Fellow users of the Turkey Bay Off Highway Vehicle Area in Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, there are some people of whom we need to be mindful, as we ride along those ridges and make our runs down through those hollows. The land we use was theirs for generation after generation. Some of the families had been there for as many as seven generations. The crumbling remnants of the foundations of their homes and the small family cemeteries that we often encounter along the trails lie in silent testimony to the existence of the families upon whose land we tread. These people were "The People Between the Rivers."

I have seen information to the effect that as many as 900 families were evicted from their ancestral lands, so that LBL could be created on the land that had been deeded to their ancestors to reward them for their service in the Revolutionary War.

The land that we use for recreation in Turkey Bay OHV and in the other parts of LBL was once made up of farms and homeplaces, where the good people who inhabited the land raised their families and buried their dead for many generations.

The typical user of LBL most likely gives no thought at all to the people whose land was taken. They may wonder why there are old foundations and why there are cemeteries on public land, but they are not curious enough to try to find out why.

My friends, when I learned about The People Between the Rivers, I didn't know what to do. I wanted to continue to enjoy my off roading at Turkey Bay, but I felt guilty for "trespassing" on someone's land. I was told by one of the descendants of the People Between the Rivers that I should go on and use the land, since there was no hope that the land would ever be returned and my refraining from using it would make no difference.

So, what would the People Between the Rivers want us to do? They would want us to respect the land and do what we can to preserve it. They would want us to remember them as the honest, hard-working, law-abiding citizens that they were, and not as the backward, illiterate moonshiners that TVA portrayed them to be in order to gain the public's support for evicting them. They would want us to help them maintain their rights to access their family cemeteries and to do what we can to assure that LBL remains non-commercial, which was what was promised as justification for evicting them from their lands. Finally, I don't think it would be asking too much, and I know that the People Between the Rivers would appreciate it, if you would simply take the time to read their story in the article to which the link I post below will take you.

We should all remember that it is the US Forest Service that administers LBL now, but it was TVA who treated the People Between the Rivers so unfairly. The Forest Service did not take over LBL until 1999, but the people lost their final appeal, and the last of them moved away in 1969.

Please, click on the link below, and read the article by David Nickell about how the People Between the Rivers were driven off their land by TVA.

Thank you.

Tom

http://home.earthlink.net/~tsjay49/david_nickell.html