Documenting history

There's a wonderful project running in the Asheville Citizen-Times on the North Shore Road to Nowhere. That's the area along the north shore of the Little Tennessee River that was flooded by the TVA's Fontana Dam in the 1940s.

The evacuated residents were promised that a road would be built to give them access to their historical land and the cemeteries there. After half a century, the consensus is the road would cost too much and cause too much environmental damage to the southern part of the Great Smokey Mountain National Park. The people whose families were displaced demand the road, however.

The newspaper's printed display of these stories, historical photos, maps and timeline is gorgeous, but much more is online, including videos and photo galleries. Located on the day 2 printed map, the site of Horace Kephart's cabin on Hazel Creek, where he lived while writing Our Southern Highlanders. In the story on Kephart, a link to Western Carolina's digital image collection of Kephart photos, and more on the AC-T page.