AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
There's a mysterious tunnel tucked away in the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina. It has an intriguing name, the Road to Nowhere, but nowhere was never the plan. When the road was built, it was supposed to go somewhere. WUNC's Charlie Shelton-Ormond has this story.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Vocalizing).
CHARLIE SHELTON-ORMOND, BYLINE: On a sunny summer morning in North Carolina's Smoky Mountains, a collection of tourists, hikers and fly fishers brave an eerie pitch-black tunnel.
(SOUNDBITE OF WHISTLING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Vocalizing).
SHELTON-ORMOND: But this isn't a normal tunnel. As you walk through it, pavement suddenly turns into dirt, and the road abruptly disappears. Locals have a special name for this quarter-mile corridor, the Road to Nowhere.
MELISSA GIBSON: This is my first time.
DALLAM HART: Yeah.
SHELTON-ORMOND: As part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Road to Nowhere often attracts hikers passing through, people like Dallam Hart (ph) and Melissa Gibson (ph).
GIBSON: Always wanted to come out here and make some noise in this tunnel.
(Vocalizing).
SHELTON-ORMOND: The pair put the tunnel's acoustics to the test.
HART: (Vocalizing).
GIBSON: (Vocalizing).
SHELTON-ORMOND: The eeriness of this Appalachian oddity is undeniable, but why is the Road to Nowhere here, tucked inside the Smokies? To find out, I left the tunnel...
GIBSON: (Singing) So long. Farewell.
SHELTON-ORMOND: ...And went into the nearby town of Bryson City, where I met up with local historian Lance Holland.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOG BARKING)
LANCE HOLLAND: Back off.
SHELTON-ORMOND: Well, Holland and his dog.
HOLLAND: Morning.
SHELTON-ORMOND: Mr. Holland.
HOLLAND: Yes.
SHELTON-ORMOND: Sorry to let your dog out.
HOLLAND: Come here, Maybelline (ph).
SHELTON-ORMOND: Holland says the tunnel's origin starts with three letters, TVA.
HOLLAND: The Tennessee Valley Authority.
SHELTON-ORMOND: In the early 1940s, the TVA got to work building Fontana Dam in western North Carolina. This was during World War II, and the dam was being constructed to supply power for the war effort, specifically...
HOLLAND: Aluminum to make airplanes out of.
SHELTON-ORMOND: And with the dam came a big lake for the area, but there was a problem. The valley the lake would flood was home to more than a thousand families, people who'd lived in small mountain communities for generations. But Holland says most families were willing to relocate if it helped the war effort.
HOLLAND: People were patriotic back then. They were doing their patriotic duty.
SHELTON-ORMOND: But families weren't willing to part with something special that was impossible to move.
HOLLAND: The big kicker was the cemeteries.
SHELTON-ORMOND: The dam and lake project was going to cut off these communities' access to dozens of family cemeteries above the waterline.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DELIA WOODARD WATKINS: It was very hard for some people.
SHELTON-ORMOND: This is Delia Woodard Watkins. She was a teenager when the dam project was proposed. This is a recording from 2009.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WATKINS: Nobody objected because they were going to build the road, and then the people could go back.
SHELTON-ORMOND: Back to visit their loved ones buried in those cemeteries. The TVA proposed a deal. If locals relocate, the government would build a new road to the grave sites. So the park service got to work on construction. The route was set to be more than 30 miles long, but after only about seven miles, they hit a bump in the road, literally.
HOLLAND: They started going through Anakeesta rock.
SHELTON-ORMOND: Which was a problem because when you expose Anakeesta to air and rainwater...
HOLLAND: It produces an acid runoff. If that got in the creek, kills some fishes. And so the environmental movement pretty much got the road stopped.
SHELTON-ORMOND: With this, the park service halted construction in the early 1970s.
HOLLAND: And that's what created the Road to Nowhere controversy.
SHELTON-ORMOND: But a lack of pavement hasn't stopped people from visiting their ancestors. For 50 years, descendants have returned to the Smokies for a ceremony called Decoration Day, donning gravestones with plastic flowers.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOAT ENGINE RUNNING)
SHELTON-ORMOND: But their journey to these sacred sites isn't easy. Descendants have to travel by boat across a lake and then snake their way deeper into the Smokies.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SHELTON-ORMOND: But paying tribute to their ancestors is worth the trek, says 91-year-old James Calhoun, who's been coming to the cemeteries his whole life.
JAMES CALHOUN: Well, decoration was always special to me ever since I was a child. Old habits die hard, I guess.
SHELTON-ORMOND: And for as long as he can, Calhoun says he'll continue to make the trip.
For NPR News, I'm Charlie Shelton-Ormond in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RASCOE: To hear more about the Road to Nowhere, listen to WUNC's podcast The Broadside on the NPR app or wherever you find your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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