"It's just so doggone big you can't see the head of it. It's a whole herd of 'em, a whole herd of congressmen and things like that appropriated the money for this." --Roy Keaton, ordered off his Buffalo River-adjacent land by the National Park Service in the 1970s.
Brooks Blevins' maternal grandfather did not fish for trout. His mother died when he was 8 years old and his father headed out west, trying to survive the Great Depression. Blevins' grandfather landed with his own grandparents, Elijah and Arminda Trivitt, known as Lige and Armindy, and was looked after by an older cousin named Sarah.
Lige and Armindy farmed land along the North Fork River that had been in the family since before the Civil War. Sarah recalled that Lige was 83 years old when "authorities" carried Lige and Armindy off their land.
According to his tombstone, Lige was born Oct. 14, 1858, so the year of the Trivetts' removal would have been 1941 or 1942. Blevins is not sure if those "authorities" were federal marshals, officers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, or from the local sheriff's department, but the occasion was the inundation to come on completion of the Norfork Dam.
The Army Corps of Engineers got into the business of domestic dam building thanks to the Flood Control Act of 1938.
As Neil Compton describes it in "Battle for the Buffalo," that act gave the Corps "authority to build high dams on virtually every remaining free-flowing stream of any consequence in the United States."
Begun in 1941 and completed in 1944, Norfork Dam was an early project in the flood-control plan for the White River drainage basin.
As I noted last week, dam enthusiasts often justified their projects by the need for flood control, only to expand their missions to include navigation, hydroelectric power, and recreation. Compton points out that holding water behind a dam is perfectly contrary to the dam's flood control function.
In the mountains, the creation of a dam also meant that "any good alluvial bottom farmland above the dam would be in jeopardy in the event of any rain of consequence."
"In the Ozarks," he writes, "the premium farmland consisted of such bottom land, the steep slopes and hilltops roundabout being generally poor and rocky. In the more stable multipurpose reservoirs with conservation and power pools, this bottom land loss was continuous and total, a permanent flood offered up to the catechism of flood control, hydropower, and recreation."
Blevins calls Congressman Clyde T. Ellis "the ramrod behind the Army Corps' dams in the White River basin." As the great champion of Norfork Dam, he pointed out the urgent need for hydroelectric power to support manufacturing related to World War II, and declared "in my district [Arkansas' 3rd] there is not a single person opposed to these projects that I know of."
There are no photos of Lige and Armindy as they were carried away. Blevins notes that their resistance, and that of any of the hundreds of others displaced, might not have been of interest to the Baxter Bulletin given that its editor Tom Shiras supported the creation of Norfork Lake. (His grandson Tom Dearmore would later join the fight against the Corps' plan to dam the Buffalo River.)
At normal depth, Norfork Lake covers 22,000 acres (about 34 square miles). Twenty-six cemeteries were moved to make way for it.
The cold waters discharged by the dam from the bottom of the lake rendered miles of the North Fork River uninhabitable to native fish. The same thing happened after the completion of Bull Shoals dam in 1951, so the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opened the Norfork National Fish Hatchery in August 1957.
One of three National Fish Hatcheries in Arkansas, the Norfork hatchery receives fertilized eggs of rainbow, cutthroat, and brown trout, raises them to nine inches, and releases over two million of these non-native specimens per year.
Blevins speculates that to his grandfather, the trout became the symbol of "the federal government's appropriation of the family farm" and "a reminder of citizen powerlessness in the face of eminent domain."
In "Against the Current," a chapter in his 2022 collection "Up South in the Ozarks," Blevins begins with the loss of the family farm to "progress" on the North Fork and moves on to an account of the "fight to save the Buffalo" that is more nuanced that Neil Compton's classic firsthand account.
The story of the Buffalo River fight is about a struggle between the Corps of Engineers, its progress-minded allies (notably the Buffalo River Improvement Association, based in Marshall), and the citizen-resisters led by Compton and the Ozark Society and their allies in government and the press (notably the Pine Bluff Commercial), whose victory led to the establishment of the Buffalo National River, managed by the National Park Service.
Blevins' telling brings in a third previously neglected element: landowners. Many, like Roy Keaton above, found the National Park Service to be as intrusive and dismissive of their property rights as the Corps of Engineers might have been.
Blevins' conclusions about the effects of expert-led, top-down planning in the rural world echo the wisdom of Jane Jacobs' observations about the same in urban environments. Educated people who are (rightly) alarmed by the role of right-wing, anti-government nuttiness in our current politics would do well to read "Against the Current" and consider the quite legitimate grievances from which some of that nuttiness emerged.
Likewise, if you crave roots, crave a sense of place, but feel alienated or detect sterility behind our proclamations of "Authentic Arkansas," I cannot recommend "Against the Current" more.
I'll leave you with Blevins, on the Ozarks:
"Our whole social construct ... revolves around defiance of whatever it is that homogenizes and sucks the singularity out of people and places, whatever it is that made damming the North Fork seem like a swell idea, whatever it is that puts tract housing on old dairy farms and a polo field in a Goshen pasture, whatever it is that assures the wealthy and powerful and the experts that they have the power and the duty to make life-altering decisions for the rest of us in the process of their planning.
"Vance Randolph, Otto Ernest Rayburn, Charles Morrow Wilson, May Kennedy McCord, Donald Harington ... they all found in the hills and hollers a people who were not going gently into that homogenizing, modern world."