It’s hard to believe now, but in the 1950s, economists predicted that the average American work week would fall from 40-50 hours a week to just over 30 in the year 2000—and likely decrease even further as the economy became more efficient. 

While these estimates seem laughable today, the thought that Americans would have copious amounts of free time was seen as a problem so large and looming that Congress created a task force in 1958 to figure out what the American public would do with this promise of almost endless spare time. The Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, led by Laurence Rockefeller, designed a plan to fill Americans’ free time with outdoor recreation—access to nature and a place to swim, boat, hike and camp would keep alive the wholesome feeling of the frontier that had propelled our nation to greatness in centuries past.

President John F. Kennedy and the Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall ran with the idea of creating National Recreation Areas all over the country. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) had already identified an area in the Tennessee Valley watershed that needed improvement and provided the boldest and grandest of all of the plans for that area. TVA’s Congressional Charter enabled the organization to acquire land quickly and easily with eminent domain powers and little external oversight and so, TVA was given the task of creating one of the first National Recreation Areas in the country.  

In 1964 TVA began to condemn 170,000 acres between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley to construct the Land Between the Lakes, a national recreation area that was intended to attract 10 million visitors a year. Consequently, the almost 2500 residents who lived between the two lakes were relocated out of—in the words of a TVA official—their “rural slum.”  A relocation specialist knocked on many doors with the price TVA would pay for their home and a promise that their land would only be used for “recreation, education and demonstration.” TVA saw the plan as win-win: the residents would receive a windfall of money, be lifted out of a poverty-stricken area and at the same time, the eastern half of America would be given an idyllic natural playground to get back in touch with the spirit of the American frontier.  

After LBL was completed, the throngs of visitors never appeared. In its busiest year, LBL served around one million people. The close-knit community that had lived and farmed the area for six to seven generations had been dispersed in the name of progress and a future that never arrived, and many were left without land that had given them a livelihood. Thirty years later, TVA admitted defeat:  In 1998, operational authority of LBL was transferred to the U.S. Forest Service. The USFS has now closed many of the campsites and other recreational aspects and is burning and clear-cutting parts of the wooded areas in a controversial bid to create pre-European savannas. Former residents are also concerned about access to their family cemeteries. A Tennessee man is currently awaiting sentencing in Federal Court in Nashville for terroristic threats to a federal officer after he threatened a USFS employee with bodily harm for removing the stakes for his dying uncle’s gravesite in the family cemetery in LBL. A dedicated group of former residents are leading a coalition against what they see as the dismantling of LBL and the commercial nature of some of the timber transactions. They do not want to feel their sacrifice—of both their property and community—was made in vain.