Tonight I drove down to the Morganton Cemetery in Loudon County. The cemetery, bearing the remains of three sets of great grandparents, is the only tangible remnant that's left of a once-thriving river port on the banks of the Little Tennessee River. Today, the town of Morganton, along with the capitol towns of the Overhill Cherokee nation, hundreds of family farms and what was arguably one of the finest free-flowing trout streams in the Eastern United States, has been completely inundated by the Tellico Lake Reservoir.The town of Morganton was situated at the mouth of Baker's Creek on the east bank of the river. During its heydey, it was a bustling port that supplied flatboat traffic trading up and down the Tennessee River basin and beyond. My family moved into the area in the 1840's.
At the turn of the century, my great-grandfather, John Allen Anderson, was the town doctor; my second great grandfather, Reverend David M. Kerr, was a prominent local minister.
When I was young, my grandfather, Oren Kerr Anderson, used to entertain me with tales of his adventures growing up in Morganton, fishing and playing along the banks of the river. He said the sturgeon in the river were legendary, and that it was not infrequent for flatboat fishermen to land specimens weighing well over 100 pounds. He told me the men would hook the fish initially and then rig the lines to teams of mules on the boats to haul them in.
He remembered there was a spring that flowed from under the cemetery hill in town, and that the "colored folks" all refused to drink from it. My great-grandfather owned the first automobile in Morganton, and I have a photograph of my granddad sitting behind the wheel, surrounded by local girls and holding a cigar, looking all of maybe 15.
Like my grandfather before me, many of my fondest memories of childhood are also associated with that river. It was there that I learned to fly fish, often wading into the wild, dark waters before dawn with my father; warming myself in the early morning sun as the first hatch came off and the trout began to rise. There I learned the 10-2 method of the cast; how to mend my line upstream and ultimately how to effect a convincing drift with a caddis fly nymph. Some days we would catch 30 or 40 good-sized fish before 10 am; always with a wary eye upstream toward the imminent possibility that the waters would rise suddenly when the turbines in Chilhowee Dam began generating.
It was also here, along the banks of this river, that I found several beautiful arrowheads, and my father would relate to me the long and ultimately tragic history of the Overhill Cherokee; their ancient capitol of Chota located just adjacent to where we fished.
And yes, the sturgeon were still there, sometimes visible as huge and ominous looking shadows sweeping across the river bottom just ahead of our approach.
The impoundment of Tellico Lake is one of the most egregious examples of greed and political impropriety in recent East Tennessee history. Others more eloquent than myself have aptly chronicled the tragic destruction of the Little Tennessee River, and the story bears remembering.
I was 13 when the fight to save the river was finally defeated through underhanded political maneuvering by a couple of local politicians, and its loss was as deeply affecting to me as the death of a close relative.
Our family had roots there, and now nothing remains but endless lakefront developments, the cemetery and the still, deep waters of the lake.
