High above Fontana Lake on the North Carolina side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park lies the Road to Nowhere: a winding 6.5-mile pass that dead ends at a 1200-foot tunnel accessible only by foot. If you walk it at night, the wind blows cold, voices carry, and the darkness seems to last forever. The park and nearby town Bryson City market the Road to Nowhere as a tourist attraction, and locals like Eligiah Thornton grew up hearing chilling tales of supernatural danger. There’s “a weird shadow over the place,” he says.
But what’s truly haunting is the tunnel’s unsettling history. In the 1940s, to facilitate the construction of Fontana Lake and Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) assured approximately 200 Appalachia families that they would construct a road to enable them to visit their ancestral cemeteries in exchange for relocating their homes. However, in 1969, the government halted construction due to concerns about potential acid runoff from exposed rocks.
Although the National Park Service eventually agreed to compensate Swain County with $52 million instead of completing the road in 2010, this financial settlement has not resolved the ongoing issue: providing these families assistance accessing the 26 cemeteries now situated miles away from the lakeshore, accessible only via steep and poorly maintained trails.
“The promise was not a financial settlement. The promise was to build the road,” says Karen Marcus, a psychologist in her 60s who has five generations of ancestors across multiple gravesites. “The promise will never be kept.”
A history buried underwater
The Road to Nowhere families were the last of 50,000 people across six Southern Appalachian states forced to relocate so the TVA could build 15 hydroelectric dams from 1933 to 1943. While the company claims this decade of construction “transform[ed] the poverty-stricken, often-flooded Valley into a modern, electrified, and developed slice of America,” the reality of life in the Fontana Basin was far from the stereotype of the isolated, uneducated, impoverished mountain dweller.
“This was an industrial area,” says Daniel S. Pierce, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Asheville.
As railroads began winding through the rugged terrain in the late 1880s, logging and mining companies followed closely behind, giving rise to thriving towns such as Proctor, Bushnell, and Judson—all of which were flooded and destroyed when the Fontana Dam, the largest east of the Mississippi River, was created in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack to power a nearby aluminum plant.
(These ancient mountains witnessed the birth of man and monster.)
While most families impacted saw their towns buried underwater, the homes of the 200 families on what’s now called the North Shore sat above the watermark. But their only access road to their family cemeteries, did not. Instead of moving these families’ loved ones, the TVA promised to build a new road so Decoration Days, an annual Appalachian tradition, which folklorist Alan Jabbour described as “an act of respect for the dead that reaffirms one’s bonds with those who have gone before,” could continue.
“You couldn’t have found a better people—mountain people—to be understand[ing of] the war effort and want to contribute,” says Leeunah Woods, whose mother, Helen Cable Vance, grew up there.
According to Lance Hardin, who studied the dam’s impact on these families, the TVA took advantage of this generosity of spirit, paying property owners an average of $38 per acre—less than most relocated families received.
As a result, land ownership among North Shore residents dropped by a quarter, and home ownership fell by nearly half. “A lot of the available, small farms were gone, and so a lot of them really struggled to find something nearby that could be a replacement to what they were losing,” says Hardin.
(Is building more dams the way to save rivers?)
Pierce says that’s a key reason why the cemeteries hold such profound importance for these families: “They’ve lost their homes, they’ve lost their businesses, they lost their schools—you know, all the markers of community. But here’s what’s left.”
Keeping tradition alive
As years passed and no road appeared, families would make their own way to their cemeteries for Decoration Days. In the 1960s, “us boys would go fishing, and the men would go to the cemeteries and clean them off,” says Henry Chambers, chairman of the North Shore Cemetery Association. “Just being able to come over here was special.”
In 1977, after over 650 people attended a reunion the year prior for the nation’s Bicentennial, Helen Vance and her kin created the North Shore Cemetery Association to advocate for the road to be finished and, in the meantime, get government help to access their cemeteries. Since 1984, park rangers have ferried families across Fontana Lake and maintained trails for these annual visits from April to October. Chambers estimates the yearly costs, from travel costs to repairing graves damaged by weather and wild animals, to be about $8,000.
(See pictures of death and burial rituals from different cultures.)
To attend a Decoration Day is to understand how connected these families are to their shared history and what they call the “homeplace.” They clean the tombstones and decorate the graves with colorful cloth flowers. After the group sings “Amazing Grace,” Marcus reads a self-penned reflection before leading a prayer. Then it’s time for a potluck, when the stories flow long and winding as the creeks that rush nearby.
Lillian Hyatt shared her scrapbook with articles profiling her great-grandmother Sarah Palestine “Tiney” Kirkland, a midwife who delivered 627 babies and designed many home chimneys. Frank March, an amateur historian from Tennessee, recalled the day 83-year-old Joe Cable, Sr. said that the sheet metal March found on his family’s old chimney was the fender of his brother’s bicycle. “He was so excited to be back there,” March says.
“The park wants everybody to believe the Smokies is wilderness. [But] it has never been wilderness,” Chambers says. Together and independently, he and March have mapped over 2700 sites—including homes, churches, schools, and mills—across the park’s 522,000 acres to prove their point.
As for the Road to Nowhere’s reputation, the North Shore families don’t put much store in it. “There’s no ghostly whatever,” says Woods. “It’s just an eerie feeling in that long of a tunnel to walk.”
With its cold concrete and graffitied stone, the Road to Nowhere is a dead place, not a place of the dead. The dead rest in the cemeteries that honor the generations of Appalachians who called this land their home.
“They need to come and see it,” says 94-year-old Carrie Laney when asked what people should know about the Decoration Days. “They’ll come back if they do.”
