Speaking of Bierce and Geography.
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#OTD (December 7) in 1970, groundbreaking began for B. Everett Jordan Lake. I was a kid but aware that something was up. Through the fall and early winter months of 1968 and into January of 1969 (I was 11 years old) my parents, me in tow, traveled from #DeepChatham to Raleigh several times a week to visit with my dying Grampa at Rex Hospital. I guess the road we took was a version of Highway 64 which still runs east-west through the heart of the Piedmont.
As we made that drive I eavesdropped on my parents. Knowing that “Little ‘pitchers’ have big ears’ (pitcher=picture in the dialect) deployed a clever tactic - to avoid the inevitable embarrassment that a curious and often boisterous child - like me - might repeat the names of the subjects of their church, family, and community conversations they used the name ‘Jacob Marshall’ in the place of any and all locals they mentioned. — ‘Jacob Marshall’ was drinking again and wrecked his tractor, ‘Jacob Marshall’ and his wife are on the outs again, you just KNOW that ‘Jacob Marshall’ is gonna get fired down at the planer this time for sure…and so on. I have to admit that I thought that ‘Mr. Marshall’ was downright remarkable and badly desired to at least someday get a glimpse of this scoundrel. But I never did and it only dawned on me much later in life the true function of this mythological figure.
Sometimes though Momma and Deddy were quiet and the radio played a basketball game or the news brought Vietnam or Nixon or the Cold War to my mind — Faraway Places With Strange Sounding Names — as Mark Twain wrote, “God created war so that Americans would learn geography.” I clearly remember the distinctive voice of Paul Harvey and “the rest of the story.” Even then I knew his points were not shared in my family but in those days voices on the Right weren’t loony so to listen could be good for thought.
I clearly remember staring out the car window at the kudzu-covered countryside and pondering the adult topic of the flooding to come and the creation of the mysterious lake. I had gathered that a good deal of the land through which we were traveling on those Raleigh-bound trips would soon be underwater. In those days kudzu worried me a good deal - spying the plant’s relentlessness in consuming the barns and even homes along that road it was hard to imagine a future for humanity that wasn’t lived beneath a canopy of viney, clingy, aromatic house-eating leaves.
Thomas Wolfe supposedly wrote that winter came along every year to beat back the kudzu and save The South from being hopelessly buried. I understand now that the kudzu along that road, soon to be the bottom of Jordan Lake, was indeed winning because the abandonment and displacement of people had begun. No fighting the vine - or the Army Corps of Engineers for that matter - The Flood was coming.
Indeed, the inundation had a purpose — the goal was to control the rivers and streams in The Cape Fear Basin. Today, recreation is a major offshoot of the project (the lake was full by ‘82). The vast majority of The Jordan lies in Chatham County. Some home places were fairly well emptied out first to be sure and graveyards were excavated (at the expense of the descendants) - kudzu didn’t take everything. They say that archaeologists dug into sites soon to be submerged. The Flooders, I have read, were not much help as generations-old family farms and communities were lost and anger and resentment still exists. In the end, 11 year old apocalyptic forebodings as we ran the the Tar Heel night were not so far off.
Archaeology Work at Future Jordan Lake
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