Imagine trudging through or around thick tangles of underbrush, over mountains and along seemingly endless ridges.

Everything you own is on your back or in both hands. Where you’ve been is long gone. Where you’re going is uncertain. Home is wherever you choose to spend the night, and each night is different. Seasons have simple names like cold, hot, wet or dry. You know nothing of minutes and hours, weeks, months, years, decades or centuries; light and dark are enough. The brightness around you is fading. It’s time to find a place to stay while daylight lingers. Enemies and fierce animals may be watching or waiting. Even so, thirst draws you toward the sound of rushing water.

Others like this imagined one lived here first, as far back as 14,000 B.C., but they arrived in groups, not alone. They later became known as the Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee and Tuscarora, who made the New River Valley their home long before Daniel Boone’s time.

This valley home was often a battlefield for the warring tribes. But enormous changes would happen in the decades ahead. Families with ancestral roots to Europe claimed, bought and sold the land, making it their heritage for generations yet unborn.

In 1968, a huge corporation’s business venture threatened to submerge 42,000 acres of pastures, houses, barns, churches, businesses and farms by damming the world’s second oldest river. This ancestral treasure was to be sacrificed for electricity sold at a loss. The New York firm was the American Electric Power Company. The Blue Ridge Project was its goal.

In 1968, political and corporate arrogance collided with the determination of people who refused to be bullied. Their 12-year battle wasn’t waged in Alleghany, Ashe, and the New River Valley, but in our nation’s capitol and courts. Those taking part in the fray included Sparta attorney Ed Adams, President Gerald Ford, Senator Sam Ervin, Congressman Wilmer Mizell, Governor James Holshouser, Rufus Edmisten, Steve Neal, Wallace Carroll and scores of others who labored behind the scenes.

Thomas Schoenbaum, attorney and Visiting Professor of Law at George Washington University, complied reports, legal briefs, and testimony from that period and authored “The New River Controversy,” (published by John F. Blair, Winston-Salem) which details the struggle’s ebb and flow. Examples of the battle’s lighter side include remarks made by Senator Ervin and Hamilton Horton of Winston-Salem:

The AEPC’s General Counsel, Joseph Dowd, threatened to sue the United States of America for $500 million dollars if Congress refused to allow them to have their way.

“If Julius Caesar had heard this (Mr. Dowd’s) testimony,” Senator Ervin began, “he would never have said that ‘All Gaul is divided into three parts.’ He would have said ‘All gall is concentrated in this particular witness.’ “

When Hamilton Horton announced his hope that the power company’s chief lobbyist “would see a great light like Paul had seen on the road to Damascus and cease his lobbying efforts,” Senator Ervin reminded him that the light Paul saw was from the Lord, “and not from the power company’s subsidiary, the Appalachian Power Company.”

Details of this convoluted and lengthy struggle will appear in this column in the next two issues of The Alleghany News.