Word: appalachian
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...mountainous miles from southwestern Virginia in a hook northwest into West Virginia,* is a thoroughly old-fashioned stream. The New is unimproved, except for traces of a small Congressional appropriation a half-century ago; like all unimproved streams it alternately races and moseys, brawls and dawdles. Fifteen years ago Appalachian Electric Power Co. decided to throw a dam across the New, five miles above the little town of Radford, Va. (pop. 6,898). The Federal Power Commission demanded that Appalachian accept a license to dam the stream for a power plant. Under the Federal Water Power...
...Appalachian Electric Power Co. resisted the demand in court on grounds that the New River was not navigable. (The historically accepted Supreme Court conception of navigability, while multi-shaded, defines a navigable river in law as one which is navigable in fact.) The New had not been used for water commerce since the '90's; a great part of it was as unnavigable as a river can be: rocky, swift, extremely shallow...
...case flickered feebly until mid-1934, when Appalachian began actual construction of its unlicensed dam. In August 1939 a 1,140-foot barrier of grey-white concrete stretched across the New, with nine big spillways near the middle. Thirtieth largest hydroelectric plant in the U. S., Claytor Dam backed up 206,000 acres of water into a lake reaching 21 miles upriver...
...Turnpike Commission, appointed by Democratic Governor George Earle, got $29,250,000 from PWA, and a $40,800,000 loan from RFC. Tough, driving, sixtyish Walter Adelbert Jones, commission chairman, set a construction deadline at July 1, 1940 (to get the PWA grant), sent "cats" and bulldozers racing over Appalachian slopes like Nazi tanks in the Ardennes, ordered concrete flushed over roadbeds that had been given scarcely the winter to settle. The road was completed in 21 months. There was no fanfare this week as the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened for business. President Roosevelt had been invited...
...Spring, Carson-Newman, University of North Carolina), Blanford Dougherty went back to Boone and with his brother, Dauphin Discoe, built a two-room cabin, there in 1900, they opened the Watauga Academy. Today, thanks to homespun Dr. Dougherty's political skill, his school has grown to be the Appalachian State Teachers College, one of the South's best, with nearly 1,000 students and a $2,500,000 plant. Dr. Dougherty, president of the college, is a power in the State. At 69, he has lost none of his sharpness, none of his homespun ruggedness. Bald and stoop...