The names are legion and legend. But they are only names on an old map today. Not too long ago, as time is measured, they were bustling little towns and thriving settlements. There is little trace of them now. Most of them lie beneath the vast waters of Fontana Lake. Briars, poplars and sprouts have sprung up to make a tangled wilderness where others once stood in the Great Smokies.
Beneath Fontana’s waters are the sites of hundred of little farms and a score of towns, hamlets and settlements. There was Bushnell, Proctor, Noland, Forney, Wayside, Marcus, Judson, Ecola, Hubbard, Dorsey, Ritter, Medlin, Smokemont and Ravensford. Settlements of Kirkland Creek, Calhoun Branch, Bone Valley,, Walker Creek and Pilkey Creek are all gone – home now only to the bear, the deer, the fox and the owl.
These areas vanished in the great exodus of the 1940’s when the federal government flooded the land for a reservoir and turned the Smokies into a national park.
Along with the houses and the stores went the schools and the churches. Thousands of persons were uprooted and sent packing. Pioneers who had worked hard to bring education into the remote coves and valleys saw their work leveled with the destruction of the school houses at Fairview, Dorsey, Bushnell, Noland Creek, New Fairfax, Wayside, Sugar Fork, Walkers Creek and Proctor. Wiped out, too, were the churches at Proctor, Bushnell, Chambers Creek, Bone Valley and Cable Branch.
The boom town of Proctor, with a gigantic bandmill that turned out 100,000 board feet of timber daily, boasted a population of better than a thousand people, a church, three stores, a school, a clubhouse and a theater. Approximately thousand people lived on the headwaters of Hazel Creek as well and to the west, just across the ridge on Eagle Creek, there was another thousand. To the east, on Forney Creek, there was another thousand residents.
The Smoky Mountain Railroad, charted to carry passengers and freight, ran ten miles up Hazel Creek. The logging trains ran right to the top of the Smokies. The Southern Railway ran from Bryson City to Fontana, as did State Highway 288. Both were abandoned and covered over by the waters of Fontana.
Bushnell, now under water, was known far and wide. It boasted a sizeable population as a trading center and railroad freight center. It had three stores and a boarding house. The town of Judson, also under water now, was at the north side of a Southern Railroad tunnel.
Hundreds of folks ply the waters of Fontana Lake in boats every week and never know they are cruising over lost town and vanished settlements and farms. But the natives know….