A decade ago, I walked the shoreline of Old Kuttawa in western Kentucky on a clear December afternoon, the time of year when Lake Barkley’s water level is at its lowest. Winter pool, they call it, a controlled lowering of this Cumberland River reservoir that straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee line. The draw-down at the massive concrete dam a few miles downstream reduces the likelihood of flooding from winter and spring rains.
Each year when the water goes down, signs of the past reveal themselves. Beaches broaden, banks grow taller, and favorite waterskiing bays become shallow and riskier to navigate as sandbars and other obstructions appear. Like the towboat captains who navigate the lake year-round, seasoned boaters know to stay within the confines of the marked, twisting channel to keep from running aground.
The near-solstitial sun offered short daylight hours and little warmth, and as it approached the horizon, its beam skirted across the water then dropped behind the low hills that ring the lake. The gloaming tinted layers of sky, earth and water from orange to pink, then deep magenta as egrets and herons found their spots for the night. Along the exposed shore and in the day’s last light, I witnessed the outlines of house foundations, fragments of old roads, scattered bricks, even railroad spikes near where the train station once sat. The view haunted me. It still does. The drowned towns and the many lost places felt close, their histories not so distant.
This landscape underwent monumental changes when Kentucky and Barkley dams were built a half-century before, when old river towns were demolished prior to the impoundments, and the area now known as Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area (LBL) was developed. I grew up in western Kentucky, and I’ve always loved the lakes and LBL. I knew the history, but I had no familial connection to the sites. Until that December day when I witnessed traces of what had existed in Kuttawa, I hadn’t considered the profound personal sacrifices of the people who gave up homeplaces, communities and livelihoods to make way for these projects.
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The western tips of Kentucky and Tennessee are places of rivers. Big rivers. The region is bounded by the Mississippi, the Ohio and the Cumberland rivers, then sliced again for good measure by the Tennessee. In the mid-20th century, the area became a place of lakes—big lakes—when the topography was forever altered by a succession of major federal water and land projects: Kentucky Dam, Barkley Dam and LBL. Today, this part of Kentucky is called the Western Waterland.
Before the lakes, a narrow strip of land situated between the Tennessee and the Cumberland was known as Between the Rivers. Small towns and family farms were located there. Many of the inhabitants were descendants of settlers who had arrived in the early 1800s, after the region had become part of the United States during the westward push for new territory. The original 1818 government buyout for this part of Kentucky was negotiated via treaties with the Chickasaw Indians who also called the place home.
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Built between 1938-44, Kentucky Dam was part of the New Deal’s plan for rural electrification and flood control through the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The Tennessee River was dammed near the small Kentucky town of Gilbertsville. The resulting reservoir, Kentucky Lake, is still the largest lake in surface area in the eastern United States and the largest body of water between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. Stretching 184 miles and covering 160,309 acres, the lake opened the Tennessee Valley to year-round navigation and connected the region to the Inland Waterway System.
The dam and reservoir displaced thousands of residents and submerged several towns, but a significant diaspora from the region didn’t occur. Most people relocated to nearby communities. Some moved from the banks of the Tennessee to homes on the Cumberland to remain river people, while others moved to Between the Rivers. Several families were displaced multiple times by the public projects that followed.
In fact, less than 20 years later and a mere 2 miles away from Kentucky Dam, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed Barkley Dam on the Cumberland River. Again, an enormous reservoir filled to create Lake Barkley, named for Kentucky native and former U.S. Vice President Alben Barkley, the original Veep. Eddyville and Kuttawa were relocated to nearby higher ground and rebuilt as “new” towns; the “old” towns were then demolished in preparation for the higher water levels. A few original houses remain at both sites, as well as the Kentucky State Penitentiary perched close to a limestone bluff in Old Eddyville.
Even before Barkley Dam was completed and the water began to rise, another big project was approved. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy announced a plan to create a national recreation area to be known as Land Between the Lakes. The plan would return the Between the Rivers area to a wild, natural state to attract visitors for camping, hunting, hiking and other recreational activities. To accomplish this, every house, farm, business, school and church had to be acquired by TVA through the government’s power of eminent domain. Each parcel would be cleared, every structure demolished, and most signs of human settlement erased.
The federal government already owned a 57,000-acre portion of the peninsula, a tract known as the Kentucky Woodlands National Wildlife Refuge, but the LBL project required more land. Residents protested and fought to keep their property, including a lawsuit that made it through the federal courts. But in the end, the government took it all—over 170,000 acres. More than 800 families were forced out.
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There’s no question that electrification of this rural part of the country sparked dramatic economic growth and provided thousands of good-paying jobs at new chemical and industrial plants. There’s no doubt the region needed reliable river navigation and flood control, especially after the devastation of the catastrophic 1937 flood and other frequent but significant flooding. The lakes drove a wave of development that attracted tourists to the recreational opportunities of boating, fishing and swimming, and paved the way for increased tax revenues that lifted towns, counties and school districts out of poverty. But there was a price to be paid for progress, and here, some folks paid dearly.
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Scene from the 1955 Eddyville flood, which occurred prior to the town’s relocation.
When Kentucky Lake filled in the 1940s, the former bustling town of Birmingham disappeared beneath its surface. To make way for Lake Barkley, Eddyville and Kuttawa were demolished in the 1960s. Farmhouses along both rivers were knocked down, and fertile bottomlands submerged. By 1970, nearly every Between the Rivers resident had been moved out, and the communities of Golden Pond, Kentucky, and Model and Tharpe, Tennessee, had been razed. In isolation, each project brought significant change, but collectively, the environmental and social impact was enormous.
Displacement occurs for a variety of reasons, usually from external forces: economic, environmental, political, sometimes personal. My parents decided to leave Appalachia in the 1950s for both economic and personal reasons. After moving to the flatland boomtown of Paducah, they continued to think of the mountains as home, as if they belonged there, and no other place could ever substitute. They never moved back to eastern Kentucky, but I witnessed my parents’ longing for their own lost places.
Regardless of the reason for outmigration or the distance involved, displaced people share a yearning for home that’s almost palpable in conversation and the written word. As their stories and memories are handed down, the collective grief and longing become multigenerational. Now, with the passage of more than a half-century, many of those who once lived in these Kentucky and Tennessee communities have passed. Their sacrifice in the public interest should not be forgotten.
Retired Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Bill Cunningham began writing his autobiography as a way of sharing memories with his children and grandchildren. Although he’s published several other books about western Kentucky history, Cunningham never intended to publish the memoir. With encouragement from fans of his other books, he recently released I Was Born When I Was Very Young, a recounting of his childhood in Old Eddyville. As a lifelong resident of Lyon County, he acknowledges both the benefits and the heartbreak that came with the relocations.
“We are a haunted people. Like a long-ago first love who broke our heart and yet still lies tender upon the mind, we cannot shake ourselves of Old Eddyville,” Cunningham said. “The past is the past. But those old ghosts will not go away.”
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Carolyne Sue Bonds grew up in Eddyville and Between the Rivers. She still works to make sure the U.S. Forest Service, the TVA’s successor in managing LBL, keeps the promises made to former residents, including the commitment to never allow commercial development of LBL and to sufficiently maintain roads that lead to family cemeteries. She also moderates a Facebook group where former residents and friends share history, genealogy and photographs.
“Over 250 cemeteries, one church, numerous historical sites, and the remnants of homes and communities still exist there. In many ways, like the ghost towns of the Old West, to the outsider it would appear dead,” Bonds said. “But to those of us who still love the area and its rich history, it is still green and thriving in our hearts and memories.”
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Kentucky has few natural lakes, but many TVA and Corps of Engineers reservoirs dot the landscape. Communities in every part of the state have their stories of drowned towns and lost places, including Lake Cumberland, Dale Hollow, Rough River, Green River, Nolin, and Taylorsville lakes. In the TVA region, major reservoirs include Pickwick, Lanier, Old Hickory, Percy Priest, Norris and Fontana. The history of these projects and our march toward progress are inextricably linked to the sacrifices of those who can never go home again.
During the time I worked on the stories in Drowned Town, I also visited the former site of St. Thomas, Nevada, a history-rich town that was flooded in the 1930s when Hoover Dam was built on the Colorado River. After Lake Mead filled, the town remained underwater for decades, out of sight and fading from memory like the Kentucky and Tennessee towns I had researched.
Lake Mead remains the largest reservoir in the U.S., but in recent years, its depth has declined steadily. Its lowest level ever was reported in June 2021. Scientists say the drop is from increased demand for water, evaporation from warming temperatures, and a prolonged drought in the Southwest. As the lake’s water level has fallen, the town of St. Thomas has reappeared, like a memory that seems irretrievably lost but somehow resurfaces. Ruins of houses and streets and businesses are visible in a section of dry lakebed, perhaps a reminder that those old ghosts don’t go away after all.
Jayne Moore Waldrop is the author of Drowned Town, a linked story collection set in western Kentucky, published by Fireside Industries, an imprint of University Press of Kentucky. Her other books are Pandemic Lent: A Season in Poetry and Retracing My Steps (Finishing Line Press).