Things that could have been: A lake bigger than Smith Mountain Lake on the New River

History is simply a collection of decisions we’ve made over the years. We know the roads we took to get here. Oftentimes, though, it’s easy to forget the roads we didn’t take. This is the third part of a five-part series that looks at projects proposed in Virginia from the 1940s into the 1990s that were never built but which would have changed things if they had been. Today: the 1960s and 1970s:

Power companies had long looked to the New River as a potential source. Construction of Claytor Lake in Pulaski County began in 1937. In the 1960s, Appalachian Power — then the utility for much of Southwest Virginia — had even grander ambitions for the future of hydroelectric power. In 1960, Appalachian began work on what we know today as Smith Mountain Lake, which dammed up the Roanoke River. Three years later, in 1963, Appalachian received a federal permit to begin formal studies of a hydroelectric project of roughly equal size on the New River as it flowed through Grayson County. In 1965, with a favorable study in hand, the utility asked the federal government for permission to build what was called simply the Blue Ridge Project.

This would have been a “pumped storage” project with two lakes and a coal plant. The original proposal was for the biggest lake to be somewhat smaller than Smith Mountain Lake. That lake covers 20,600 acres of land; the original Blue Ridge proposal was for a main lake covering 16,600 acres and a secondary one of 2,850 acres. The dam at Smith Mountain is 235 feet high; the dam at the Blue Ridge project was to have been 210 feet.

By 1968, the Blue Ridge project had grown to 26,000 acres, bigger than Smith Mountain Lake, with a secondary lake of 12,390, about three times bigger than Claytor Lake. About half the flooded land would have been in Grayson County, with the rest in North Carolina — and that’s where the project started to run into the political problems that eventually killed it. That same year Congress passed, and President Lyndon Johnson signed into law, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act that was intended to protect some river from development. The New River wasn’t on that list, but you might be able to guess what’s coming.

A master’s thesis on file at Virginia Tech by Robert Seth Woodard Jr. says that initial opposition to the project was light. In time, though, it grew as the magnitude of the project became clearer. The lake would have flooded nearly 10% of the land in Grayson County. “The finished project would force the relocation or destruction of 893 homes, hundreds of family farms, forty-one summer cabins, ten industrial employers, twenty-three commercial facilities, five post offices, fifteen churches, twelve cemeteries, and an estimated 2,700 people,” Woodard wrote. “One-fourth of the state’s total burley tobacco croplands would be flooded, producing an annual loss of about 9,582,300 dollars. Entire towns, such as Virginia’s Mouth of Wilson, would be under hundreds of feet of water.”

The arguments for and against are ones that sound similar to today: On the plus side, it was argued that the lake would create a new, tourism-based economy in Grayson County. On the minus side, “the power generated was not even destined for the Appalachian region, North Carolina, or Virginia, but for export to large urban manufacturing areas in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States.” This seems similar to some of the complaints we hear today about solar facilities in Southside: that rural Virginia is being asked to sacrifice its countryside to generate power for data centers in Northern Virginia. 

In 1969, Appalachian was granted a federal permit to build the dam, although legal proceedings continued over some of the details. This went on long enough that a complication soon developed.

In 1970, Congress passed, and President Richard Nixon signed, the National Environmental Policy Act, which now required an environmental impact statement. That took time — time enough for something else to happen. In 1972, North Carolina elected its first Republican governor of the 20th century. James Holhouser Jr. was from Boone, North Carolina, not far from the land to be flooded. He thought this was a terrible idea and launched a vigorous campaign to stop the project. This put him directly at odds with Virginia’s Republican governor at the time, Mills Godwin, who was all for the dam. Over the next three years, Virginia and North Carolina butted heads, legally speaking, over the project. Unable to persuade the Federal Power Commission to revoke Appalachian’s license, the North Carolina governor tried another tack: He wanted to amend that law President Johnson had signed and get the New River declared a “wild and scenic” river, a designation that would block development.

Holhouser had a political advantage: He was head of President Gerald Ford’s reelection campaign in the South, and Ford faced a stiff primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. North Carolina was a key state in that battle. In short, Ford owed Holhouser. I’m skipping over a lot of details — the archaeological digs that turned up Native American artifacts, the national media attention, the bureaucratic delays — to get to this part: Reagan, seeing how fired up people in North Carolina were against the project, came out in favor of a scenic river designation. Then Ford did, too, and Ford had the power to make it happen. Congress still needed to act, and it did. “The two Virginia Senators, William Scott and Harry Byrd, Jr., tried desperately to organize last minute opposition to the bill,” Woodward writes. Nonetheless, both the House and Senate voted to approve the designation. Ford signed the bill into law on Sept. 11, 1976. 

That officially killed the Blue Ridge hydroelectric dam project. If people in Grayson County today think that was the right decision, they should figure out some way to honor Holhouser and Ford, both of whom have passed from this earthly realm but whose handiwork is evident in the preservation of the New River. In signing the bill, here’s what Ford had to say: “When a decision has to be made between energy production and environmental protection … you must ask what is the will of the people involved. … It is clear in this case [that] the people wanted the New River like it is.” 

The New River Conservancy still sells T-shirts that proclaim: “The New River . . . Like it is!”

Should Ford’s view govern our decisions today or not? That’s a question that still feels relevant.

Coming Thursday: A 1980s proposal for a project that would have changed how coal was transported to the port.

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