the industrial excesses perched uncomfortably nearby.54

Alongside the environmental concerns expressed by the development companies’ leaders and the lawyers and experts they hired, the sensory effects of pollution remained at the forefront of the minds of those who recently moved to the island. Pollution itself represented a concern to be sure. However, the presence of a petrochemical plant also symbolized a fundamental redefinition of the landscape from a rural, coastal retreat to one where heavy industrialization would soon be joined by urbanization and overcrowding

Calls to stop Hilton Head from becoming another “Savannah” or “Cleveland” went hand- in-hand with the “back-to-the-land” argument that life on the island offered a necessary antidote to the ills of modern life. In another letter, a salesman for the Hilton Head Company bragged to

Governor McNair that Hilton Head provided “nature’s therapy” in a world with “mental institutions bulging beyond capacity,” which he blamed on “our industrialized and mercenary business complex.”55 In these personal testimonies, pollution became a proxy word to stand in for the sense of meritocratic entitlement to enjoy nature’s bounty that the island’s residents felt would be violated if the plant did arrive on nearby shores. Portraying the coastal landscape as unpolluted proved essential to both its defense and its larger re-imagining as a landscape of retreat.

54 Barnwell, quoted in Bayard Webster, “Carolina Plan to Build on Unspoiled Coast Arouses Protest,” New York Times, February 1, 1970; Robert Horsey to Governor Robert McNair, December 23, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 75, Folder: “BASF: Letters Con, 1969,” SCPC. For a detailed report on the environmental and ecological damage done by the paper industry in Savannah, see: James M. Fallows, The Water Lords: Ralph Nader’s Study Group Report on Industry and Environmental Crisis in Savannah, Georgia (New York: Grossman, 1971). 55 George C. Bjork to Governor Robert McNair, December 31, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 75, Folder: “BASF Letters: Con, 1969,” SCPC.

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Having found eager and willing recruits to fight the plant, Hilton Headers steeled themselves for a years-long battle against the company and its backers. In the first week of

January 1970, Orion Hack—brother to Fred Sr. and vice president of the Hilton Head

Company—organized a four-day, all-expenses-paid conference on the island to call attention to the threat of pollution. Although certainly enticed by the offer of a prepaid trip to the island,

Hack pitched the conference to ecologists and environmental activists as an opportunity to raise the alarm about industrial pollution nationwide and in what he described as “one of the few large areas of estuaries left on the East Coast still unpolluted by industrial waste.” The symposium— entitled “South Carolina in Crisis!”—drew representatives from environmental organizations within the state (including the black fishermen’s cooperative) and the South as well as more well-known national groups such as the National Audubon Society, Friends of the Earth, and the

Izaak Walton League.56

However, such activists did not heap copious amounts of praise on the developers’ efforts. They clasped hands in an uneasy embrace and backed their fight against BASF, but ecologists like Barry Commoner and Joseph Browder emphasized that the issues facing Beaufort

County served as only one battle in a larger war against polluters. Even more than that, many cast skeptical glances at Fraser, in particular. Soon after the symposium, one attendee who described Fraser as a “parasite,” explained that the activists tried to make clear that “we’re not in this to bail out Hilton Head.” Similarly, a biologist from the University of South Carolina

56 Citizens Association of Beaufort County, Conservation Symposium: South Carolina in Crisis, January 4-7, 1970, BASF Vertical File, BDC; Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 501-506.

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lamented “it’s a shame what they’ve done to that island,” referencing his own studies of the area’s ecosystems less than a decade before the first resorts were built.57

Unimpressed by the island’s labyrinthine roads named for various bird species, the student activists and scientists who attended the symposium understood the people with whom they had joined forces. Nonetheless, they understood the value of regional estuaries as ecological rather than aesthetic. Fraser and Hack’s vision of preserving a landscape of retreat for human beings went against the principles of these environmentalists, but they operated with a righteous zeal that saw the developers not only as strategic allies but as potential converts to the broader cause.58

Over the next month, the conference created a “chain reaction,” in Orion Hack’s words to direct national media attention to the BASF fight. Major national news outlets from the New

York Times to Time Magazine to the New Republic came to the island to do in-depth reports on the controversy.59 In garnering publicity for their campaign, citizens groups also gathered evidence for fact sheets to be distributed to voters and included in full-page advertisements that would cast doubt on the company’s claims that it could mitigate the plant’s pollution using its own safeguards. In one report with a question-and-answer guide that emerged from the symposium, the CABC brandished its new slogan: “Progress Without Pollution.” Over the next thirteen pages, they made the case that should the plant go through, “we will have lost…some of the most beautiful and soul-satisfying ground to be found anywhere.” The conservation

57 Quoted in “Environment: Fight at Hilton Head,” Newsweek, April 13, 1970, 72; Alan Ternes, “An Introduction to the Setting and Characters of the Tragical Farce or Farcical Tragedy of Victoria Bluffs, S.C.,” Natural History 79 (April 1970): 9-17, quote on 12. 58 McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid, 77-96; Ternes, “An Introduction.” 59 Bayard Webster, “Carolina Plan to Build a Plant on Unspoiled Coast Arouses Protest,” New York Times, February 1, 1970; Eugene Warner and John Carmody, “Hilton Head is Wondering About its New Neighbor,” Washington Post, April 26, 1970; “Troubled Little Island,” Time, January 26, 1970, 55; Arthur Simon, “Battle of Beaufort.”

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symposium set the BASF controversy on a course for a national debate.60 As in the hunger hearings, the use of experts to undermine a state-driven narrative brought Beaufort County to the attention of national actors in the media and political spheres.

However, the issue surrounding the plant had never been merely a local one. The concerns expressed by residents, whether full-time or part-time, and tourists who lived outside the Lowcountry solidified Hilton Head’s reputation as a foil to conditions in other parts of the nation, an exclusive landscape of retreat away from the smog, crime, and freeways that defined the urban imaginary for many white Americans.

Fat Cats and Shrimp Boats

As the calendar turned to a new decade, the company’s concerns continued to mount despite widespread support from the local and state political establishment. After holding a meeting in the Beaufort Arsenal in December 1969, BASF President Dr. Hans Lautenschlager conveyed to the Governor his exasperation that “nothing we can say… will satisfy those who have declared their opposition.” Seeking to clear the cloud of uncertainty that enveloped the plant, he asked McNair to form a committee to study the pollution loophole and negotiate with the anti-BASF leadership.61 In return, South Carolina worked to make sure company officials did not delay or back out of their plans. By January 1970, McNair agreed to direct the state Water

Resources Commission—a “reasonable” agency in his estimation—to conduct a study of the state’s pollution laws.62 With BASF’s leadership getting nervous about the gathering storm of

60 Citizens Association of Beaufort County, South Carolina in Crisis (1970), 12, Hamby Papers, Box 1: “Clients: BASF,” Folder 1: “1970 General,” SCPC; The Wilderness Society Press Release, “South Carolina Estuaries Versus BASF Chemical Plant,” 1970, BASF Vertical File, BDC. 61 Dr. Hans Lautenschlager to Governor Robert McNair, December 15, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: December 1969,” SCPC. 62 Robert McNair to Dr. Hans Lautenschlager, January 15, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: December, 1969,” SCPC.

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negative publicity attracted by the January symposium, the Governor hoped this meager concession would satiate the opposition long enough for him to launch a public relations counter- offensive.

A sense of desperation soon enveloped the Governor’s Mansion. Behind the scenes,

McNair and his staff looked for a new political cudgel with which to bludgeon Charles Fraser. In early 1970, McNair’s aides leaned on the Administrator of Puerto Rico, Luis Guinot Jr. to investigate whether one of Fraser’s resorts on that island sat next to an oil refinery. Much to their dismay, Guinot reported that a “large mountain” separated the two.63 Having failed to embarrass

Fraser by showing the inconsistency of his position that industry and tourism could not coexist, such minor skullduggery illustrated the growing frustration among pro-BASF forces at their inability to dislodge the opposition.64 This attempt represented a larger strategy to feed into the narrative that Hilton Head’s “fat cats” cared only about their bottom lines, not about the economic uplift of the area surrounding their plush resorts.

Unable to concede to the concerns of Hilton Headers and unwilling to force the company to abide by more stringent pollution controls, the pro-BASF forces found themselves in a difficult position by early 1970, a full four months after the plant announcement. The Governor and others then looked to shore up support among South Carolina’s political class. On January

22, 1970, the state General Assembly passed a concurrent resolution with unanimous consent offering their blessing for the plant.65 This announcement provided a modicum of comfort to the

63 Luis Guinot Jr. to Wayne Seal, December 29, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 74: “BASF: December 1969,” SCPC. 64 Of course, Hilton Head’s resort owners used their own contacts in West Germany and Belgium to report on the status of rivers affected by BASF plants. In particular, staff at the Hilton Head Company learned from officials at Belgium’s Health Department that recreational activities like swimming and fishing were banned in waters near the company’s plant in Antwerp. Memorandum of Phone Conversation Between Fred Hack and John Larsen, January 5, 1970, Hamby Papers, Box 1: “Clients: BASF,” Folder 3: “Letters 1970 General,” SCPC. 65 Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 502.

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increasingly nervous officials at the State Development Board and in the Governor’s Office who staked so much political capital to securing this project.

Yet, the concerns of many BASF backers came from the staunch ambivalence, perceived as hidden hostility, by South Carolina’s Congressional delegation. Even with the increased media scrutiny, South Carolina’s U.S. Senators refused to take sides in the intensifying conflict. The company knew it could count on the support of area Congressman L. Mendel Rivers, who never met an industrial development opportunity—military or otherwise—he did not support.

However, Democratic Senator Ernest Hollings hit both sides for retreating to their respective foxholes and not working toward a practical resolution.66 Meanwhile, despite pressure from constituents, Senator Strom Thurmond maintained both his “absolute neutrality” and a desire “to get the truth.” Yet in a phone conversation with Dolly Hamby—whose advertising agency once worked for Thurmond—the Republican Senator admitted he shared many South Carolinians’ desire to keep “one of the few really beautiful places left unspoiled” out of a recognition that the chemical plant could alter the landscape over the long-term.67 Hamby then shared these comments with Fraser, Hack, and the other white leaders of the anti-BASF campaign.

Recognizing that Hilton Head’s population of retired executives could deliver GOP votes in a traditional bastion of Democrats, they believed that Thurmond would defend their interests if push came to shove.

66 On Mendel Rivers’s role in re-making the Lowcountry into what one journalist called “a microcosm of military- industrial civilization” see: Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sun Belt, 146-147; On Hollings, see: “Hollings Gives Views on Plant—BASF Controversy,” Beaufort Gazette, April 23, 1970; Ballantyne, New Politics in the Old South, Chapter 5. 67 Senator Strom Thurmond to Chuck Sullivan, May 20, 1970; Lottie Hamby Memo, January 20, 1970, Lottie D. Hamby Papers [hereafter “Hamby Papers”], Box 1: “Clients: BASF,” Folder 1: “1970 General,” SCPC.

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Despite Hilton Head’s obvious appeal as a destination for wealthy retirees, tourists, and business types from urban areas across the eastern half of the U.S., the anti-BASF forces tried to downplay the island’s reputation as an exclusive, resting place for the rich. Yet, no one could deny that those who migrated to Hilton Head in the first fifteen years after The Bridge came almost exclusively from the white upper-middle or upper-classes. By 1973, the annual income of the average island resident reached nearly $47,000, over twice the national average.68

Meanwhile, their opponents delighted in pointing out the county’s economic disparities as evidence that the area needed industrial growth. Not long after the conservation symposium, a white farmer from the town of Yemassee, on the western border of Beaufort County, needled the developers, asking in a letter to a Beaufort newspaper that if they wanted “to make a rich man’s preserve of the entire area” because they would be “horrified at the prospect of having to live in proximity to several thousand common working people?”69 If living in the plush enclaves of

Hilton Head endowed people with a modern marker of royalty, their proverbial crowns rested uneasily with squalor and struggle sitting just outside the plantation gates.

Continuing a theme from the poverty hearings, Beaufort County’s massive wealth gap gave it more in common with the developing nations of the Global South. With these disparities in mind, the company’s plans, at an implicit level, offered a pathway to broad-based prosperity more in line with developed nations in the Global North. And BASF backers took calibrated their messaging to highlight these similarities. “The battle…reminds us of the economic conditions in some South American countries,” an editorial from a Charleston television station began, “you find great wealth and poverty, without a middle class citizenry such as we have in the United

68 Danielson and Danielson, Profit and Politics, 102. 69 L.J. Williams Letter to the Editor, Sea Islander, January 29, 1970, copy included in McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: January 1970,” SCPC.

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States.”70 Privately, one local political operative described the local conditions in similarly, global terms for reporter Marshall Frady. “We are almost like India or China down here,” he said, “we got the very, very rich, and then we got the very, very poor, but there’s hardly anything in between there.”71 Although these statements advanced the discourse of the Lowcountry as part rural slum, part rural retreat, its simplicity elided the efforts undertaken by many of the leaders of the anti-hunger campaigns to define the landscape in ways that transcended this binary.

Caught between the threats of obsolescence by BASF, on the one hand, and that of displacement by Hilton Head’s resort behemoth on the other, members of the Hilton Head

Fishing Cooperative (HHFC) opposed the plant, despite some clear reservations. Having fought tooth and nail to secure the FHA loan, the HHFC grew slowly into a fleet of at least thirty boats by 1970. In a profile that appeared in Ebony Magazine, Arthur Stewart—one of the co-op’s captains—spoke of the sense of communal pride through self-reliance provided by the cooperative. “We are in better shape now than we have ever been,” he boasted, “and we’re working for ourselves.”72 Its leaders, Tom Barnwell Jr. and David Jones, a college-educated native of Hilton Head and recently-elected member of the Beaufort County Board of Directors, worked around the clock in the two years since receiving the loan to ensure that the co-op remained a sustainable venture, despite the wear and tear of the work, the weather, and market forces. Although their employees never numbered more than two hundred, the HHFC

70 WCSC-TV Editorial, January 22, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: January 1970,” SCPC. 71 Marshall Frady, “The View From Hilton Head,” 105. 72 “Shrimp Co-Op Makes Blacks Their Own Bosses,” Ebony 25: 1 (November 1969): 106-112, quote on 112.

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represented a symbol of African American efforts to defend their home ground by adapting traditional industries to changes in the area’s political economy.73

With little margin for error, the impending threat of a chemical plant within miles of their central fishing grounds threatened the very survival of both their livelihoods and an institution of black economic power. Joining the initial calls by white developers for ironclad covenants to prevent, or at least limit, water quality degradation from the plant, the HHFC membership adopted a version of working-class environmentalism that drew on their generations of local knowledge about coastal landscapes, tides, and weather patterns.74 Additionally, they knew that the promises of industrial boosterism could not be trusted. Referencing the Tenneco scandal that embroiled the area in December 1969, Jones said BASF’s assurances to keep its environmental impact low, sounded like “promises from other plants who said the same thing.” Similarly, Tom

Barnwell—serving as the co-op’s secretary-treasurer—repeatedly challenged BASF officials to make firmer commitments both to limit pollution and promote greater access to employment opportunities for black workers. On both fronts, they demurred.75

By February 1970, Barnwell told reporters, “we don’t need a new industry here that would run the jobs we already have… out of the area.” However, he added with a hint of fatalism, “no matter what happens we are bound to suffer,” as supporting the plant would be suicide for the fishing industry; while opposing it would tempt white politicians to close their

73 Paul Good, “On the Shrimp Docks One Morning,” New South, 23: 1 (Winter 1968), 97-98; Grey Gundaker, ed., Keep Your Head to the Sky; Interpreting African American Home Ground (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998). 74 On the relationship between human work and the natural world, see: Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist Or Do You Work for a Living?” 75 William Whitten, “Critics of BASF File Court Suit,” Savannah Evening Press, February 15, 1970; Arthur Simon, “Battle of Beaufort,” 14.

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fishing grounds at any moment.76 As the exception to the rule, the HHFC represented black self- sufficiency and self-reliance at a time when little remained of the localized, commons economy that long defined Hilton Head. With little of the island left to call their own, some African

Americans saw the cooperative as a way to re-assert their presence in the Lowcountry; while others saw it as a fool’s errand that distracted from the potential of industrial jobs to provide secure employment for future generations.

No one had to tell the co-op members that water pollution threatened their livelihoods and that they needed to make their voices. In other words, they were not pawns of resort developers, as some whites in Beaufort and Columbia suggested. Fraser and Hack’s money, connections, and media machine helped amplify their voices in ways that the old power brokers in the county—dating back to the poverty hearings at least—refused to do. Thus, they feigned surprise when a state legislator from the area threatened to close the area’s fishing grounds should a moratorium on construction be imposed on BASF.77 Barnwell’s warning proved prescient. Although the threat never went beyond that, it offered a reminder of the rationale behind the HHFC’s decision to join forces with Fraser and Hack. Allying with the developers staved off almost immediate destruction of their livelihood and possibly allowed African

American leaders to build a political rapport with the newer residents of Hilton Head.

Undoubtedly, activists on Hilton Head cheered the increased visibility of black fishermen in the campaign. This represented an ironic twist from widespread rumors that resort owners desired to limit the industry or even push it off the island through residential zoning. BASF

76 Barnwell quoted in Bayard Webster, “Carolina Plan to Build a Plant on Unspoiled Coast Arouses Protest,” New York Times, February 1, 1970. 77 Barr Nobles, “Moratorium Looming on Suit Against BASF,” Savannah Morning News, February 12, 1970.

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proponents at the local level made sure to remind their rivals of this story.78 In framing their opposition to the plant, these developers and residents described the threats to the local fishing industry as equally important as those posed to their tourism interests. Although the fishing industry employed only a few hundred black islanders on a full-time basis at this point, white leaders incorporated it into their larger narrative depicting a booming coastal economy that would be derailed by BASF and its allies.

From the beginning, white Hilton Headers like community activist Emerson Mulford and

Sea Pines vice president William Marscher portrayed the island’s residents as undeserving victims of potential, environmental injustices. Mulford predicted that if current trends continued,

Hilton Head would make up 40 percent of the county’s tax base by 1970.79 Marscher, as the Sea

Pines point man on the BASF issue, crafted numerous position papers and fact sheets that set out to undermine the most damaging of their opponents’ arguments. In one broadside entitled “The

Poverty Myth in Beaufort County,” he decried the fact that the county had been “greatly maligned” as a “poverty pocket” when it possessed the third-highest household income among all South Carolina counties. Of course, he neglected to mention that Beaufort ranked closer to the bottom of the state in terms of per capita income.

Moreover, in this and other fact sheets, citizens groups tried to sever the link between lower taxes and industrialization, noting that urbanized, industrial counties possessed higher tax rates. Ideas about place and poverty remained implicit in these efforts. For island developers and

78 There are only hints of this brief effort, which was quickly squashed, but Danielson mentions black resistance to zoning proposals around 1956 in Profit and Politics,168-169; and it is vaguely identified in a full-page ad in a local newspaper taken out by white businessman John M. Trask denouncing “the Barons of Hilton Head” who once tried “to keep the shrimp boats from operating off their sacred shores.” See: John M. Trask Sr., “Not Pollution But Progress and Opportunity—the Truth,” Beaufort Gazette, January 15, 1970. 79 “Island Economy Fears Expressed,” Beaufort Gazette, December 4, 1969, BASF Vertical File, BDC;

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residents, investing in the tourism economy would best ensure that the county remained underdeveloped enough to preserve the landscape’s aesthetic and attract a more robust residential tax base. As an unincorporated community at the time, Hilton Head’s citizens' groups tried to make up for their lack of political representation by noting that the island punched above its weight class when it came to jobs, tax revenues, and economic impact.80

Although tourism accounted for most of Hilton Head’s economic impact, the symbolic presence of black-run fishing operations provided a more convincing, political talking point. In

Fraser and Hack’s original memo on the issue, they lauded the cooperative as evidence that “the recreation industry has provided a strong stimulus to independent, Black-owned, Black-managed small business concerns.” Subsequent mailers and full-page advertisements developed for citizens groups by Dolly Hamby’s agency echoed similar sentiments.81 In the first few weeks after the original announcement, Captain George Klecak of St. Helena Island, a renowned fisherman, wrote to the Beaufort Gazette warning of the potential damage to the local seafood and recreational fishing industries. Citing select evidence from scientific journals about the harmful effects of the plant’s pollutants, he predicted that with BASF, “we can look forward to the fate of such cities as: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and, nearer home, Charleston and

Savannah.” Many residents echoed the fears that heavy industry would bring urban conditions to

Beaufort County.82 In a similar vein, a salesman for Port Royal Plantation named Robert C.

80 William Marscher, “The Poverty Myth in Beaufort County,” April 10, 1970, Hamby Papers, Box 1: “Clients: BASF,” Folder 1: “1970 General.” 81 Fraser and Hack Memo, November 29, 1969, 9, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: March-December, 1969;” Citizens Association of Beaufort County, South Carolina in Crisis (1970), 12, Hamby Papers, Box 1: “Clients: BASF,” Folder 1: “1970 General;” Bradley, Graham, and Hamby Agency, “Points Against the Location of BASF at Port Victoria, S.C.,” 2, Hamby Papers, Box 1: “Clients: BASF,” Folder 1: “1970 General,” SCPC. 82 Capt. George Klecak, Letter to the Editor, October 16, 1969, Beaufort Gazette, BASF Vertical File, BDC.

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Bjork wrote to Governor McNair expressing his disgust that a “multi-million dollar fishing and resort enterprise” could be transformed into a “planned chemical, industrialized jungle.”83

For many white residents who lived on or visited the Lowcountry, the presence of fishing boats represented a natural feature of the landscape’s aesthetic that they could incorporate into their criticisms of BASF. They welcomed the cooperative’s fishing fleet into their vision of communal life on the island with little awareness of the profound irony inherent within this alliance. If anyone could claim a right to belong on Hilton Head it was the Gullah communities of black islanders who lived there long before The Bridge, Sea Pines, or BASF.

Yet, alongside this aesthetic trope, some whites in the anti-BASF movement did acknowledge this history, albeit in a more subtle, paternalistic discourse that drew on longstanding stereotypes equating blackness with unskilled labor. Walter Greer, a prominent artist living on Hilton Head, painted numerous landscapes of Lowcountry life, including some depicting, in his words, “the negro performing tasks indicative to his skills in this part of South

Carolina.” In a letter protesting the plant, he cited such paintings of African Americans before asserting his beliefs that “their life and pleasure comes from the tidal waters” and that “there is no occupation available to the underskilled individual when his aquatic livelihood is obliterated.”84 Rather than a source of independence as a continuation of multi-generational livelihoods, many white residents on Hilton Head saw African American fishermen as a natural part of the local landscape.

83 George C. Bjork to Governor Robert McNair, December 31, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 75, Folder: “BASF Letters: Con, 1969,” SCPC. 84 Walter Greer to Robert McNair, December 17, 1969, McNair Papers, Box 75, Folder: “BASF Letters: Con, 1969,” SCPC.

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Meanwhile, a full-page advertisement in the New York Times—paid for by a statewide environmental group founded by Orion Hack—featured a picture of black fishermen working on their boats (Figure 6-2). The text of the ad evoked similar arguments warning that the plant would ensure “these proud, hard-working fishermen of today will be unemployed or on welfare tomorrow causing grave unemployment in this poverty pocket.”85 Among both locals and non- locals, white opponents of the plant tried to cement a more firm bond between the leisure economy and the fishing economy. By deploying the nostalgic imagery of primarily black men working on the water, white residents embodied the contradictions at the heart of the landscape of retreat they imagined for the Lowcountry. More than simply trying to escape the specter of industrial urbanism found in many of their former residences, they tried to maintain these unique places of the rural South in ways that appeared both true to their history and attractive to visitors.

Legal Battles and Environmental Policy in Washington, 1970-1971

Despite the distrust inherent within the fishermen-developer alliance, it nonetheless helped the anti-BASF movement grow into a political juggernaut by the spring of 1970. For all the momentum garnered both within the campaign and from the national media attention after the symposium, the alliance of plant opponents recognized that they were racing against the clock. On February 11th, the HHFC filed an injunction against BASF. Joined by a Maryland- based company that employed around three hundred workers (both seasonal and full-time) at its

Port Royal seafood packing plant and a smaller Beaufort-based oyster canning facility, these three plaintiffs challenged the BASF plant because it would “destroy the business…and the

85 “Of Marsh & Men and the Right to Life,” New York Times, 1970, BASF Vertical File, BDC; On Orion Hack’s role in creating Concerned South Carolinians for a Better Environment, see: Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 507-508.

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means of livelihood” of their employees, members, and stockholders.86 In making their case for an injunction to halt the impending preliminary construction, the plaintiffs relied—like so many environmental lawsuits in 1970—on NEPA, barely two months into its existence. With the statutes’ requirements that any project requiring federal action could be subject to environmental impact statement, the Victoria Bluff plant qualified since BASF required upgraded port facilities through dredging in addition to requests for licenses to secure a duty-free trade zone and relief from federal oil import quotas.87

With this announcement, the black cooperatives incurred the wrath of longtime whites in the county, namely State Representative J. Wilton Graves. A Democrat who lived at a historic plantation site in Bluffton but owned a motel on the island, he could have been a bridge figure between the county’s old power structure and the island’s developers-turned-activists.

Representing the county for most of the 1950s and 1960s, he is often credited with getting the first bridge to Hilton Head and his extensive land holdings in the area raised speculation that he stood to benefit from the BASF plant once it built onto its new facility. For that reason combined with an animus toward his competitors, Graves lashed out at the cooperative for “allowing themselves to be influenced by legal brainstorming and selfish interests.” Although Hilton Head citizens’ groups did provide substantial financial support and legal assistance to the lawsuit, their relationship with the fishermen represented a strategic alliance against a common enemy.88

86 Hilton Head Fishing Cooperative Inc., Clear Channel Corp., and Ocean Lake and River Fish Company vs. BASF Corporation and Badische Anlin-Und Soda Fabrik, A.G., Civil Action No. 70-105, February 11, 1970, quote on 13, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: February-March, 1970,” SCPC. 87 William Whitten, “Critics of BASF File Court Suit,” Savannah Evening Press, February 15, 1970. 88 Graves, quoted in Barr Nobles, “Moratorium Looming on Suit Against BASF,” Savannah Morning News, February 12, 1970; Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 507-508.

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African Americans who opposed the plant were not pawns in the larger chess game of local politics.

In subsequent statements that February, Graves reserved particular venom for Barnwell.

Citing the African American leader’s Congressional testimony on malnutrition, “Barnwell…said public officials of South Carolina are not taking care of the needs of the poor and sick children,”

Graves mocked, “is it not ironic that now at the first opportunity to alleviate these conditions people try to keep an industry from settling in our community.”89 Contrary to Graves’s understanding of the situation, such statements missed the long game strategy adopted by

Barnwell, Jones, and their allies. They accepted the dependent arrangement where white resort owners underwrote their lawsuit as temporary, but necessary in a broader campaign for individual self-reliance and community preservation through Black Capitalism. The alternative looked too much like embracing the booster-driven politics that had historically ignored and harmed the aspirations of black communities.

Even John Gadson, who lent the backing of Penn Community Services to BASF, justified his decision based on notions of communal independence. “From the standpoint of the working people,” he called on the company’s top brass in January to keep its promises for expanding job opportunities and “safeguarding the waters in the area.” Later, Gadson told a reporter, “there must be…a way that we can have jobs without pollution” before referencing the all-too-often reality that high school dropouts and graduates alike “just get on a bus and go” in search of better opportunities. Balancing jobs and environment, Gadson’s position reflected a continued commitment to economic justice since it provided security for African Americans to remain in or

89 Graves quoted in William Whitten, “Critics of BASF File Court Suit,” Savannah Evening Press, February 15, 1970.

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return to Beaufort County.90 In this view, political alliances mattered if they could increase their communities’ economic and political power and, in doing so, preserve the ties between Gullah blacks to the Lowcountry’s land and waters.

Meanwhile, in Columbia and at BASF’s Manhattan headquarters, the most prominent proponents of the plant projected confidence that the plant would not be derailed by these developments. On February 14, 1970, the State Development Board prepared remarks for

Governor McNair charging that the so-called “hysteria” around the project would not roll back the state’s “decade of progress” in the realm of industrial development. Since BASF’s planned investment represented the largest development project in state history, such hyperbolic rhetoric seemed necessary.91 Ten days after the cooperative and its counterparts filed their suit in

Charleston, BASF announced that its initial site work on the Victoria Bluff would begin in the following weeks as scheduled. With that announcement, the company expected the state’s construction of extended railroad lines and a port terminal would soon follow suit. In all, BASF’s leadership believed that the bulk of the construction would be underway by the following fall.92

With no injunction coming to delay construction, the anti-BASF groups kept up their pressure campaign into March 1970 through letters to federal officials and increased exposure in regional and national media outlets.93 The Concerned South Carolinians for a Better

Environment Committee—a statewide environmental group founded by Orion Hack—placed

90 John W. Gadson Sr. to Dr. Hans Lautenschlager, January 12, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: April, 1970,” SCPC; Gadson, quoted in Betsy Fancher, “A New Plant Meets A New Age,” New South Special Edition, BASF Vertical File, BDC. 91 South Carolina State Development Board, “Victoria Bluff and the Quest for Industry,” February 14, 1970, quote on 7, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: February-March, 1970,” SCPC. 92 BASF Press Release, February 21, 1970, BASF Vertical File, BDC. 93 Citizens Association of Beaufort County, “The Facts!” Beaufort Gazette, March 5, 1970.

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full-page ads in the New York Times. Ex-residents and tourists living in major citizens who saw these vivid messages and pictures of an imperiled landscape in numerous national publications then wrote checks and letters to support the cause.94 In the six weeks after the January symposium, anti-BASF advertisements appeared twice a week in every one of South Carolina's daily newspapers. Developed by the Bradley, Graham, and Hamby agency, the ads included

“coupons” that an estimated 20,000 South Carolinians cut out and mailed in to have their names included in letters to be sent to their representatives calling for a construction moratorium at the

Victoria Bluff site.95

Under a barrage of ad campaigns and letters from concerned citizens, the anti-BASF message continued to resonate in Washington’s ever-widening environmentalist circles. After receiving what Secretary Walter Hickel described as “many letters of protest against what is called heedless environmental destruction,” the Department of the Interior stepped gingerly into the controversy. On March 24th, Hickel submitted a letter to Dr. Lautenschlager and the BASF leadership expressing grave concern that the plant would cause irreparable damage to fragile, unique ecosystems of local estuaries due to channel dredging and the “degradation of water equality” due to the over 2 million gallons of industrial wastes that could enter the Port Royal

Sound each day of operation.96 Although it did not carry the force of law, the announcement from Interior only gave BASF pause about going forward with initial construction by raising

94 Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 507-508; For an example of the impact of such ads, see a letter from a Clemson University alum living in Brooklyn to Governor McNair. Pinkus Sugarman to Robert McNair, March 17, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF February-March, 1970,” SCPC. 95 “Summary of Action Regarding BASF,” Hamby Papers, Box 1: “Clients: BASF,” Folder 3: “Letters General 1970,” SCPC. 96 Secretary Walter Hickel to Dr. Hans Lautenschlager, March 24, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF February-March, 1970,” SCPC.

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both the specter of federal intervention and the possibility of more studies and negotiations to comply with new environmental standards.

Although Secretary Hickel’s statement tipped the scales in favor of the plant’s opponents, it also set the stage for a continuation of an intensifying lobbying campaign over the next two months. Meanwhile, BASF supporters upped the ante on their pressure campaigns. Within two days, Governor McNair lashed out at Hickel in a phone call and a telegram claiming that his letter was “disturbing” and borderline defamatory for implying that neither the company nor the state planned to uphold existing regulations governing industrial pollution.97 At the local level, pro-BASF groups, especially those led by African Americans sprang into action. The Beaufort

County Voters League organized a bus trip to lobby the Interior Department and federal policymakers. As the group’s president James Richardson told a reporter, “last year everyone was talking about people starving here…now they’ve ruined our chance to help the overall economy.”98 Soon after, local NAACP chapters organized a rally at the Thankful Baptist Church near the line dividing Beaufort and Hampton County. The Rev. Walter Burson then led community members on a bus trip to Hilton Head to protest, in his words, “the rich people…who are stopping [the plant].”99 Such protests indicated the ways that the legacies of the poverty fight lived on among African Americans in Beaufort as well as surrounding counties like Hampton,

Jasper, and Colleton where BASF’s plans promised not only jobs in a post-agrarian economy, but also industries that multiplied beyond the confines of Victoria Bluff.

97 McNair Telegram to Hickel, March 26, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “February-March, 1970,” SCPC; Bob Dennis, “McNair, Hickel Swap BASF Views,” Charlotte Observer, March 27, 1970. 98 Richardson quoted in Fancher, “New Plant Meets a New Age,” BASF Vertical File, BDC. 99 Burson quoted in Simon, “Battle of Beaufort,” 13.

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Not to be outdone, the anti-BASF contingent—buoyed by Hickel’s letter—staged their own counter-offensive to defeat the plant once and for all. Fraser and Hack approached the company with a carrot and a stick. First, the stick came in the form of a request for a permanent injunction to halt construction filed both in the same U.S. District Court in Charleston and on the same grounds as the fishing companies. Listing their multi-million dollar holdings, Hilton Head

Company and Sea Pines combined forces to offer a carrot to BASF that would buy the nearly two thousand acres on Victoria Bluff for a cool $1.2 million.100 In their mind, accepting this buyout could cut the German company’s losses and end the fight with some shred of dignity intact. But the resort owners did not stop there. Rather than keep the land for themselves, Fraser proposed the building of a tourist attraction called “Seven Flags over Port Royal.” Envisioned as a seamless combination of Six Flags amusement parks and Colonial Williamsburg, this new scheme promised an economic boost for the area through supposedly “cleaner” industries like tourism.101 Although this idea grew more controversial over time, at the moment it did little to alter perceptions of Fraser and Hack’s activities. Those who saw them as rich, but benevolent community leaders nodded in agreement that accentuating the region’s natural and cultural heritage represented a prudent development strategy. Meanwhile, those who saw them as insatiable, egotistical dictators shook their heads at another self-enriching business venture clothed in the disguise of public interest.

Having faced a growing and determined for a full six months since its initial announcement, BASF retreated a few weeks after Hickel’s letter due to mounting pressure. On

100 Eugene Warner and John Carmody, “Hilton Head is Wondering About its New Neighbor,” Washington Post, April 26, 1970. 101 Draft of News Release, Hamby Papers, Box 1: “Clients: BASF,” Folder 1: “Letters General 1970,” SCPC; “Park Urged on Site of Proposed Plant,” New York Times, March 31, 1970.

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April 8th, the company released a statement suspending the construction of the chemical plant at

Victoria Bluff.102 Desperate efforts to fend off the combined effects of months-long protests and a growing appetite for federal environmental intervention made the chemical plant an increasingly tough sell. Even though the state General Assembly tried to pass upgraded pollution standards in the weeks after Hickel’s letter, they failed to mollify environmentalists at every level. In the legislature’s debate, Representative Alex Sanders—who represented Columbia but maintained close ties with the Hack brothers—testified to the inadequacy of this measure when his amendment to strengthen legal protections to protect individuals from polluters failed to make the final version.103

Unfazed by this progress, the HHFC and white Hilton Headers pressed their case with

Washington policymakers on the first “Earth Day,” April 22, 1970. The crown of the cooperative’s fishing fleet, a forty-one-foot trawler named Captain Dave, sailed from Hilton

Heading up the coast through the Chesapeake Bay and into the Potomac River, the boat’s crew presented the Department of the Interior with a collection of around 40,000 signatures of people opposed to the plant (Figure 6-3). Organized by one of Sea Pines Company’s public relations gurus, the “cruise” capped off months of organizing, petitioning, and debating the compatibility of the BASF plant with the changing landscape of Hilton Head and Beaufort County writ large.104 Its arrival in Washington signaled the local, state, and national impact of the fight against the chemical plant in Beaufort County. Spurred on by an unusual alliance of black fishermen, white resort owners, and mostly young environmentalists from outside South

102 BASF Press Release, April 8, 1970, BASF Vertical File, BDC. 103 “Tentative Approval is Voted,” The Greenville (SC) News, March 27, 1970. 104 Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 510-512; “Shrimp Co-op Makes Blacks Own Bosses,” 107-108.

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Carolina, BASF’s plans foundered on the rocks of a commitment to preserving communal ties to the landscape.

Although BASF would not officially abandon its plans for the Victoria Bluff site until

January 1971, the seven months between the suspension of construction and the public announcement saw the company resigned to its fate even as South Carolinians continued to debate both sides of the controversy. However, with federal policy putting the company and its backers on notice, the post-mortem on why the plant never came erupted into a nasty blame game primarily between state officials and Hilton Head’s developers. Since Fraser and Hack’s idea for an amusement park on the site never came to fruition, the State Development Board and local boosters continued to market Victoria Bluff to other companies.

Over the next three years, two other companies expressed interest but ultimately passed on the industrial site with considerably less fanfare than BASF. First, the Houston-based Brown and Root Oil Company considered erecting a smaller petrochemical plant on Victoria Bluff.

Preferring not to risk a public relations debacle, they gave way to the Chicago Bridge and Iron

Company (CBIC) who hoped to build a natural gas refinery at the site. Although CBIC won backing from local African American leaders like BASF and gave similar assurances that they would limit pollution, their plans never got off the ground either. With a new gubernatorial administration taking a more hands-off approach and impending lawsuits from environmental groups, this plant pulled out within a year of announcing its plans.

The victorious alliance of the HHFC, Sea Pines, and the Hack family saw each at the arguable peak of their influence. David Jones, the co-op’s captain, continued to serve on the

Beaufort County Council until 1977. According to Thomas Barnwell Jr., the group continued to meet their production goals and found themselves sending shrimp beyond South Carolina or

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Georgia. However, the oil shocks of the mid-1970s combined with increased regulations to protect other marine life, and competition from Pacific markets took their toll on the cooperative.

Closer to home, cooperative members also cited changes in local fishing grounds that pushed them further from the shoreline and away from the most populated shrimping areas.105

Despite their shared commitment to maintain the island’s appeal as both a landscape of retreat and a place where traditional livelihoods remained viable, the structural inequalities that existed throughout Beaufort County also persisted. Over the next two decades, as the competition between developers grew increasingly fierce in the face of economic troubles, the mostly working-class population of black islanders struggled to keep their homes and communities on Hilton Head. As a result, Fraser’s commitment to social harmony faded as his company fought to remain solvent amid the economic downturn and he tried to maintain his tight-fisted grip on the island’s landscape. Over-extended and cash-strapped, Sea Pines did not collapse, but Fraser’s once quasi-dictatorial control over Hilton Head was broken. As the island became an increasingly contested political space into the late 1970s and early 1980s, these three groups who joined forces to defeat BASF—developers, African Americans, and residents themselves—soon adopted increasingly combative postures as the local population continued to become larger and more affluent.

Rather than simple choices between ecology vs. economy or taking sides with either developers versus boosters, the fundamental issue of power disparities in both economic and political terms remained. Although a shared commitment to protect the lands and waters of the

Lowcountry once united its diverse citizenry against the looming threat of industrial excess, the

105 On the other attempts to industrialize Victoria Bluff, see Danielson and Danielson, Profit and Politics, 156-158; “Hilton Head: A Contrast of Cultures,” New York Times, December 30, 1973; For a short overview on the rise and fall of the fishermen’s cooperative, Sherry Conohan, “Site of Planned Rowing and Sailing Center Special for Many Native Islanders,” Hilton Head Monthly, October 2013, 90-91.

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removal of that very threat combined with the continued march of the region’s tourism megapolis ensured that land—its ownership and its usage—remained at the center of so much of its recent history.

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Figure 6-1. Map of Hilton Head Island Plantations and Neighborhoods, Note Hilton Head and Port Royal Plantations on the northern end of the island and Sea Pines on the southern end. South Carolina Information Highway https://www.sciway.net/maps/printable- hilton-head-south-carolina-map.html (accessed November 12, 2019).

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Figure 6-2. Concerned South Carolinians for a Better Environment Advertisement, Such ads appeared in national newspapers including the New York Times, BASF Vertical File, Courtesy of Beaufort District Collection.

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Figure 6-3. Captain Dave Arrives in Washington, D.C., 1970, (Hilton Head) Islander Magazine BASF Vertical File, Courtesy of Beaufort District Collection.

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CHAPTER 7 “WE ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES:” TOURISM AND BLACK LAND LOSS IN THE LOWCOUNTRY, 1970-1988

Land planning today is the greatest of all segregations. —Thomas Barnwell Jr. Interview with Robert Korstad

Fires and Feasts: The BASF Postmortem, 1970-1971

On a quintessential steamy June afternoon in 1970, a crowd gathered outside the Sea

Pines Company’s sprawling headquarters on the southern end of Hilton Head. Led by the Rev. I.

DeQuincey Newman of the South Carolina NAACP, the group of fifty African Americans came prepared to deliver a message for Charles Fraser. Brandishing signs with messages like “Frasier

Loves Poverty,” “The Rich Get Richer,” and “Admiral Taylor deals in our Real Estate,” the picketers denounced the selfishness of the developer for stopping the BASF plant before moving north to do the same at Fred Hack’s Port Royal Plantation.1 However, before they did, one hapless Sea Pines employee thought it wise to distribute some of the anti-BASF material the company developed for its fight. In response, the marchers piled the pamphlets on the ground before lighting them on fire. “Instead of giving us propaganda,” Newman boomed to the crowd and a few media members gathered near the small blaze, “Charlie Fraser out to set up a buffet out here for us, and give us some of those oysters on the half shell.” By the end, one local

NAACP member warned that the group could make Hilton Head “look like Montgomery,

Alabama before the end of summer.” Although nothing of that scale materialized, this

1 Chapter epigraph from: Barnwell, Interview with Robert Korstad; Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 512-513.

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demonstration signaled that racial tensions in the Lowcountry would not subside, despite

Fraser’s rapprochement with the HHFC.2

This incredible scene outside his office enraged Fraser. Over the rest of the summer, he and his developer allies would take state officials to task for what they perceived as a taxpayer- funded, public relations stunt. In the counter-narrative forged by white islanders, they reserved the bulk of their rhetorical fire for state officials. Still, their statements offered strong implications that the NAACP activists, in joining the demonstrations, allowed themselves to be manipulated by the State Development Board’s (SDB) nefarious plans. Lost in this back-and- forth was the fact that African American leaders helped plan the protest outside the Sea Pines office. Always sensitive to the accusation that he acted like a “baron” exploiting the labor of

African Americans on this new “plantation,” Fraser’s strong responses precipitated an escalating air war between the two sides that brought an ugly end to the BASF affair.3

At the same time, this rancorous ending offered no path forward and signaled a series of multi-layered power struggles over race, class, and land use in Beaufort County that would escalate over the next decade. The anti-BASF movement portrayed itself as evidence that Hilton

Head represented an oasis of racial cooperation toward the shared goal of protecting both traditional industries like fishing and newer industries like tourism. Yet, in the following ten years, the temporary nature of this alliance became clear because it did little to alter the increasingly unequal power arrangements in a Hilton Head that brought more people and more affluence to this corner of the Lowcountry.

2 South Carolina Development Board Press Release, June 15, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF May- December 1970,” SCPC. 3 John M. Trask Sr., “Not Pollution But Progress and Opportunity—the Truth,” Beaufort Gazette, January 15, 1970; Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 512.

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With hindsight, the partnership between native black islanders and white residents who adopted the island as their permanent retreat appeared more like an engagement, rather than a marriage, of convenience. Before BASF entered the scene, Fraser himself and other white Hilton

Head residents worried about the appearance that their leisure came at the expense of the local

African American communities. Yet, the possibilities for a long-term alliance disappeared quickly throughout the 1970s. This denouement was not inevitable, but the perpetuation of the status quo on Hilton Head—namely the ever-growing borders of the resort communities combined with the shrinking presence of black natives—made it unsustainable. Subsequent controversies including the incorporation battles of 1971 and 1983, issues with affordable housing, along with the growing movement to draw attention to black land loss contributed to and confirmed that any promise of shared power on a biracial basis would not be realized on the island.

Even with BASF on the ropes, local and state boosters continued to lash out at the developers and their allies until the official abandonment of the Victoria Bluff site in the final days of 1970. In May 1970, SDB officials cheered the fact that syndicated conservative columnist John Chamberlain agreed to write a series of articles about the BASF controversy.

Chamberlain wrote from a pro-BASF perspective, but he offered more measured criticism for

Fraser than the SDB’s press office. For example, he contrasted the Fraser who appeared before the U.S. Senate promising to fight hunger and disease out of grave concern for the local poor with the Fraser who opposed better-paying jobs for the area. “With their vacation paradise,”

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Chamberlain wrote of Hilton Head developers, “they had caused enough change, they don’t want any more.”4

Heartened by the brief exposure provided by Chamberlain’s five columns, which appeared in over two hundred newspapers nationwide, state officials continued to hammer away at the anti-BASF forces. The SDB released a filmstrip entitled “Rich Man, Poor Man” followed by a series of press releases feigning outrage at the “moral tragedy that ecology is being made the rich man’s bag in Beaufort while the downtrodden are starving.” The depth of resentment held by the spurned boosters ensured that even state leaders reluctant to take sides would be targeted for criticism. A member of the Beaufort County Development Board sent a stinging letter to Senator Ernest Hollings for his decision to support Secretary Hickel’s statement in May

1970 after sitting on the fence for the better part of eight months.5 As their chances of landing the

BASF plant faded with each passing day, state and local boosters felt liberated to harangue their opponents with increasingly emotional attacks.

In response, Fraser and Hack punched back at state officials for the escalating rhetorical barbs that accompanied the series of demonstrations outside the Sea Pines offices from May to

June 1970. Sea Pines officials, including Fraser, saw the protests as part of a broader conspiracy to tarnish their reputation, led by the SDB’s new acting director Alfred DeCicco. For example, they submitted affidavits to the U.S. State Department that officials from the German Embassy visited Sea Pines just before the demonstrations began. Although most likely a coincidence with nothing to do about BASF, this response signaled a heightened sensitivity among the island’s

4 John Chamberlain, “Ecology Vs. Jobs?” included in Al DeCicco to Robert McNair, May 26, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “May-December 1970,” SCPC. 5 SDB Press Release, quoted in Bryan, “Poverty, Industry, and Environmental Quality,” 512; Edwin Pike Jr. to Ernest Hollings, May 4, 1970, and Hollings to Pike, May 6, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “May-December, 1970,” SCPC.

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business leaders.6 In a ten-page memo to state leaders, Fraser accused them of using “Black

Panther” tactics “to make Hilton Head Island look like Watts” with the final NAACP rally in

June. Moreover, he charged that BASF financed the militant protests while lambasting the

SDB’s use of “distorted facts” and “irresponsible and inflammatory rhetoric” as doing more damage to the Lowcountry’s reputation than anything else.7

Throughout the summer of 1970, Hilton Head groups hammered away at BASF taking out full-page advertisements, release strident press statements, and issuing fundraising appeals based on the supposed collusion between the state, company, and civil rights groups. That July,

Orion Hack’s group South Carolina Environmental Action responded by filing a “taxpayers

[law]suit” against the development board for using public monies “in a determined assault against Hilton Head!”8 Irony abounded on both sides. With some justification, anti-BASF forces pointed out that state officials acted like “prophet[s] of doom,” in Fraser’s phrase, by tarnishing the island’s image and thereby possibly undermining its chances to attract further development whether in tourism or manufacturing industries. However, the developers’ claims that tourism jobs could replace the income gains promised by BASF ignored the growing chorus of black leaders and residents whose interests they claimed to respect and represent in this fight.

Determined to keep hope alive for industrial development, state NAACP leaders like Isaiah

Williams doubled down on their message that working for the island’s white elite offered

6 Joseph T. Elvove to Hon. James Sutterlin, May 18, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “May-December 1970,” SCPC. 7 Charles Fraser to T. Allen Legare Jr., June 20, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: May-December 1970,” SCPC. 8 South Carolina Environmental Action Inc. Letter, McNair Papers, Box 75, Folder: “BASF Letters: Con, July- October 1970,” SCPC; “SCEAI Strikes Back at Development Board,” Island Packet, July 9, 1970; South Carolina Environmental Action Inc., “Defend Your Tax Dollars!” Island Packet, July 23, 1970; William Marscher, Inaccuracies, Omissions, and Distortions in the South Carolina State Development Board Research Document (Hilton Head: Sea Pines, June 26, 1970), BASF Vertical File, BDC.

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African American youth “no hope of upgrading themselves in the future.” Despite this persistent clamoring combined with the forced resignation of Walter Hickel at Interior later that year, the

BASF leadership officially announced they were abandoning their plans in January 1971.9

With BASF out of the way, Sea Pines officials tried to shore up their partnership with the black communities in Beaufort County. For example, they touted their cooperation with Thomas

Barnwell Jr. to help another seafood cooperative expand their operations. Founded in 1968, the

Bluffton Oyster Cooperative (BOC) grew from twenty-five founding members to employ a total of fifty, mostly low-income people by 1970 thanks to private investments and a $25,000 seed grant from the federal OEO.10 Regardless of whether Fraser or Hack gave money to the cooperative, it is clear that they asked their marketing staff and the Hamby advertising agency to help round up more investors for the BOC. Moreover, Sea Pines also tried to build an industrial park in Bluffton, just off the island, while also promoting a Black Enterprises program to provide job training in construction and manufacturing for black workers.11 This plan reflected Fraser and Hack’s master plan for Beaufort and surrounding counties to prove that “progress without pollution” was more than a political rallying cry to defeat BASF. In their renderings, strict zoning regulations would push heavier manufacturing west toward Interstate 95, while “light

9 Williams quoted in Oliver G. Wood, et. al., The BASF Controversy: Employment vs. Environment (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Bureau of Business and Economic Research, 1973), 19; There were a series of competing economic reports issued during and immediately after the BASF fight. The SDB sponsored one report in which a consulting firm concluded that without the plant, Beaufort and Jasper Counties would have 22,000 fewer jobs by 1980. In response, the Hack family recruited a different consultant to do another economic study, which showed that recruiting “light industry” and fostering the creation of “agricultural cooperatives” could create around 20,000 jobs. Economists at the University of South Carolina, led by Oliver Wood, issued the most balanced report in 1973 that nonetheless sided with the state in describing the economic impact of Hilton Head as “miniscule in comparison with the BASF complex alone.” See: Wood, et. al., The BASF Controversy, 19-21, 6061. 10 James W. Light to Dolly Hamby, March 24, 1970, Hamby Papers, Box 1: “Clients BASF,” Folder 1: “1970 General,” SCPC. 11 “Plans Announced for Industrial Park,” Island Packet, July 23, 1970. It is not fully clear what became of these programs, although it is probable that their impact remained small given Sea Pines’s financial troubles in the 1970s.

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industry” including these agricultural cooperatives would sit in-between the industrial area and the tourism-rich domain on Hilton Head proper. Of course, in responding to criticisms by the

NAACP and state officials, Fraser and Hack made sure to emphasize their work in these areas.12

However, it soon became clear to the developers that they needed to do more to earn the goodwill of their neighbors. For one, the plan for a “Seven Flags Over Port Royal” amusement never got beyond the drawing board. Its quick demise suggested that Fraser dangled it as a tactical “carrot” to counter BASF rather than a serious commitment to addressing the need for good-paying jobs in the Lowcountry. George McMillan—a white man who covered civil rights protests as a journalist before retiring to St. Helena Island—told Fraser as much, warning that

Seven Flags represented “a very serious tactical mistake” that could offend both African

Americans and environmentalists. Acknowledging that Fraser seemed interested “in the welfare of Black people to some degree,” he predicted that the amusement park idea increased black residents’ distrust of Fraser for trying to “con” them into fighting BASF only to receive more low-paying jobs working for his tourism empire in return.13 Although McMillan’s statement affirming Fraser’s well-meaning intentions seems correct, it nonetheless indicates that the developer (like McMillan) exemplified the paternalistic moderate politics of the New South.

Rather than embracing the radical potential of biracial democracy, moderate Republicans like

Fraser and Democrats like his nemesis, Governor McNair, advocated for the gradual integration of African Americans into the apparatuses of economic and political power.14

12 “Plans for Area’s Future and Island’s Role Unveiled,” Island Packet, August 27, 1970; Charles Fraser to T. Allen Legare Jr., June 20, 1970, McNair Papers, Box 74, Folder: “BASF: May-December 1970,” SCPC. 13 George McMillan to Charles Fraser, April 2, 1970, Hamby Papers, Box 1: “Clients-BASF,” Folder 1: “1970 General,” SCPC. 14 For a largely celebratory account of McNair’s term as governor that nonetheless provides insight into his racial moderation, see: Phillip Grose, South Carolina at the Brink: Robert McNair and the Politics of Civil Rights (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006); a more critical account of white moderates in Virginia that is useful to understand this political ideology at a regional level, see: Andrew Lewis and Matthew Lassiter, eds.,

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Consistently, Hilton Head’s image-conscious developers understood the negative implications that the island’s status as a playground for the rich depended upon the erasure of black residence on the island. African Americans could work on the island’s resorts, critics charged, but they could not live behind or even near the plantation gates. However, Fraser and

Hack were also businessmen who knew how to boost their companies’ bottom lines far better than they knew how to win in the court of public opinion. For example, the same white residents who cheered the fishermen’s cooperative ignored or resisted further engagement with issues that affected people like David Jones. In August 1970, a small protest broke out in one of the island’s remaining black neighborhoods after a state patrolman arrested and manhandled an elderly black man named Ben Jones, leading his sons David and Henry to also face charges after a brick was thrown and a night of unrest followed.15 Even as a county councilman and head of the cooperative, David Jones and his family understood that the inroads made with the white developers who now seemed to run the island only went so far on the new Hilton Head.

More cracks in the biracial environmental alliance appeared soon after BASF’s forced dismissal. From 1971 to 1973, two other companies with proposals for industrial plants at

Victoria Bluff came and went with less fanfare than BASF. The Chicago Bridge and Iron

Company’s proposal for a plant there that would construct tanks to hold liquefied natural gas

(LNG) aroused the concerns of the same groups that opposed the vanquished chemical plants.

Groups of white Hilton Headers—like the Sea Pines Property Owners Association—joined the

The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998). 15 “Grand Jury to Get Charges Vs. Islanders,” Island Packet, November 12, 1970; For a sample of the response of white residents, see the local newspaper’s appeal for racial calm and biracial cooperation. “Editorial: Neighbors’ Island,” Island Packet, August 20, 1970.

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National Audubon Society and the Department of the Interior in expressing concerns about the significant dredging involved to build new docks, piers, and other shipping facilities.16

However, when community members submitted statements to the Environmental

Protection Agency (EPA) in the early months of 1974, the fishermen’s cooperative took a slightly different tone. HHFC President David Jones spoke favorably of the plant provided there

“will not be any pollution of the waters that could affect the marine life and seafood industry.”

Meanwhile, the organization’s Secretary-Treasurer Thomas Barnwell Jr. offered his unreserved endorsement of the LNG plant as a job creator for the county.17 Rather than an abrupt departure from their previously strident opposition to BASF, Jones and Barnwell’s support for this plant reveals the independence of black political organizing and refutes the conspiratorial whispers made by some local whites that they acted like puppets with strings pulled by Fraser and Hack.

HHFC fishermen were not only pragmatic in assessing the pollution threat from CBI to be much less than BASF, but their about-face on these issues also echoed growing concerns among black

Hilton Headers about declines in population, land ownership, and political power.

The Knife’s Edge of Ruin: Hilton Head’s First Incorporation Movement, 1970-1973

The divergence between the rest of Beaufort County and Hilton Head in terms of demography, partisan alignment, and land use demonstrated to many of the island’s residents that they needed to assert a greater measure of autonomy over local affairs. During the BASF affair, press releases and letters from the staff at Sea Pines and other development companies

16 Hilton Head Community Association to Col. Robert C. Nelson, February 19, 1974, in Appendix B: “Letters of Comment,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Final Environmental Statement, (Charleston: U.S. Army Engineer District, 1974). 17 David Jones to Army Corps of Engineers, January 30, 1974, and Thomas C. Barnwell Jr. to Col. Robert C. Nelson, February 1, 1974, in Appendix B: “Letters of Comment,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Final Environmental Statement, (Charleston: U.S. Army Engineer District, 1974).

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cited their disproportionate contributions to local tax rolls as evidence that they could not be ignored when it came to industrial recruitment or other significant policy decisions. As a result, the anti-BASF movement stirred pro-autonomy sentiments on Hilton Head. Alongside the ever- present concerns about the right measure of land use zoning, debates over whether incorporating

Hilton Head as a municipality emerged from the early 1970s through the 1980s. Hardly a simple or innocuous issue, it pulled at the seams of the unequal social threads that wrapped the island together in the uncomfortable unity of shared geography.

Although Fraser and Hack started rolling this proverbial ball down the hill, the push to incorporate Hilton Head as a town called “Hilton Head Beach” came from outside Sea Pines or

Port Royal Plantations. In Fall 1970, two white businessmen named Louis McKibben and

Wilbert Roller started circulating a petition calling for this new municipality to be formed out of a few neighborhoods on the central part of the island. Although emphasizing multiple times that the men had “no ill feelings” toward anyone on or off the island, their decision to include the smaller, marginally-less affluent neighborhoods around Forest Beach and Shipyard Plantation, while excluding Fraser and Hack’s respective names seemed curious to many on the island.18

Certainly, incorporation could bring better services to island residents. In his weekly column, Jonathan Daniels scoffed at the fact that “the boundaries of their dream town…leave out practically all of the rich and the entirety of the poor.” Less humorously, though, the newspaperman interpreted the petitioners’ frequent invocation of the need for “better police protection” as a slight directed at the more affluent residents of communities like Sea Pines who enjoyed private security behind the plantations’ gates.19 On the one hand, as Daniels’s comments

18 “Community Petitioners Seeking Hilton Head Beach Corporation,” Island Packet, September 24, 1970. 19 Jonathan Daniels, “Sojourner’s Scrapbook: Romulus and Remus,” Island Packet, October 1, 1970.

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hinted, the incorporation movement indicated that some Hilton Head residents grew restless with the notion of Charles Fraser as a kind of benevolent dictator over the island. However, on the other hand, challenges to Fraser’s proverbial reign faced difficult obstacles from both groups that

McKibben and Roller excluded—the island’s dwindling black population and its most prominent developers.

The initial push for incorporation fizzled out by the end of 1970. Pushing for a November plebiscite on the issue after first collecting signatures in September ruffled many feathers on the island. In one meeting of the Hilton Head Island Community Association—the ad-hoc deliberative body where most local issues received a forum—Charles Fraser submitted a motion asking for a ninety-day delay in the vote to allow adequate time to study the issue. Although the association’s resolutions were non-binding, the proponents agreed to send such a request to the

South Carolina Secretary of State.20

Following that decision, white residents both inside and outside of the proposed town soured on the move. Many wondered about the possible consequences of such a move, especially since it drew very tight borders in the middle of the island. Others worried about rising taxes both in the new town and outside of it. Cabell Phillips—a white man who lived in Washington,

D.C. but owned a property in the Forest Beach area where he planned to retire—expressed such concerns in a letter to the Island Packet. Not only did the proposed community lack an adequate tax base by excluding the higher-value neighborhoods, but he speculated further, “aren’t we being short-sighted, maybe inviting future trouble, by excluding the Blacks down the road; by enclosing ourselves in a smug, all-white ghetto?” This candid letter exemplified the especially cautious, conservative nature of the white residents who moved to the island. Ultimately, the

20 “Community Group Asks Delay on Proposed Town,” Island Packet, October 15, 1970.

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would-be founders of the new town withdrew their petition and preserved the status quo.21

However, their efforts revealed the uneasiness with which Hilton Head’s white communities tried to address the problems of growth and racial tension, which proved mutually reinforcing.

These adopted locals understood, even if they did not always acknowledge it as candidly as this writer did, that their landscape of retreat sat on the knife’s edge of ruin. The island had not been given to them, but they claimed it nonetheless. Despite the idealized, Arcadian rhetoric that new residents used to describe the island as a place where nature, leisure, and people existed in harmony, the waves of new residents that raced across the bridge created the problems of inequality and potential over-development by their very presence. For these reasons, Hilton

Head’s developer class proceeded with their usual caution toward the issue of incorporation. By

1973, the Community Association on the island hired Horace Fleming Jr., a political scientist at

Clemson University, to perform a study and advise the community on the best options to maintain and sustain Hilton Head’s unique appeal.22

“A Plague Has Descended:” Race, Land, and the Second Incorporation Campaign, 1973- 1983

Despite his small role in putting the brakes to the Hilton Head Beach incorporation movement, Charles Fraser faced several problems in the three years after the BASF controversy.

First, the adopted “natives” within the Sea Pines Plantation grew restless with the slow, but steady process of continued construction and expansion. No matter how careful Fraser and his staff were about maintaining the natural aesthetic of Hilton Head, full-time residents grew tired

21 Cabell Phillips Letter, Island Packet, October 22, 1970; “Petition Withdrawn: New Town Marks Time,” Island Packet, November 12, 1970. 22 Margaret Shannon, “From Tomato Fields to Tourists,” 48.

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of the constancy of the more home-building and the ever-growing number of visitors to the island, especially during the summer months.23

By 1973, disgruntled residents formed the Association of Sea Pines Plantation Property

Owners to check Fraser’s power. One member of the group warned the president that most islanders now believed that “the chief threat to this island… is ‘people pollution’ and the inevitable defacement of landscape and lifestyle that go along inexorably with unregulated growth.” Fraser took such criticism seriously, but only offered his word that he would self- regulate the pace of construction. From his perch on Calibogue Cay in the plantation, Jonathan

Daniels saw humor and hubris in this exchange. “What have we got to hate now that BASF has been driven away?” he imagined his neighbors scheming in response, “we can always go back to

Charles [Fraser].” Such was the “fate of kings to receive both obeisance and abuse” Daniels concluded.24 Either way, Hilton Head’s success continued to be its own worst enemy in the minds of many residents.

Hilton Head’s growth problem preoccupied white residents, developers, and black residents in different ways. The first saw it as a matter of unequal governance. Those in charge of regulating growth, the profit-minded developers, had only their conscience to restrain them from irresponsible development. So far that seemed to work, but the island’s growing popularity made it unlikely to continue. “A plague has descended on our land,” one white resident proclaimed in melodramatic tones, and the only solution was to “establish all Hilton Head as a municipality.” Although most Hilton Headers shared a desire for growth control and regulation, they did so for economic or aesthetic reasons, in the case of most white residents, or for reasons

23 Halfacre, A Delicate Balance, 175-176. 24 Halfacre, A Delicate Balance, quote on 175; Jonathan Daniels, “Sojourner’s Scrapbook: Fate of Kings,” Island Packet, April 29, 1971.

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of protecting land ownership and political power in the case of many African Americans on the island.25

Meanwhile, for African Americans, the problem of growth proved more material and personal than esoteric. In addition to concerns that more growth would drive up property values and tax assessments, thereby reducing their numbers, they saw incorporation at first as a tool to defend their interests. The prospect of the whole island being incorporated would threaten the limited autonomy of their communities and reduce their political representation when they had just gained at the county level. Local NAACP officials saw the “home rule” campaign to establish separate communities at Forest Beach and Sea Pines as evidence that the island’s black neighborhoods should do the same.26 Despite African Americans’s concerns that the incorporation of the entire island would not serve their interests, whites amassed a growing consensus around such a prospect.

The issue of Sea Pines’s expansion grew out of its second issue: financial viability. Fraser was inclined to agree with his detractors living inside Sea Pines’s gates. However, he also knew that the company needed an infusion of cash to cover its expanding costs. The Oil Crisis of 1973 came just as Sea Pines tried to build newer and more impressive resorts across the South and into the Caribbean, namely its investments in Western North Carolina, Amelia Island, Florida, and in

Palmas de Mar, Puerto Rico. With rising interest rates amid economic stagflation, the company’s liabilities reached over $280 million by 1975, an eye-popping increase of over twenty times in a matter of six years.27 Over-extended and squashed by the weight of its mounting debts, Fraser

25 Danielson and Danielson, Profit and Politics, 173-174. 26 Margaret Shannon, “From Tomato Fields to Tourists,” 27 Rowland and Wise, Bridging the Sea Islands’ Past, 390-391.

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relinquished his once-unquestioned control of Sea Pines and the company sold off many of its real estate holdings both on and beyond the island.

Both Sea Pines and the Hilton Head Company’s misfortunes proved to the benefit of outside, corporate entities in the late 1970s through the early 1980s. Driven by auctions and rampant speculation, these new developers prioritized efficiency and exhibited little of the concern for the proper aesthetics of the island that Fraser did. For example, prominent chains like

Hyatt, Westin, and Marriott constructed high-rise hotels on Hilton Head. To the horror of many residents, the new Hyatt hotel at Palmetto Dunes reached ten stories, a height previously unseen by any structure on the island.28 In time, the rise of corporate tourism combined with the continued growth of Hilton Head’s population contributed to a sense among many older residents that they needed to reassert control over the community’s affairs since the county government seemed uninterested in regulating such projects. In the minds of those who lived or ventured outside the plantation gates, many white Hilton Headers observed other changes that brought anxiety about the changing landscape of the island, particularly the perceived loss of the frontier island aesthetic that brought them there in the first place. No longer could it be a landscape of retreat if it adopted the markings of any other resort or tourism community.

By the early 1980s, growth constituted a blessing and a curse for Hilton Head. Although the decennial Census figures did not address the island itself as a distinct community until 1980, anyone who set foot on the island saw signs of incredible growth. In the inaugural issue of Hilton

Head’s Island Packet newspaper in July 1970, Jonathan Daniels’s staff estimated that the population of permanent residents now exceeded three thousand, up from just over one thousand just ten years earlier. Moreover, the article further asserted that in addition to welcoming over

28 Rowland and Wise, Bridging the Sea Island’s Past, 393.

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80,000 visitors that year, Hilton Head alone could claim to account for one-fourth of Beaufort

County’s population growth over the 1960s.29 A special census taken for the community in 1975 confirmed these trends and illustrated how the island’s residents and developer class worked to document the area’s year-by-year addition of new residents. For them, growth served as proof of both its political muscle and its economic importance to the rest of the county.

As Hilton Head’s population grew over the next decade, the drumbeats for incorporation grew louder. Between 1970 and 1980, the island’s population more than tripled to reach over

11,000 in that time. Notably, African Americans now made up less than 15 percent of the Hilton

Head population, down from just over 20 percent in 1975. One African American leader told a local reporter in 1974 that he then “realized that whites had taken over the island.” He then relayed how “at first it was a shock just watching the occupation…Now we live with it everyday.”30 The notion of whites “occupying” the island demonstrates how black Hilton

Headers increasingly rejected the discourse of belonging forged by white islanders during the

BASF controversy. With the accelerated pace of white migration to the island, African

Americans fought for survival rather than idealized visions of island life or the landscape itself.

Although always suspect, whites’ claims to speak for the good of all Hilton Head became increasingly hollow by the early 1980s.

These changes occurred as the community received its final recommendations from the

Clemson professor hired as a consultant on the incorporation issue. The report offered three possible solutions. First, Hilton Head could secede from Beaufort County to establish a new

29 “Population More Than 3000 Here,” (Hilton Head) Island Packet, July 9, 1970. 30 U.S. Census Bureau, 1980 Census of Population, South Carolina; June Manning Thomas, “Blacks on the South Carolina Sea Islands: Planning for Tourist and Land Development,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977), 62; Emory Campbell, quoted in Ron Harris, “Plantations Again: The Gullahs: An Upside-Down World,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1988.

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county. Second, most unlikely, it could secede and then try to merge with less-populated, majority-black Jasper County. Lastly, which most Hilton Headers considered most reasonable, the island could incorporate itself as a municipality and thereby claim more autonomy over its revenues, services, and regulations. Despite the protests of the local and state NAACP chapters—who tried to stonewall an incorporation referendum out of the fears that it would take away the growing political representation African Americans had at the county level—the status quo of remaining under the county’s thumb seemed untenable to white community activists.31

After a series of false starts on the issue in the mid-1970s, the pro-incorporation forces seemed poised to secure a referendum to establish Hilton Head as a municipality by the early

1980s. In 1981, the completion of the Four Seasons Centre—erected next to one of the main thoroughfares running through and onto the island—both affirmed and energized those white residents who backed a new local government. Known derisively as the “stack-a-shacks,” the clear visibility of these towering, “cookie-cutter” condominiums next to popular communities like Palmetto Dunes and Singleton Beach became a symbol of the necessity of incorporation.

One full-page advertisement in the Island Packet included a picture of the insipid, prefabricated units followed by the question, “Is this what you want Hilton Head to be? Help save your island.

Vote for incorporation.”32 By framing their referendum as necessary to protect “your island,” pro-incorporation activists tried to pick up the baton dropped by developers like Fraser and

Hack. In their minds, the rustic luxury of coastal living on Hilton Head needed to be maintained

31 As historian Margaret Shannon notes, thanks to strategic voting at the county level, African Americans controlled seven seats in Beaufort County government, more than doubling the three they held nine years earlier. Shannon, “From Tomato Fields to Tourists,” 56. 32 Advertisement quoted in Danielson and Danielson, Profit and Politics, 182; see also: Rowland and Wise, Bridging the Sea Island’s Past, 393-394.

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not just through deed covenants on the islands, but through the regulatory powers of local government.

In response, African Americans offered sharp criticisms of the structure of the proposed municipal government for two reasons. First, they saw white demographic dominance on the island as a self-fulfilling prophecy where a white-run municipal government would enact policies to further marginalize black communities’ numbers and political voice. For example, plans for drawing town council districts would divide and dilute the African American vote. Second, they decried the “limited service model” proposed for the new municipal government. Because Hilton

Head’s plush plantations and subdivisions already provided core services like water, sewer, and garbage on a private basis, the designers of the island municipality understood that wealthier residents would rebel if they were asked to pay higher taxes to extend public services to everyone else when they already had them. Thus, the new government’s primary authority would be to oversee land use planning to regulate growth. Black islanders bristled at the prospect of seeing their taxes being raised even more while not receiving the services that their neighbors enjoyed behind the plantation gates.33

In similar ways to the affordable housing crunch in Appalachia, the issue of trailers parks reared its head during Hilton Head’s incorporation debate. With African Americans now living on around one-fifth of the island’s land and property values rising, many found mobile homes to be the only affordable housing option to stay on their land or in their communities. Now, with incorporation on the horizon and the intense, perhaps obsessive, desire their white neighbors had to regulate the island’s aesthetics, it didn’t take black islanders long to imagine how enhanced powers of residential zoning might be employed to their detriment. At one public hearing, an

33 Danielson, Profit and Politics, 180.

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African American man named told the gathered crowd, “I can just see one of the first city ordinances outlawing trailers. Most blacks can’t afford new homes. They live in trailers.”34

Although black Hilton Headers expressed concerns about land use controls like the hypothetical trailer ban, which never materialized, they did not support unregulated construction either. Much as they did during the BASF controversy, African American activists tried to toe the line between growth control and economic development in a way that defended their interests.

Trailers represented one example of broader concerns among black citizens that what they referred to as “zoning slavery,” aimed to push them off their land under the guise of preserving Hilton Head’s aesthetics as a landscape of retreat. Five years after the incorporation campaign succeeded, a native islander and activist named Emory Campbell put it this way, “so many people draw the conclusion that the aim of the whole power structure is to have black people wiped off the island. All these new restrictions say to the average landowner, ‘they don’t want me here.’ If it’s not because of their color, [then] it’s because of their economic condition.”

Such a telling statement underscores the reality that despite the repeated claims that the tourism economy and new government structure on Hilton Head never lived up to its promises of broad- based prosperity and fair representation for all islanders.35

Despite the obvious, almost unified voice of dissent coming from the island’s black population, the referendum to incorporate Hilton Head passed with the support of just over 60 percent of the island’s residents. As historians Michael and Patricia Danielson explain, voters also supported a concomitant ballot measure to declare the new municipality “the Town of

34 Herb Campbell, quoted in "Hilton Head Islanders Split Racially over Incorporation Vote," New York Times, May 10, 1983. 35 Emory Campbell, quoted in Ron Harris, “Plantations Again: The Gullahs: An Upside-Down World,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1988.

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Hilton Head” since town held “a nicer connotation than ‘city’ to the suburban refugees who had come to Hilton Head to escape urban America.”36 Yet, for all the hope that the new government and town structure would ensure orderly growth outside the plantation gates, the incorporation movement rested on the founding myth of Hilton Head. Namely, white residents acted increasingly like “last settlers,” like mountain resort communities, intent on preserving the island as they first saw it—both tamed and civilized, but pastoral and beautiful. In claiming to belong to the island landscape, they saw themselves as stewards of the original developers’ visions, even though this depended on ignoring or erasing the history of Hilton Head before “the Bridge.”

The incorporation vote offered a visceral reminder of African Americans’s displacement and increased invisibility as part of the island community. For example, the hiring patterns and workplace policies in the island’s burgeoning hotel scene also reflected the ways that African

Americans found themselves pushed to the margins. In 1980, June Manning Thomas, a South

Carolina native and professor in urban planning at Michigan State University found in her fieldwork on Hilton Head that resorts and corporate hotels continued to place black workers into the most menial service jobs. Upon visiting the lobbies of these facilities, she noted that white faces usually greeted guests at the front desk, while “a visit to the hotel restaurant reveals a host of black waitresses and busboys [while] the kitchen food preparers and dishwashers are also black.”37 Moreover, as corporate tourism continued to carve out a bigger slice of Hilton Head’s tourism pie in the early 1980s, business leaders found more creative ways to secure cheaper labor, even if it meant busing in workers from off the island.

36 Danielson and Danielson, Profit and Politics, 182. 37 June Manning Thomas, “The Impact of Corporate Tourism on Gullah Blacks,” Phylon 51: 1 (Spring 1980), quote on 6, 1-11.

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Debates over the island’s growth and incorporation did more than just further reveal the simmering racial tensions underneath Hilton Head’s sunny facade. It also showed divergent visions of the community’s future. The two predominant, interconnected trends during the late

1970s through the early 1980s—the rise of corporate tourism met by a determined movement to incorporate Hilton Head—held one thing in common: they strengthened the grip of white outsiders over the island’s power structure. Although the local and state chapters of the NAACP sued to block the incorporation referendum. Rejecting the group’s argument that the new town violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by reducing black voting power, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the rulings of lower courts denying their cause.38 Although an African American candidate did win one seat on the town council soon after the incorporation vote and a black grocery store owner named Marc Grant represents Ward 1 today in Hilton Head’s government, the new municipal structure did little to address or assuage larger concerns among black islanders about land loss and their political marginalization (Figure 7-1). Through incorporation, white islanders believed they secured autonomy over their affairs. To a large extent they had, but in doing so, they undercut the already-teetering foundations of community autonomy held by

African Americans in the Lowcountry.

“Got Land Problems?” Combating Black Land Loss in the Lowcountry

With the loss of black political power and black land to the hordes of affluent whites who stormed onto Hilton Head in the previous decades, African American activists across the

Lowcountry redoubled efforts to preserve their communities at this critical juncture. Across the

Broad River, near Beaufort, Penn Community Services (PCS) struggled to find the resources to meet the scale of the challenges faced by Gullah-Geechee communities. Throughout the 1970s

38 Shannon, “From Tomato Fields to Tourists,” 64-66.

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and 1980s, PCS dedicated itself to protecting black landowners, calling attention to land loss, and promoting the preservation of African Americans’s cultural heritage across the coastal

South. In response to both the rise of corporate tourism and the emphasis on land use control by white residents in places like Hilton Head, PCS drew on the activism of local black islanders and developed a larger vision and program for black islanders to maintain a measure of independence while demanding inclusion in the political life of their communities. As one joint statement issued in 1971 by PCS and African American leaders from Beaufort and Jasper Counties summed up this view, “those in control of ‘money’ cannot profit from attempts to dictate the image of our two counties. Dictation of that image will, should and must come from the people.”39

As its first African American director, John Gadson developed a bold blueprint for the center while retaining its central mission. Despite backing BASF during that controversy,

Gadson held no illusions that the chemical plant would be a panacea for the problems facing black communities in the Sea Islands. Instead, he and Penn’s staff developed a proposal based on their belief that “a meaningful project for Black Land must be developed as part of Black

Economic Development.” Focusing on coastal areas from Charleston to Savannah, Gadson saw the propping up of black landownership as not only important because of its rapid decline, but also one that would continue to draw attention to the “undisputed poverty of Blacks in the midst of affluence.”40 Working with institutions like the Atlanta-based Emergency Land Fund (EFL) and the Black Economic Research Center in New York, Gadson and Charles Washington Jr., a

39 Penn Community Services, “Beaufort-Jasper Blacks Set Goals at Work Session,” Penn News, October 1971, 5. 40 Penn Community Services, “Project Black Land, Revised August 31, 1971,” SCCHR Records, Topical Files, Folder: “PCS 1971,” SCL.

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local black lawyer, founded Black Land Services, Inc. (BLS) in 1971 backed by a $1 million gift from a wealthy benefactor.41

This organization offered advice and legal assistance to landowners on three different issues that contributed most to black land loss: low offers from land buyers, tax or foreclosure, and heirs’ property laws. For those African Americans who wished to sell their land, PCS offered to help them negotiate a fair price since many land buyers tried to exploit especially elderly or illiterate property holders with irresponsibly low offers. However, such cases made up the minority of BLS’s work.42 When most property holders refused to sell, companies worked around them to purchase land through other means.

By and large, their staff worked to convince and help black landowners in the

Lowcountry hold onto their land in the face of an onslaught of interest from wealthy white buyers. First, BLS confronted the issue of heirs’ property. By 1980, conservative estimates calculated that across the South at least one-third of all black-owned land lacked a will designating heirs. This meant that any property passed down from one generation to the next found itself shared by all possible heirs, which could include not only the deceased’s spouse or children, but siblings, nieces, and nephews as well. In cases where people living on such properties refused to sell, potential land buyers could force a “partition sale” only by convincing one heir to agree to put the property up for sale. In places like Beaufort County, nefarious real

41 Burton and Cross, Penn Center, 99; Roy Reed, “Blacks in the South Struggle to Keep the Little Land They Have Left,” New York Times, December 7, 1972. 42 Black Land Services, “Report: A Synopsis of Legal Assistance, May 15, 1971 to January 1972,” SCCHR Records, Topical Files, Folder: “PCS, 1972,” SCL.

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estate companies would often track down distant relatives who lived in Northern cities and lean on them to initiate the process.43

Working against generations of deeply-held and justifiable distrust of the southern legal system, Penn staff and their allies worked feverishly to help inform and assist black families in the Lowcountry about the need for a will and how to establish ownership in the absence of one.

For example, both Penn and the Emergency Land Fund worked to acquire a total of thirty-three acres on Hilton Head, right next to Broad Creek from seven different heirs of a black man named

Chance Washington on Hilton Head in 1973. However, raising the money to submit to purchase these two parcels, valued at $30,000 per acre or just under $1 million total, proved a tall task for the non-profits.44 Meanwhile, individuals like Frank Bowles, found that navigating the system proved impossible. Seeking a loan to renovate his house near Beaufort which had been in his family since 1865, county officials and a local lawyer informed him he needed to secure an agreement of a mysterious uncle and his children in addition to his siblings. Failing that, one potential lender told Bowles “the best thing for you to do is to find some other land—or get yourself a doublewide [trailer].” Many African Americans across the rural South faced similar choices.45 Without recourse to establish ownership, secure loans to fix up their properties, or sell at a fair rate if they wanted to, they often found homes and land that their families held for generations snapped out from under them through legal trickery.

43 Bill DuPre, “Heirs Property Presents Major Legal Problems,” and Cindy Thames, “Conference Probes Black Land Plight,” Savannah Morning News, February 18, 1975; June M. Thomas, “Hilton Head Report: No Place in the Sun for the Hired Help,” Southern Exposure 10: 3 (May-June 1982), 36. 44 Joseph F. Brooks to John Gadson, September 15, 1973, SCCHR Records, Topical Files, Folder: “PCS 1973,” SCL. 45 C. Scott Graeber, “Cloud on the Title: A Blight Hits Black Farmers,” The Nation, March 11, 1978, 269-270

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In addition to heirs’ property, Penn’s BLS program also tried to confront the rapid seizure and sale of black properties as a result of unpaid taxes. This issue proved especially pertinent given the increased tax burden on Lowcountry landholders due to the speculative interests of real estate and other development companies. Focusing their work in Beaufort and Charleston

Counties, Penn worked with local landowners to pay off the remaining taxes on properties to prevent local tax offices from claiming the title and then selling them. In one case during the summer of 1972, the center paid off just under $200 of outstanding tax debts for twenty-seven black landowners on St. Helena Island within an hour of their properties going to auction.46

However, the number of cases mounted and the tax debts that ensnared African Americans stretched the resources of BLS. In its first year, it paid almost $1500 to protect twenty-three parcels from sale or foreclosure in Beaufort County alone. Simultaneously, program records show that it identified six hundred more threatened parcels across the region, including at least eighty-seven in Charleston County.47 Despite their best efforts, trying to prevent foreclosures and tax sales required increases in funding that Penn did not have.

Despite Gadson’s new, ambitious programs at Penn, his efforts encountered the same economic headwinds that battered the sails of Charles Fraser and Fred Hack. Although, as a non- profit heavily reliant on private donations, PCS found itself in even more dire straits throughout the 1970s. It could not procure enough grants or donations to match their ambitions. Within its first five years of existence, BLS saw its staff reduced to only a few employees. Then, in 1976,

46 Hickmott, “Black Land, Black Capital: Rural Development in the Shadows of the Sunbelt South, 1969-1976,” Journal of African American History 101: 4 (Fall 2016), 509. 47 Roy Reed, “Blacks in the South Struggle to Keep the Little Land They Have Left,” New York Times, December 7, 1972; Project Black Land, “Progress Report, August 16, 1971,” SCCHR Records, Topical Files, Folder: “PCS 1971,” SCL; Penn Community Services Program Meeting Minutes, February 4, 1972, SCCHR Records, Topical Files, Folder: “PCS 1972,” SCL.

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John Gadson resigned due to the financial stress of the job. For the same reason, his successor would leave two years later, leaving interim director Joseph McDomick to manage the center until 1980 when PCS settled on another director.48 Without the resources of a Sea Pines or any other developer, the bold determination of Penn’s staff ran up against the realities of inequality in the Lowcountry. Confronting the cadre of lawyers and staff assembled by real estate interests in the name of making a profit through quasi-legal land theft, the symbolic and communal value of black landownership fell prey to the demands of the market where land and landscape represented a commodity. Thousands of acres of valuable real estate in the coastal South came to the market through deception and coercion.49

Meanwhile, the rise of corporate tourism by the early 1980s did not in itself create a massive decline in black landownership, but it did accelerate it. Tasked with picking up the baton at Penn from Gadson was Hilton Head native Emory Campbell. Having grown up on the island before leaving for college where he became, in his words, “one of the first Earth Day people,”

Campbell combined an abiding love for the commons economy of his youth and the importance of ecology to the landscape of the Lowcountry. For example, in a 1982 interview, he expressed dismay that local deer and snake populations had been found swimming miles offshore to nearby islands or the mainland as a result of their shrinking natural habitats.50 As a result, he saw the changes afoot on Hilton Head and other Sea Islands as distressing both for their impact on native culture and communities and for the strains that tourism growth placed on the landscape. Years later, Campbell recalled that since 1960, he first understood how the “new whites” on Hilton

48 Burton and Cross, Penn Center, 104-110. 49 Andrew Kahrl, The Land Was Ours. 50 Campbell quoted in Burton and Cross, Penn Center, 109; Campbell Interview with Vernie Singleton, “Hilton Head Report: We Are An Endangered Species,” Southern Exposure 10: 3 (May-June 1982), 37.

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Head brought not just new faces but an “affluence atmosphere” or an attitude where work became disconnected from the land and leisure promoted aesthetics rather than a tactile engagement with the natural world. Not only that, but the demographic dominance of whites on

Hilton Head and other coastal areas meant that, in his words, “we have given up on trying to protect the shrimp and the crab because we had become the new endangered species.” Across the

Sea Islands, the pressures of residential growth on these landscapes of retreat brought environmental duress not only to local flora and fauna but to the human communities and economies that once relied upon them.51

Under Campbell’s leadership, Penn continued the work of sustaining Gullah-Geechee land and culture under more firm financial footing. Recognizing that the incorporation campaign threatened to undo the measured progress achieved under Gadson, the new era of PCS leadership rededicated itself to sustaining native communities as a political and economic project. In 1982,

Campbell reported in an interview that, in the previous fifteen years, African Americans lost around 1000 acres to tourism-related development. However, he warned then, “the real crunch

[is] yet to come.”52 Although local historians describe the restructuring of Sea Pines and Hilton

Head Company as marking the end of “the era of modern plantation paternalism,” black activists increasingly doubted whether or not such an era ever existed.53

Certainly, Fraser and Hack wore the badge of good intentions with pride, but the defeat of BASF and the piecemeal efforts to support black institutions paled in comparison to the changes wrought by the explosion of growth on Hilton Head. For example, when Sea Pines used

51 Campbell Interview with Vernie Singleton, “We Are An Endangered Species, quote on 38; Campbell Interview with Robert Korstad. 52 Emory Campbell, quoted in Mark Pinsky, “Hilton Head Report: Sea Island Plantations Revisited,” Southern Exposure 10: 3 (May-June 1982), 34. 53 Rowland and Wise, Bridging the Sea Island’s Past, 391.

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$80,000 to set up a program to assist African Americans with heirs’ property to obtain services that could clear these titles, many black leaders recoiled at the offer. One member of the Hilton

Head NAACP chapter described it as “a scheme to get black property in the disguise of help.”

For many African Americans with deep roots on the island, the trauma of decades of displacement and marginalization under what some called the white “occupation” reaffirmed for them the need to hold onto land, neighborhoods, and other institutions that provided independence.54

Similar suspicions followed the building of the island’s first public housing project.

Completed in the early 1980s with a little over $3 million in funding from the Department of

Housing and Urban Development (HUD), local leaders ensured that the eighty-unit development had a name befitting government housing in Hilton Head. Dubbed Sandalwood Terrace and given a Spanish-style architectural feel, the public housing facility held a resemblance to other residential communities in name only. Even as Charles Fraser and other area whites heaped praise on the new housing facility as progress toward the goal of “housing for people of all incomes,” many black islanders saw things differently. Perry White, who headed up the Hilton

Head NAACP, described it as “a step backward toward greater dependency.” For White and many other natives of the island, the loss of land, commons access, and independence could not be glossed over with new housing and a fresh coat of paint.55

Despite the mounting evidence to the contrary in the 1980s, Fraser continued to double down on his belief that the growth of Hilton Head to become more white, more affluent, and more dependent on the recreational tourism industry was to not just his benefit but to the benefit

54 June M. Thomas, “Hilton Head Report: No Place in the Sun for the Hired Help,” 36. 55 Fraser and White both quoted in Mark Pinsky, “Hilton Head Report: Sea Island Plantations Revisited,” Southern Exposure 10: 3 (May-June 1982), 34.

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of black islanders as well. This sentiment became clear when black activists continued to confront Fraser over a longstanding issue: the gates that barred them from entering plantations like Sea Pines unless they paid for a day pass. For this reason, Emory Campbell and other black activists drew parallels between Hilton Head and apartheid South Africa. “I know it sounds farfetched,” to compare the two he admitted to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, but “We need passes to go places on the island. We work in the lowest jobs so white people can play. We arrive in these busses every morning and then we’re shipped out again.” In the latter case,

Campbell indicated how as black Hilton Headers found themselves pushed out or taxed out of their land, local governments established a bus system to allow tourism workers to commute from towns anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours away.56 Comments like these, included in profiles by national news outlets, helped illustrate the profound sense of loss over the displacement of black islanders from their home ground.

As the black land loss campaigns attracted more media attention to Hilton Head in the

1980s, it drew the ire of Charles Fraser and other white developers In 1983, after a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer asked the Sea Pines boss about whether African Americans needed to pay to visit their ancestors’ graves that sat behind his gates, Fraser seethed with resentment. “Did they tell you about the cemetery? It’s their favorite gambit with the media,” he mocked, ‘oh they won’t let me visit old granddaddy’s burial place.’ That’s absolute hogwash!” Such hostility to their concerns confirmed for black activists like Campbell and Barnwell the need to redouble

56 Emory Campbell, quoted in Ron Harris, “Plantations Again: The Gullahs: An Upside-Down World,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1988; On the bus system created by Lowcountry Regional Transportation Authority (LRTA), now called “Palmetto Breeze,” see: Erin Heffernan, “Why 5 Hour Commutes? A Look Back,” Island Packet, August 6, 2016.

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efforts to hold onto black land.57 The two decades after the BASF fight confirmed for African

Americans that the guiding logic of white developers’ vision for the island—to create a landscape of retreat—depended on the marginalization of their independence and community interests.

Beyond Hilton Head, corporate developers descended on other, previously undeveloped

Sea Islands eager to build their own resort empires. African American landowners again bore the brunt of this shift. For example, on Kiawah Island, located just south of Charleston and about one hundred miles north of Hilton Head, Sea Pines company designed a resort community for the island’s owners, the royal family of Kuwait. Despite protests from both the island’s native black community and Jewish residents in nearby Charleston, investors from the Arab nation’s government bought the island for $17 million in 1973 from a timber company. Within fifteen years, it sold the island—with its three golf courses, a sprawling inn, and numerous recreational facilities—to a South Carolina development for around $105 million.58 Despite the efforts of

PCS and other groups to help stop the rezoning of the island, it developed much along the same lines as Hilton Head. Estimates as recently as 2017 peg Kiawah’s African American population at less than 1 percent.59

Back in Beaufort, new real estate companies bought land across the county. Campbell and Penn Center found themselves stretched by encroachment both close to home and on the

57 Fraser quoted in Julia Cass, “Newcomers and Natives Square Off on Hilton Head,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 1983. 58 Wayne King, “’Loss’ of an Island Deplored in Carolina,” New York Times, August 7, 1974; Bruce Smith, “Resort Island Bought for $105 Million From Kuwaiti Group,” AP, June 29, 1988; June M. Thomas, “Blacks on the South Carolina Sea Islands,” v-viii. 59 Barney Blakeney, “Racial Disparities: Economic Disparities Persist Despite Documentation,” Charleston Chronicle, December 1, 2017, https://www.charlestonchronicle.net/2017/12/01/racial-disparities-economic- inequities-persist-despite-documentation/ (accessed November 11, 2019).

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Lowcountry’s most out-of-the-way island. In 1981, Alcoa Properties—the real estate arm of

Alcoa Aluminum—bought Dataw Island to develop a resort community six miles east of

Beaufort and right next to PCS.60 While Dataw, known as “Datah” to local blacks, would not become like Hilton Head due to its lack of oceanfront property and easy access from major highways, the latter did not stop developers from setting their sights on the supposedly

“untouched” beaches of Daufuskie Island.

Located less than ten miles west of the southern end of Hilton Head, the barrier island’s population by the early 1980s consisted of less than one hundred Gullah blacks, all descendants of slaves who lived there since at least the Civil War. Since the paper mills in Savannah, fifteen miles to the west, polluted and destroyed Daufuskie’s oyster beds in the late 1940s, the lifeblood of the island’s economy vanished, and the population slowly dwindled. As early as 1966, South

Carolina state officials worked with OEO to create a confidential economic development plan for the island. Their report detailed the possibility that Daufuskie could become a “national tourist attraction” for its history of “pirates and privateers.” However, it also suggested that residents should incorporate the community beforehand to preserve the island’s rustic beauty and prevent

“all vestiges of the 20th Century” through zoning ordinances. “Through such regulations,” the report concluded, visitors “would be wafted back into a time away from the confusion and hurry of our present society…when time stood still and life was simple and gay.”61 No such plans materialized on either front, but these suggestions that the island held the same kind of romantic, nostalgic appeal as Hilton Head endowed it with a mystique that only grew as its neighboring island grew more crowded.

60 Rowland and Wise, Bridging the Sea Islands’ Past, 395. 61 South Carolina Office of Economic Opportunity, Confidential Report on Daufuskie Island (1966), quotes on 7, 11.

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Soon, wealthy whites on Hilton Head advanced across the Calibogue Sound and began buying up parts of Daufuskie. First, in 1974, a liquor dealer named Gilbert Roller bought 2700 acres of an old plantation for an estimated $4 million. With Charles Fraser as an adviser, Roller told reporters, “we do plan to develop it, along the lines of Hilton Head, but without the density.

We want to keep it horse and buggy.” In response, Daufuskie’s residents, which then included about a dozen whites, found it difficult to incorporate to head off the possibility of unregulated land buying and development.62

Despite a ferry service, development did not come for another ten years. Then, Charles

Cauthen, a Hilton Head real estate agent bought another 2,630 acres on Daufuskie. Although

Congress passed the 1982 Coastal Barriers Resources Act to prevent over-development on ecologically sensitive and hurricane-threatened islands like Daufuskie, Cauthen and his cronies found a way around the law. Namely, they secured an exception that would allow homes there to purchase flood insurance policies through the federal government.63 Within three years, the

Hilton Head developers planned to build a $65 million country club with championship golf and tennis courses along with a vast event space made to look like the antebellum Melrose plantation which once stood on the site. Memberships at the club sold for $45,000. Soon after, the real estate arm of International Paper corporation planned to build two gated plantations on the island with sprawling residential developments and a marina that would allow hundreds of boats to dock on Daufuskie.64 Much like on Hilton Head, the quaint notions of creating a landscape of

62 Wayne King, “’Loss’ of an Island Deplored in Carolina,” New York Times, August 7, 1974 63 Jack Anderson, “Shore-Land Law Saves Subsidies for Developers,” Washington Post, October 15, 1982; Andrew Kahrl, “The Sunbelt’s Sandy Foundation: “Coastal Development and the Making of the Modern South” Southern Cultures 20: 3 (Fall 2014), 40. 64 Gayle Golden, “The Land That Time Forgot,” Sun-Sentinel, May 22, 1986.

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retreat in the coastal South became transmogrified into an exclusive playground that trampled over nature, culture, and history.

Emory Campbell and PCS looked on with horror at the plans for Daufuskie. Its impending development signaled the rapid disappearance of Gullah-Geechee communities and culture. In an interview at the time, Campbell blamed the land grab on the island as “nothing more than a spillover of what’s happened on Hilton Head.” He continued, “They said they’re gonna change development style just a bit on Daufuskie, but in our initial conversations with one of the key developers it’s clear there is no respect for the native population.”65 Campbell’s comments indicated that developers across the Sea Islands desired black land both for its location and the surrounding landscape, but how they acquired it grew out of lack of respect for black culture. Proving him right, one of the new Melrose Plantation’s founders Steve Kiser shrugged when a reporter asked him about the native islanders and author Pat Conroy’s comment that the development represented an “American tragedy.” “Cultures do pass, you know,” he said before adding, “How can you look at this natural beauty and say it’s a tragedy?”66 Hilton Head’s growth and wealth brought similar issues to Daufuskie.

Despite its listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, the human connections to Daufuskie’s past have disappeared slowly. Within the first decade, only seventy- five black residents remained as their property bills increased by an average of 700 percent during those years. In response, the NAACP blamed local officials for trying to raise the tax assessments of property owned by native islanders to exorbitant levels. When a cemetery with the graves of black islanders was desecrated by resort-building, the National Council of

65 Campbell Interview with Vernie Singleton, “We Are An Endangered Species,” 38. 66 Gayle Golden, “The Land That Time Forgot,” Sun-Sentinel, May 22, 1986.

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Churches issued a statement decrying the developers as guilty of “cultural genocide.” As recently as 2015, journalists from Georgia Public Radio reported that only 12 Gullah blacks remained on

Daufuskie.67 In the minds of developers across the Sea Islands, nature rather than culture made the landscape valuable. Although the two remained inextricably linked, only the latter was expendable to attract residents and visitors who would bring their own culture.

In a bitter irony, the revival of Penn Center under Emory Campbell’s leadership accompanied a period of accelerated black land loss in the Sea Islands. Under his savvy leadership, local institutions brought national attention to the decline of Gullah-Geechee culture to the benefit of wealthy, white resort owners. Much like in the anti-hunger and anti-BASF campaigns before this, the persistent, ever-swelling inequalities between the Lowcountry’s white population and its mostly black and, now, Hispanic communities attract media attention because it presents a modern, Southern Gothic tale of loss, tragedy, and greed in paradise. However, as

Emory Campbell understood, the notion of these communities and cultures as “endangered,” played an important role in their long-term survival. Rather than simple narratives of tragedy, the legacy of black activism in the Lowcountry is one of survival, sustainability, and adaptation despite decades of state-sanctioned oppression followed by cultural and geographic displacement.

Yet, Penn’s continued existence and organizing efforts testify to the resilience of African

American communities in the face of displacement. Under Campbell and subsequent directors, the center helped preserve and sustain black life in small, but important corners of the Sea

Islands. The creation of cultural museums and “Heritage Day,” along with the establishment of

67 Kahrl, “The Sunbelt’s Sandy Foundation,” 40-41; Gabrielle Ware, “Preserving Daufuskie Island,” Georgia Public Radio January 16, 2015, https://www.gpb.org/news/2015/01/16/gullah-geechee-series-part-three-preserving- daufuskie-island-video (accessed January 4, 2020).

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both the Gullah-Geechee Heritage Corridor by Congress in 2006 and the Reconstruction Era

National Historical Park in 2017 indicate both the critical impact of Penn’s work in using outside concerns for the losses endured by black communities to then help preserve their cultural heritage.68

Examining the endangered nature of Gullah-Geechee communities reveals how the experiences of black islanders on Hilton Head, Kiawah, and Daufuskie echoed those of similar communities on St. Simons, Amelia, and Sapelo Islands. Throughout the late twentieth century, acquiring black land became a source and symbol of white wealth along the Atlantic Coast of the

American South. From 1970 to the late 1980s, the black population on St. Simons Island,

Georgia fell from 1,100 to under 600 thanks in large measure to the growth of new resorts.

Meanwhile, Charles Fraser and Sea Pines helped turn Amelia Island, Florida into a swanky resort in the image of Hilton Head. In the process, the historically African American community in nearby American Beach found itself threatened by similar forces. Lastly, the black communities on Georgia’s Sapelo Island remain one of the last, remote outposts of Gullah-Geechee life on the

Eastern Seaboard. Although largely untouched by resorts, recent land purchases of heirs’ property by developers led by skyrocketing property taxes that threaten the continued existence of the fewer than fifty people who live in the black community of Hog Hammock.69

In July 2019, an investigation by The New Yorker and ProPublica detailed the plight of black landowners in North Carolina jailed for eight years after refusing to vacate their property after being told that developers had bought it without their knowledge through a partition sale.

68 Burton and Cross, Penn Center, 122-123. 69 Ron Harris, “Plantations Again,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1988; Russ Rymer, American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory (New York: HarperCollins, 1998); Marsha Dean Phelts, An American Beach for African Americans (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010); On Sapelo, see: Cooper, Making Gullah, 207-213.

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The report also cited the fact that in Beaufort County, South Carolina “investors [still] fly into the county each October to bid on tax-delinquent properties in a local gymnasium.” Although the legal loopholes and nefarious land-buying techniques of developers can and should be addressed by policymakers, the persistence of black land loss is rooted in the social inequalities that still define much of the rural South.70 Although Americans prize a sense of belonging to a particular place, that right is not inviolable but subject to the whims of powerful groups and individuals.

Even in a post-agrarian society, the right to belong through land ownership remains an important yardstick of our democracy.

70 Lizzie Presser, “Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery: The Reel Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave It,’ ProPublica, July 15, 2019, https://features.propublica.org/black-land-loss/heirs- property-rights-why-black-families-lose-land-south/ (accessed July 17, 2019).

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Figure 7-1. Map of Ward Districts on Hilton Head Island, Note that Ward 1 is represented by an African American business owner named Marc Grant. As new subdivisions and plantations grew in the last fifty years, the island’s remaining African American population increasingly lived in the neighborhoods around this ward. https://www.hiltonheadislandsc.gov/council/tcwards.cfm (accessed November 12, 2019).

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CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION

Our purpose will not be so much to save the world as to guard its islands, not all of which have to be surrounded by water. —Jonathan Daniels Island Packet

In the muggy darkness of the Lowcountry morning, hundreds of people gather in parking lots across the region and prepare to do the most important jobs on Hilton Head Island. In rural communities along the I-95 corridor—in places like Allendale, Hardeeville, and board the busses bearing the tropical sounding name, Palmetto Breeze, pay their fares, and begin the 5-hour, roundtrip commute to work at restaurants, hotels, and other service jobs related to the island’s sprawling tourism empire. A publicly-funded system, many of the mostly African American and

Latinx workers cite the fact that Hilton Head jobs pay better than the minimum wage jobs in their hometowns. And commuting offers the best way to stretch their still-meager take home-pay rather than live on an island where the average home price nears half a million dollars. As the buses roar eastward toward the island, these riders pass the roads where investigators found parasites and hunger fifty years prior, they pass what is now the Victoria Bluff Heritage Preserve or the proposed site of the BASF plant, and finally, many cross over the Charles Fraser Bridge once they reach Hilton Head.1

The contradictions at the heart of this arrangement illustrate the profound contingencies of the politics of place in the American South, with implications for communities far beyond it.

First, poverty and tourism remain deeply intertwined. Per capita income in Beaufort County for whites is over twice that of African Americans and Hispanics as recently as 2012. As Hilton

1 Chapter epigraph from: Jonathan Daniels, “Sojourner’s Scrapbook: The Launching of the Packet,” Island Packet, July 9, 1970; This information as well as profiles of the commuters can be found in a special report published by the Island Packet (founded by Jonathan Daniels) in 2016. “Propping Up Paradise,” Island Packet, August 6, 2016, http://media.islandpacket.com/static/news/workforce/ (accessed August 10, 2019).

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Head and Beaufort County grew more affluent, workers like those on the Palmetto Breeze buses moved further inland in the last thirty to forty years. Just a few miles to the west, the rate of people living in poverty in counties like Jasper, Colleton, and Hampton remains above 20 percent, while in nearby Allendale and Bamberg Counties the poverty rate sits around 41 and 32 percent respectively as of 2015.2 Although no company dared to locate another plant after the mid-1970s, the area around Victoria Bluff—like parts of the New River and French Broad River valleys—has seen new “plantations,” golf courses, and recreational facilities sprout up around it.

South Carolina’s stretch of I-95 brings thousands of travelers each year through what some have called “the Corridor of Shame” on their way to Hilton Head, which claims the title of “America’s

Favorite Beach.”

Similarly, as Chapter 4 hinted at, as de-industrialization hit Western North Carolina hard in the late 1990s and early 2000s, jobs in tourism and service industries have failed to address— and in some cases exacerbated—the underlying inequalities in the region. According to the 2010

Census, the percentage of people living in poverty exceeds the state average in the vast majority of mountain communities.3 As a result, many communities in this part of the state find themselves grappling with the challenges of a post-industrial economy more acutely than other parts of the state with more diverse economies. In recent years, the rising cost of living in cities like Asheville or prominent resort areas has forced local leaders to consider creative solutions to

2 South Carolina Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office, Statistical Abstract, Income: Tables 4 and 12, http://abstract.sc.gov/chapter13/income12.html (accessed January 4, 2020). 3 U.S. Census of Population, North Carolina, County Data, 2010; Steph Guinan, “Special Report: The Poverty Problem in the Rural Mountains of WNC,” Carolina Public Press, May 21, 2014, https://carolinapublicpress.org/19178/special-report-part-1-the-poverty-problem-in-the-rural-mountains-of-wnc/ (accessed January 5, 2020).

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stave off a housing crisis and limit commute times for mountaineers who work in tourism as well as teachers and construction workers.4

Although in some ways the experiences of these communities suggest that over the last fifty-plus years little has changed in terms of poverty and inequality, this continuity amid change indicates how the love of place covers many sins. This is not a uniquely regional conceit that applies to southerners only. However, grassroots activists played upon certain assumptions about life in the South, particularly concerning rural areas, to construct powerful discourses about their communities as landscapes of retreat. Working in concert with outside groups and sympathetic politicians, their successes in defeating ambitious development projects rested on both the cultural idealization of agrarian life and the legal frameworks of modern environmentalism.

Moreover, these pitched battles over economic development and environmentalism offer another reminder that the perceived uniqueness of the South’s problems and history faded with the formal end of the Jim Crow system. As this study shows, local debates over job creation versus environmental preservation loomed large in national politics.5 Residents, whether newcomers or natives, joined with tourists and outsiders to defend what they perceived and constructed as landscapes unique to both region and nation. In doing so, they drew on both local memories about the trauma of displacement as well as broader environmental touchstones about the loss of open space, the destruction of fragile ecosystems, and the arrogance of government and corporate planners.

4 Mike Cronin, “Study: Asheville Unique Among 8 Housing Markets at Risk,” Asheville Citizen-Times, May 10, 2016 https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2016/05/10/real-estate-market-health/84183228/ (accessed January 5, 2020); Joel Burgess, “$1.4M in Home Buying Help to go to Asheville’s Poorest Residents, Teachers, City Workers,” Citizen-Times, February 27, 2019. 5 Laura F. Edwards, “Southern History as U.S. History,” Journal of Southern History 75: 3 (August 2009): 533-564; Orville Vernon Burton, “The South as ‘Other,’ the Southerner as ‘Stranger.” Journal of Southern History 79: 1 (February 2013): 7-50.

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Several local, regional, and national factors contributed to the tearing down and building up, preserving and destroying much of the rural South. Undoubtedly, the environmental legislation passed in the late 1960s and early 1970s offered diverse communities the legal recourse they needed to defeat dam projects and industrial pollution. As much as ecological know-how and legal resources contributed to the successes of conventional and unconventional environmentalists across the rural South. Shared values about the commons, ecological knowledge, and legal maneuvering undoubtedly proved crucial to the formation and success of these grassroots organizations. However, these works’ focus on integrating rural southerners and mountaineers into the larger body of literature on American environmentalism leaves room to further explain the importance of ideas and motivations in these movements. Other factors help explain the broader, non-local appeal of these grassroots movements and their relative staying power for the better part of a decade. What made a range of southerners and Americans care about the fate of such small communities? In short, people who lived and loved these places turned the idealized landscape into discursive symbols for the imagined virtue of rural communities. And even more than that, in an age of suburbanization, the notion of imperiled, aesthetically beautiful landscapes of retreat held broader, nostalgic appeal for politicians and voters who sought to preserve these places.

In many ways, the same communities that launched grassroots, environmental movements to defeat industrial development became victims of their own successes. Concerns about industrial pollution gave way to expanding recreational economies based on tourism and second-home building in both Southern Appalachia and the Lowcountry. The anti-development movements succeeded in blocking harmful industrial development that would alter the landscape and the living patterns of residents. However, in granting the region’s landscapes a kind of

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protected status based on its aesthetic appeals and its reputation as pure and unpolluted, grassroots activists contributed to the growth of ecotourism and real estate economies that posed different threats to the environment.

In this vein, there is at least some truth to Canadian writer Mark Abley’s vivid claim, in a study of dying languages, that “without the stories, the land turns into real estate.” The place narratives constructed by citizens’ groups to defeat massive development projects became embedded into the broader, national conscience. However, what Abley’s point misses, is that stories about rurality and underdevelopment contributed to the transformation of certain landscapes into valuable commodities. When certain stories are told by predominant groups, especially, others are lost. As Jonathan Daniels’s comment about “poverty as preservative” reminds us, underdevelopment often creates an incentive for rapid development. Or, the perception of underdevelopment fosters a need for preservation.6

Through this process by which certain stories about the land make real estate, developers took advantage of these discourses to sell wealthy outsiders on unique vacations and second- homes that were supposedly in harmony with the area’s natural and cultural heritage. Floridians flocked to Western North Carolina while more and more retirees went to Hilton Head because they represented an imaginary South: a place relatively untouched by industrialized cities, overrun with highways and suburbs and smog. Local boosters carved out flourishing tourism economies replete with gated neighborhoods, golf courses, and even as relatively high poverty rates persisted.

6 Mark Abley, quoted in Rebecca Menzies, Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good (Gabriola, BC: New Society, 2014), 54; Jonathan Daniels, “Poverty as Preservative,” Island Packet, November 30, 1972.

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In response to this process of exurban gentrification, community groups like the Penn

Center for the Sea Islands tried to combat “heritage depletion” in addition to preserving people’s longstanding ties to homes, neighborhoods, and communities. In the last twenty to thirty years, the successful campaign that established the Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor grew out of the difficulties such groups found in stemming the tide of black land in the Lowcountry.

South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn echoed the words of Emory Campbell and others in describing African Americans here, not just their lands and environments, as “endangered” or

“vanishing.”7 In 2006, Congress passed the Gullah/Geechee Heritage Act to empower the

National Park Service (NPS) in preserving and interpreting the cultural resources of black communities along the coasts of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida.

Despite the clear pleadings of residents for expanded loan programs or other funding to help black residents of these areas hold onto their ancestral lands, NPS officials demurred. As they saw it, their role would be to promote public awareness through historical interpretation, and then policy changes could follow to address the predatory legal and tax regimes that enabled the rapid loss of black land.8 These efforts indicate how earlier generations’ concerns about unique landscapes as imperiled gave way to more recent protests about local people, communities, and cultures vanishing from these places.

In a different way, groups like the NCNR along with Appalachian heritage groups like the Foxfire Fund and various regional folk schools try to keep alive the cultural legacies of agrarian work patterns. As rural land use patterns changed in the last forty years to see more

7 On “heritage depletion, David Lowenthal, “The Heritage Crusade and Its Contradictions,” in Max Page and Randall Mason, eds., Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2004): 11-29; Melissa L. Cooper, Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), quote on 192, 188-199. 8 Cooper, Making Gullah, 197-199.

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residential construction, such groups stepped up efforts to document and preserve the material life of the agrarian economy. Back-to-the-landers like Sam Parker in Madison County became increasingly notable as objects of cultural fascination. In an interview in the early 2000s, Parker noted with fascination that people who “live, if you will, the old way” appeared more often in human interest news stories because “they’re so few now… it's almost a historical notice. This is it. We want this recorded.”9 Echoing similar notes, acclaimed writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s award- winning biography of Eustace Conway—a back-to-the-lander who operates the Turtle Island

Preserve near Boone—bears the title The Last American Man as a testament to the enduring appeal of an idealized, simple rural life. The combination of national profiles, along with a revived homesteading movement, and his constant battle to maintain ownership of his property, turned Conway into something of a folk hero.10

It is unknowable at some point what these river valleys and coastal areas might have looked like with hydroelectric dams or chemical plants. However, the very shape and substance of the local landscapes bear testimony to the choices made by previous generations. For example, the fact that workers commuting into Hilton Head pass the Victoria Bluff site almost daily serves as a stark reminder that, for better or worse, the contours of the communities they live and work in might have been remarkably different. Meanwhile, in the French Broad and New River

Valleys, certain homes, neighborhoods, and even whole communities owe their existence to the activism of previous generations. The waters of these rivers do not power dams, nor do they or the Colleton River in the Lowcountry always help create paper, cloth, dyes, and chemicals as planners and politicians of previous years hoped they would. Today, the mountain waters of the

9 Sam Parker, Interview with Rob Amberg, SOHP. 10 Anne Oakes, “Turtle Island Forced to Close,” Watauga Democrat, November 20, 2011; Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man (New York: Viking, 2002).

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French Broad and other rivers supply new industries like the region’s rapidly expanding number of breweries.11 Both the material and human histories of these regions’ landscapes are often invisible to today’s tourist. Few visitors to Hilton Head might imagine a time when no bridge existed to the island or when most of its residents were not wealthy whites.

Yet, across the South, many ruins of the region’s recent past remain visible for those that wish to see them. Similarly, although some of the sturdy, weathered barns that once held tobacco or other crops that became repurposed to build cabins for tourists, many others stood abandoned but unbowed for decades across the rural South. Historian Pete Daniel’s comments in his 1985 study of southern agriculture, for the most part, still ring true twenty-five years later. “The rural traveler sees constant reminders of the agricultural system that once characterized the South— vacant and decaying tenant houses, sagging barns, and empty mule lots,” he said and “these museum pieces stand juxtaposed with brick houses and mobile homes, bulk tobacco barns, irrigation equipment, tractors, and picking machines.” Both for those who left the countryside for the city and for those who remain, Daniel continued, Americans remained committed to preserving “the heritage of rural life.” As Daniel and other historians write, the obvious signs of decay, decline, and ruin in the South have long become an object of fascination that often spur observers to advocate for preservation and restoration. Even beyond the more obvious examples of Civil War battlefields, heritage tourism and ecotourism are important fixtures in the South’s memorial landscape.12

11 Tony Kiss, “Proof is in the Water for Breweries,” Asheville Citizen-Times, October 21, 2014. 12 Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), xv; For instance, Drew Swanson discusses the importance of Civil War sites and decrepit antebellum mansions and plantations as sites for heritage tourism in the South. Swanson, “A Rhetoric of Ruin: Imagining and Reimagining the Georgia Coast,” in Paul Sutter and Paul Pressly, eds., Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 175-208.

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The legacies of poverty and environmentalism remain both seen and unseen in communities examined here. A small plaque in one section of the New River State Park provides a brief explanation of the dam fight and its role in establishing public lands along the river. Local newspapers have only recently published a few brief, largely celebratory retrospectives on the

New River, French Broad, and BASF controversies. Certainly, these grassroots movements and the national attention they garnered should be remembered as environmental victories that showed the diversity and breadth of concern about the nation’s unique landscapes. However, these victories forced people to make difficult choices about what kind of community they and future generations should live in. For that reason, they deserve to be remembered by more than just self-congratulatory narratives. In an age of climate change and sea-level rise, many communities in the South and beyond face difficult choices ahead about how and where people can live. The testimonies of previous generations about the power of place and people’s desire to protect their ties to land, homes, and communities offer no crystal ball and no silver bullet. But it can provide a sense of common ground on which these difficult conversations can be had.

Lastly, these narratives speak to the limits of community planning. Whether as proposed by regional planners and industrialists like those who backed the TVA or BASF or as real estate developers like Charles Fraser or Hugh Morton envisioned a tourism economy in harmony with the natural world, decisions about land use and zoning tend to reify existing power dynamics.

After all, to envision a landscape is to envision a community. On both sides of the South’s modern environmental controversies, the grand visions that activists, developers, and politicians had for rural life, for eco-tourism, or the well-being of a particular place often became, contrary to their best intentions, an obstacle to the causes of economic, social, and environmental justice.

The determination or obsession to exact a specific, often high-minded vision on the refractory,

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haunted landscapes of the South often became a self-defeating ideology when carried out through existing power relationships. As theologian C.S. Lewis once wrote, “what we call Man’s power over Nature, turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”13 In the same way, the powers to plan and to exclude often went hand-in-hand in places like the Southern Mountains and Lowcountry. Love of place does not always translate to a love of the people that inhabit that place. Environmental groups and historic preservation organizations would do well to consider how their activism can enhance, rather than hinder, the values of social equity and inclusion.

13 C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, quoted in Drew Swanson, Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 8.

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LIST OF REFERENCES

Archival Collections Asheville, North Carolina: Special Collections, D.H. Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina at Asheville Housing Authority of the City of Asheville (HACA) Records Upper French Broad Defense Association Records WNC Tomorrow Position Papers Collection Asheville, NC: North Carolina Room, Pack Library, Buncombe County Public Library Save Downtown Asheville Collection Vertical Files Collection: ---Tennessee Valley Authority ---Upper French Broad Defense Association Beaufort, South Carolina: Beaufort District Collection, Beaufort County Library Vertical Files Collection: ---African American Land Issues ---BASF ---Beaufort-Jasper Comprehensive Health Care Center ---Penn Center Boone, NC: W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Special Collections at Carol G. Belk Library, Appalachian State University Appalachian Land Ownership Survey Records Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews National Committee for the New River Records Chapel Hill, North Carolina: North Carolina Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Jim Holshouser Papers Chapel Hill, NC: Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Jonathan Daniels Papers North Carolina Fund Records

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Penn Center of the Sea Islands Records Sam J. Ervin Papers The Southern Oral History Program Collection Columbia, South Carolina: South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Papers

South Carolina Council on Human Relations Records

South Carolina Environmental Coalition Records Columbia, SC: South Carolina Political Collections, Ernest Hollings Special Collections Library, University of South Carolina Lottie “Dolly” Hamby Papers

Robert McNair Papers

John Carl West Papers Durham, North Carolina: DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University Southern Rural Poverty Collection Raleigh, North Carolina: North Carolina Department of Archives and History Governor James Holshouser Papers

State Documents Collection (Online)

Microfilm Collections Southern Christian Leadership Conference Records Southern Regional Council Records

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Cegul, Brent. “Creative Competition: Georgia Power, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Creation of a Rural Consumer Economy.” Journal of American History 105: 1 (June 2018): 45-70.

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Kline, Patrick M., and Enrico Morretti. “Local Economic Development, Agglomeration Economies, and the Big Push: 100 Years of Evidence from the Tennessee Valley Authority.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 19293, (August 2013): 1-17. Manganiello, Christopher J. and Bruce E. Stewart. “Watershed Democracy: Rural Environmentalism and the Battle Against the TVA in Western North Carolina.” Environmental History 23: 4 (October 2018): 748-773. McKinney, Gordon. “The Fractured Land of the Sky: The Image of Western North Carolina During the 1986 Nuclear Waste Controversy.” North Carolina Historical Review 82: 3 (July 2005): 326-346.

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Dissertations and Theses Eklund, Christopher. “’Making the Mountain Pay:’ Hugh Morton’s Grandfather Mountain and the Creation of Wilderness.” M.A. Thesis. Appalachian State University, 2011.

Shannon, Margaret Anne. “From Tomato Fields to Tourists: Hilton Head Island and Beaufort County, South Carolina, 1950-1983.” M.A. Thesis. University of Tennessee, 1996.

Shepherd, James F. “The Effect of Turnaround Migration on the Rural Landscape: A Study of Grayson County, Virginia.” M.A. Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1986.

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Turman, Jinny A. “Appalachian Alter-Natives: The Back-to-the-Land Migration and Community Change in Appalachia, 1970-2000.” Ph.D. Dissertation. West Virginia University, 2013.

Woodard, Robert Seth. “The Appalachian Power Company Along the New River: The Defeat of the Blue Ridge Project in Historical Perspective.” M.A. Thesis. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2006.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

A native of Hillsborough, North Carolina, Madison Cates received his B.A. in History from Gardner-Webb University in 2013 and an M.A. in History from NC State University in

2015. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Florida under the direction of Dr.

William Link in May 2020.

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