ties and relics. Pleaz Mosley got
together in a corner of his farm a lot of Indian relics, petrified
oddities, and a few rare varmints, a five-legged calf and a one-eyed
'possum, and housed them in a shack down by the new road that cut
through his bottom land and drew sightseers day after day.

"But Pleaz's Zooseum can't hold a candle to the curiosities down in the
Holston and Tennessee River country," his neighbors say. "Looks like
they just naturally turned loose the briny deep in that country. When
they started in on the job old Grandpap up and spoke his mind. Said he,
'Sich carryings on is destructuous of the Master's handiwork and I don't
countenance it.' He'd set there by his log fire in his house all his
endurin' life. The fire had never went out on that hearth since he was
borned and he told the goverment he didn't aim the embers should die
down whilst he lived. Well, sir, to pacify the old man they up and moved
him, house, log fire and all, up higher in the mountains and him
a-settin' right there by the fire all the time. Now he can look down to
them mighty waters and them public works with his door open and never
jolt his chair away from the hearth."

If Daniel Boone could retrace his steps along the Holston and Tennessee
Rivers perhaps he would gape, too flabbergasted to utter a word. Or he
might ask in dismay, "What's become of my elbow room?" The country he
once roamed with gun and dog has been transformed into a mighty flooded
area to make way for the world's largest project of its kind. At first
much was said back and forth about the Tennessee Valley Authority. Some
viewed it with a dubious eye, called it names--a New Deal experiment, a
merchant of electricity, a threat to private ownership of business, or
again merely a new series of letters in alphabetical government, the
TVA. To isolated mountain folk who came to look as time went on, it was
the plum biggest public works they had ever set eyes on.

Eight years after it was begun--by the middle of 1941--with war
threatening the civilized world, the TVA has become a defense arm.

Uncle Sam at once cast his discerning eye down Tennessee way and his
National Defense Advisory Committee designated the TVA as one of its
defense industries, and an appropriation of $79,800,000 was granted the
Authority, and a call from the defense power program went out for TVA
"to add to its system of ten multi-purpose dams the Cherokee Power Dam
on the Holston River, to bu