An Appalachian Pleasure Garden: Tourism and the Reshaping and Exploitation of the American Hinterland

The planning pursuit of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) directed the shape, function, and quality of life of the “hydraulic society.” Meanwhile, popular notions of conservation and wilderness buttressed TVA’s regional planning and decentralization mission and, with the designation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (1934), construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway (1935), and completion of the Appalachian Trail (1937), suggest a time in which Americans anxiously fled the metropolis for nature’s refuge. The TVA Act decreed regional modernization through provisions for the “general welfare of the citizens ... fostering an orderly and proper physical, economic, and social development of said areas.”[1] Under TVA stewardship, industrial remedies based on regional resources completed this task through town planning throughout the Valley. But in the Appalachian Highlands, over exportation of raw materials catalyzed the cultivation of a new self-sustainable industry, recreation tourism. This paper will look at one town-planning example, Fontana Village, NC, as a case study in applied vernacular and cultural exploitation. Viewed as an idealized rural America, the Valley’s resulting portrayal of distinct delimitations is a familiar dichotomy not a celebration of cultural identity. With the primary consumers of the region’s recreation tourism resource coming from outside the region, this paper suggests a distinct North/South, country/city relationship, questioning the underlying aims of developing the hinterland for recreation. This paper asks the question, are the landscapes as we know them natural, or the designed idealized pleasure garden of wealthy northern tourists?

[1] Tennessee Valley Authority Act, U.S.Code, vol. 48, (1933).