Title: Drowned towns: What traces of 'ghost' cities lie beneath Alabama's man-made lakes? - al.com
Headings: Drowned towns: What traces of 'ghost' cities lie beneath Alabama's man-made lakes?
Drowned towns: What traces of 'ghost' cities lie beneath Alabama's man-made lakes?
Relocating people, roads, towns, cemeteries
TVA's relocation program
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Content: Relocating people, roads, towns, cemeteries
To create the dozens of lakes in Alabama, made by damming the Alabama and Tennessee rivers and tributaries, thousands of people - living and dead - were relocated. Many dams were built as power sources by TVA or Alabama Power Co., companies that had the responsibility of moving homeowners to land outside the flood zones. Alabama Power was founded in 1906 and quickly began building on the Tallapoosa, Coosa and Black Warrior rivers. The Tennessee Valley Authority was formed in 1933 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, designed to bring jobs and posterity to rural areas of the South, beginning with lighting homes and businesses with electricity. TVA's relocation program
In his 1943 book about the Tennessee Valley Authority, C. Herman Pritchett observed, "Nowhere did the Authority's program have more direct and disturbing effects than upon the hundreds of families who had to abandon their homes and farms to the waters of a TVA reservoir," according to the National Archives in Atlanta. Because of that, TVA workers were thoroughly trained and were particularly sensitive to a family's wishes, TVA historian Pat Ezzell said. "Basically TVA had a very strong family relocation program," she said. " They would go out and they would determine what the pool level was going to be and which folks were going to be impacted by the reservoir. They were offered fair market value for their homes and land." However, many people did not own the land. "