Editor’s Note: This article is the first in a two-part series on the fight to stop the damming of New River.

We nearly lost our big river to the nation’s largest utility, the American Electric Power Company, which provides electricity to western Virginia and all or parts of four northern states.

Its wholly-owned subsidiary, The Appalachian Power Company, started the ball rolling in 1962, assembling a feasibility study on the idea of a two-dam facility in Virginia’s part of the New River. The upper one would be just south of Galax; the lower, near Independence. Each would house a generator and use the pump-storage method of power generation. In high-demand periods, water would flow from the larger reservoir, through the power plant, and into the smaller one. Electricity thus generated when demand was high would be sent northward. Using power from other APC plants, that water would be pumped back into the larger one when demand was low.

Officially, it was called “The Blue Ridge Project.” In reality, it meant the deliberate flooding of 42,000 acres in the New River Valley so these power companies could generate three units of electrical energy from every four they used to do so.

What they failed to consider was the nation’s reaction through several conservation groups, the media, and a bunch of irate residents whose ancestral homes and farmland would become lakebottom mud. Studies and experience also showed that just twenty years of accumulated silt would cut the plant’s “efficiency” in half, and shut it down completely in thirty more. Many area residents can recall the furor, but most of the intricate details happened in Washington, DC.

Thomas J. Schoenbaum, Weatherford Award winner, one of the battle’s heavily involved attorneys, and author of “The New River Controversy” (published by John F. Blair, Winston-Salem, 1979), yanks down the bureaucratic curtain so all can see. His detailed history of the valley’s ancient residents and struggles includes the Shawnees, Iroquois and Cherokee, as well Daniel Boone and many others whose descendants remained in the area.

Early on, the idea drew no serious opposition from local residents who seemed to accept the project as a necessary evil, or were unable to arouse enough support to stop it. Pollution concerns soon drew the attention of the Department of the Interior. Their studies recommended increasing the reservoirs’ surface area from an original estimate of 19,000 acres to nearly 28,000, more than half of the land soon to be flooded. Nearly a thousand homes, family cemeteries, churches, stores, post offices and workshops would vanish beneath the waters, displacing almost 3,000 residents. Agricultural Extension Service data predicted that agricultural and livestock losses would total more than $13 million a year, and nearly 104 miles of the New River’s forks and primary streams would be adversely affected. On the coin’s other side, the power companies boasted that more than 6 million people would visit the two proposed state parks each year; a very small benefit from forever separating thousands of residents from their homes and heritage.

The late Floyd Crouse, a Sparta attorney who was heavily involved in stopping the project, summed up the results quite simply (paraphrased for brevity).

“The people of West Virginia are asking that our land and homes be sacrificed to generate electricity for a community with an annual payroll of 160 million dollars.”

In conversations with Sparta’s Ed Adams and other area attorneys, Crouse posed a far more terrifying problem:

“We have no legal basis to stop this dam.”

His blunt remark was not a call to arms or an encouragement to break the law. It was a statement of fact, given that congress had assigned the responsibilities for the nation’s dams to the Federal Power Commission. Thus, the law could neither approve nor stop Blue Ridge.

The FPC was simply carrying out its duties. Ironically, engineers hired by the AEPC were routinely sent to participate in the commission’s decisions, picking up experience and no little influence, upon that organization. Further, William C. Levy, assigned to this case, was an AEPC administrative judge, not a judge of law. His job was to see that all the necessary details and procedures were followed in policy and the licensing of new dams’ construction.

Hearings were conducted on the Blue Ridge licensing proposal, garnering support from the Department of the Interior and the Corps of Engineers. Governor Bob Scott, assuming the project would pass, addressed the upper reservoir’s drawdown level and its impact on recreational use. In 1969, Judge William C. Levy issued a license to begin the project. Opponents in Virginia and North Carolina immediately protested, citing assorted calamities that would surely follow the project’s operation, not the least of which would be the creation of seasonal mud flats nearly half a mile long. Levy’s decision was overturned the following year in anticipation of more studies.

Growing opposition to the plan gathered momentum with the involvement of several national environmental organizations and their lawyers. Crouse and attorney Lorne Campbell of Grayson County created The Upper New River Valley Association to combat the power company’s enlarged project. Crouse, soon became aware of his life-threatening illness and asked attorney Sidney Gambill to be the group’s president. In 1970, Ed Adams, one of the project’s most outspoken opponents, was asked to represent Alleghany and Ashe County in their efforts to halt construction.

Levy’s hearings then addressed some of the environmentalists’ concerns about water quality issues and the enlarged reservoirs, which they felt were of greater concern than the project itself. The judge again ruled that the license should be issued, burying hopes that the project’s defeat was near. The newly-required environmental impact regulations delayed Levy’s ruling until 1971.

Bill Moyers, delivered his “Requiem for Mouth of Wilson” on National Education Television, describing the flooding of that small Virginia town, which would disappear under 160 feet of water. What had been a regional issue was suddenly getting national attention. Another environmental impact statement from the Federal Power Company stumbled into serious trouble and stalled the effort again. The project ran on and off for the next three years as big business battled irate attorneys and citizens from this area.

The Wild and Scenic River Act of 1968 caught Sidney Gambill’s attention as a different way to stop the project, and he moved toward getting that status for the New River. North Carolina’s Senator Sam Ervin and Congressman Wilmer Mizell quickly submitted two bills asking for a study to determine if the world’s second oldest river would fit under this umbrella. Unfortunately, it was too late for anything to be done before congress adjourned for the year.

January, 1974, brought 24 separate bills to North Carolina’s General Assembly, ushered forward by State Senator Hamilton Horton. Within months, a resolution was passed to study whether or not the New River’s South Fork qualified as one of North Carolina’s Wild and Scenic Rivers. Senators Jesse Helms and Sam Ervin immediately introduced a bill in the Senate to include the New as a potential addition to the Wild and Scenic Rivers system. If that designation was made, the Department of the Interior would have to make a study and support a law blocking the Power Company’s project.

In hearings before the Senate Interior Committee, Adams tangled with Joseph Dowd, the American Electric Power Company’s chief counsel, who criticized what he called “a last ditch effort to kill Blue Ridge.” When Dowd asked that the matter be decided by the FPC (which appeared to be in his corner), Senator Ervin suggested that the study move forward, rather than destroying the river with the power plant. Adams then asked for “favorable consideration,” stating that the area’s people just wanted to be left alone. A. Heaton Underhill, assistant director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, wanted the bill to be deferred while The Department of Interior studied the River’s North Fork, which wasn’t even a part of the issue.

Govenor Holshouser waded in the next month by meeting with Rogers Morton, the Secretary of the Interior, who joined the State’s effort to delay Blue Ridge. Morton underscored that position with a letter to Senator Helms. When the matter was brought before the Senate Interior Committee, an amendment was passed, but limited the study to two years.

Senator Sam voiced his concerns that the FPC was essentially ignorant of matters regarding whether or not a river should be given National Scenic River status. Before stepping aside, he read several letters and poems written by school children in the affected area. One declared “This is what I want, Senator Sam — stop the dam!”

Senator Helms was the next to speak, and pointedly challenged the power company’s logic in pursuing a project that would see power output soon drop by half, due to the buildup of silt dozens of feet deep in the reservoirs.

Virginia’s senators Harry Byrd and William Scott then attempted to argue that their state needed the electricity, and the project’s opponents were trying “to block a badly needed power project.” Their lopsided logic was answered by a 49 to 19 vote in favor of the scenic river study.

Though it was expected that a licensing delay would follow, it didn’t happen. Adams sent a telegram asking for a chance to present additional arguments before licensing, prompting several congressmen to do the same. Apparently fearing a diminution of their authority, the Federal Power Commission refused to delay the matter. Rather than hear the scenic river issues, they issued the license, but delayed its effective date for another seven months.

Once licensure was finally secured, the power company touted slippery benefits that included power being provided for east-central states (not just West Virginia), the area’s new parks would become one of the most popular recreation areas of the eastern United States and flood control could reduce property damage by 72 percent (based upon the last flood, which was 34 years earlier). The commission based its decision upon balancing the elimination of a free-flowing river against “benefits the project would create.”

Opponents to the new power project presented their case at hearings on the Scenic River Study Bill, winning the vote by 21 to 15. The entire Virginia congressional delegation, that state’s governor and attorney general lobbied against the bill, citing the benefits the Blue Ridge Project would have for Virginia, and that it could not be built without using North Carolina’s section of the river, an enormous part of which would wind up under water.

The loudest voice of all came from the AFL-CIO labor unions, which had been assured that the project would use their people. In response, a busload of protestors from the National Committee for the New River arrived to picket the union’s headquarters. George Meany soon came outside and said he knew nothing at all about the river issue. Adams laughed as he explained how “Ham Horton took him aside and explained that union efforts usually landed on the wrong side of Southern issues, and that includes this one!” Meany considered what had been explained and soon “released” those congressmen who typically supported union efforts, telling them “to vote their consciences.” The Rules Committee of the House quickly refused to grant a vote on the issue, saying “We can’t do anything about this.”

Wallace Carroll, the nationally-known publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal, took the initiative. Within two weeks, every significant newspaper in America ran editorials against The Blue Ridge Project. With such support staring them down, the Rules Committee reversed their position and allowed a vote to debate the matter on the House floor.

The outcome was 196 in favor, and 181 against.

Evelyn Holland, a New River Valley native, wrote a letter to the editor of Raleigh’s News and Observer, describing her grief over “the impending death of a beautiful friend,” and bemoaned the fact that “the river could die and much of Ashe, the fairest of our 100 counties, would be flooded by a lake which will be surrounded much of the time by a mosquito-infested, stinking mud flat, as ‘progress’ will finally come to Ashe County.”