Forgotten Appalachia Series – Loyston, Union County, and the Town Beneath Norris Lake
On the water today, Loyston can feel more like a name than a place. It survives on road signs, family stories, cemetery records, old photographs, and the wide reach of Norris Lake known as the Loyston Sea. Boats pass over a landscape that was once fields, homes, roads, churches, stores, and schoolrooms. The water makes the old town invisible, but it did not erase the record of the community that stood there.
Loyston was one of the East Tennessee communities changed forever by the Tennessee Valley Authority’s first major water control project. Norris Dam began construction in 1933, only months after TVA was created, and was completed in 1936. The dam stood 265 feet high and stretched 1,860 feet across the Clinch River. TVA describes Norris as the first dam it built, with a reservoir extending 73 miles up the Clinch River and 56 miles up the Powell River.
For Union County, the project was not only a story of concrete, engineering, electricity, and flood control. It was a story of people being asked, pressured, and finally required to leave land that had shaped their families for generations. The Tennessee Encyclopedia notes that Norris Dam and the impoundment of Norris Reservoir had a tremendous impact on Union County, creating jobs and improving conditions while also displacing people whose homes and property lay below pool level or in the floodplain.
From Loy’s Cross Roads to Loyston
The story of Loyston began long before the TVA surveyors came through the Clinch Valley. The Tennessee State Museum identifies the community as having been first settled around 1800 by the Stooksbury family. John Loy arrived in the early nineteenth century, and by 1866 the place was known as Loy’s Cross Road. In 1894, the name changed to Loyston.
That name carried the memory of an older crossroads community. It also marked a place where families built farms, schools, stores, churches, and ordinary habits of life along the Clinch River country. The town was not large. By 1935, the Tennessee State Museum gives Loyston’s population as about seventy residents. Still, that number can make the place sound smaller than it was in lived experience. Around Loyston were kinship networks, farm paths, burial grounds, nearby schools, churches, mills, and river roads that tied the area into the wider Big Valley and Union County landscape.
Historic Union County describes the land around Big Ridge and Loyston as a farming community, with schools, churches, and farms scattered along the banks of the Clinch River. Family names such as Hutchinson, Loy, Stooksbury, and Longmire remained part of the area’s memory even after the reservoir changed the map.
The World Before the Water
Loyston’s surviving photographs help restore some of that lost world. In October and November 1933, Lewis Hine photographed East Tennessee for TVA. Hine was already known for his documentary photography, especially his earlier child labor work. His TVA assignment lasted from October 20 to November 26, 1933, and the National Archives identifies the series as part of Record Group 142, the records of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The Loyston images are some of the most important surviving records of the community before the water rose. Hine photographed Oakdale School near Loyston on October 23, 1933. One image showed the exterior of the school, with the note that the immediate region would be flooded when the Norris Dam Reservoir filled. Another showed the interior, where thirty to forty pupils usually attended.
He also photographed Sharps Station Methodist Episcopal Church near Loyston on October 29, 1933. The National Archives description says the church would be submerged by the waters of the Norris Dam reservoir. Another image showed the church interior during a Sunday afternoon service conducted by Reverend Lovelace and children from an orphanage.
A month later, Hine entered the home of Mrs. Jacob Stooksbury in Loyston. His photographs recorded an interior that spoke to continuity rather than spectacle. The National Archives captions note oil lamps, a spinning wheel, wickerwork chairs, embroidery on the fireplace mantel, and a creel used for measuring yarn by the hank. These objects mattered because they showed a home before it became a relocation problem in a government file.
TVA and the Norris Project
The legal and political setting for Loyston’s removal began with the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933. The National Archives describes the act as creating TVA to oversee dam construction, control flooding, improve navigation, and create cheap electric power in the Tennessee Valley basin. TVA’s own history of the act notes that the agency was given power to acquire real estate for dams, reservoirs, transmission lines, power houses, and other structures along the Tennessee River and its tributaries.
Norris Dam was TVA’s first test of that authority. The official 1940 TVA report, The Norris Project, described itself as a comprehensive account of the planning, design, construction, and initial operations of the Norris Dam and Reservoir on the Clinch River. Its table of contents shows the range of work involved beyond the dam itself, including reservoir activities, land purchases, agencies assisting in family removal, cemetery relocation data, highway bridges, and even an engineering section on the Loyston dike.
That range matters because the reservoir did not simply cover empty land. It forced a large administrative operation into the daily lives of rural East Tennessee families. Farms had to be appraised. Roads had to be changed. Families had to move. Graves had to be identified. Cemeteries had to be mapped. Buildings, schools, churches, stores, fields, orchards, springs, and familiar crossings all became part of a project whose final form was a lake.
Removal, Reinterment, and Loss
The removal of Loyston was part of the wider displacement caused by the Norris project. The University of Tennessee’s finding aid for the Tennessee Valley Authority Grave Removal Records for the Norris Dam Reservoir states that construction began in October 1933 and was completed in March 1936. It also describes Norris as TVA’s first hydroelectric project and notes that the project displaced about 2,900 families and about 5,000 gravesites.
Cemetery relocation was one of the most sensitive parts of the reservoir work. TVA states that surveys were conducted of all cemeteries in project areas, and that beginning in 1933 more than 69,000 graves were investigated across TVA projects, with more than 20,000 relocated. TVA says the graves were moved from areas to be flooded or isolated and placed in comparable burial places nearby, with monuments and headstones cleaned, repaired, and reset at reinterment sites.
For the Norris Reservoir specifically, the University of Tennessee collection includes cemetery removal orders, contracts, cards, and maps for more than seventy cemeteries. These records are essential for understanding Loyston because they show that displacement reached beyond the living. The lake changed where descendants could visit their dead, how family burial grounds were remembered, and how old cemetery names survived in new locations.
Historic Union County notes that many graves affected by Norris Reservoir were moved into reinterment cemeteries, including Big Barren Memorial and New Loyston Memorial in Union County. These cemeteries became places where the memory of flooded communities remained visible, even when the original ground was gone or reachable only at unusual lake levels.
New Loyston and the Changed Map
Many former residents of Loyston and the surrounding area did not move far in emotional terms, even when they had to move physically. Some settled in nearby counties. Others became part of the community remembered as New Loyston. The Tennessee State Museum notes that many residents moved to Knox, Anderson, Blount, and Loudon counties after the TVA made them leave.
The new landscape was not only a lake. It also included parks, public lands, recreational shorelines, and conservation areas. Big Ridge State Park developed in the same larger New Deal and Norris project setting. Historic Union County explains that the creation of Norris Lake and Big Ridge State Park were related, and that Big Ridge was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of the federal conservation and recreation work of the 1930s.
That connection gives Loyston’s story a complicated legacy. The same project that removed farms and homes also created public recreation lands, new roads, electricity, flood control, and a lake that later generations would know as a place for boating, fishing, camping, and hiking. But those later benefits did not make the original loss any less real for the people who had to leave.
Remembering Loyston
Loyston is often called a ghost town, but that phrase can mislead if it makes the place sound like a legend instead of a documented Appalachian community. Loyston was photographed, mapped, surveyed, purchased, cleared, flooded, remembered, and mourned. Its history appears in TVA reports, National Archives photographs, cemetery relocation files, genealogical collections, state museum summaries, local histories, and family memory.
Marshall A. Wilson’s Families of Norris Reservoir Area remains one of the most important family level sources for the displaced communities of the Norris Basin. The McClung Historical Collection identifies Wilson’s work as a 1949 carbon typescript, and FamilySearch describes Wilson as a TVA official who collected historical and genealogical information about Norris Valley residents.
The strongest record of Loyston may be the combination of the ordinary and the official. The official record explains why the lake came. The ordinary record explains what was lost. A TVA report can describe land purchases and family removal. A cemetery file can identify graves. A Hine photograph can show children in a one room school or a woman beside a spinning wheel. A local memory can still name a road, a store, a school, a family, or a field.
Today, the Loyston Sea is known as part of Norris Lake’s recreational landscape. Visitors may see only water and wooded shoreline. Beneath that view is another map, one built from Loy’s Cross Roads, Old Loyston, family farms, schoolchildren, church services, burial grounds, and the difficult arrival of the TVA. The lake changed the valley, but the old community remains in the records and in the people who still remember that Loyston was more than a place under water.
Sources & Further Reading
Tennessee Valley Authority. The Norris Project: A Comprehensive Report on the Planning, Design, Construction, and Initial Operations of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s First Water Control Project. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940. https://books.google.com/books?id=AlnVAAAAMAAJ
National Archives at Atlanta. “Tennessee Valley Authority, Lewis Hine Photographs.” Record Group 142, Records of the Tennessee Valley Authority. https://www.archives.gov/atlanta/finding-aids/rg142-532624.html
National Archives. “Records of the Tennessee Valley Authority [TVA], Record Group 142.” Guide to Federal Records. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/142.html
National Archives. “Tennessee Valley Authority Act.” Milestone Documents. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/tennessee-valley-authority-act
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Norris Dam.” https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/hydroelectric/norris
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Norris Reservoir Land Management Plan.” https://www.tva.com/environment/environmental-stewardship/land-management/reservoir-land-management-plans/norris-reservoir-land-management-plan
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Relocated Cemeteries.” https://www.tva.com/environment/environmental-stewardship/land-management/cultural-resource-management/relocated-cemeteries
University of Tennessee Libraries, Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives. “Tennessee Valley Authority Grave Removal Records for the Norris Dam Reservoir, MS.0513.” https://scout.lib.utk.edu/repositories/2/resources/315
FamilySearch. “Master File Relocation Card Index for Grave and Cemetery Relocation, Norris Reservoir Area, 1934–1936.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/778971
Wilson, Marshall A. Families of Norris Reservoir Area. Knoxville, 1949. McClung Historical Collection. https://cmdc.knoxlib.org/digital/collection/p15136coll4/id/3600/
Hine, Lewis. “Mrs. Jacob Stooksbury, Loyston, Tennessee, at Her Spinning Wheel, November 1933.” National Archives, Record Group 142. https://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/7495862560
Tennessee State Museum. “Underwater Ghost Towns of Tennessee.” May 18, 2021. https://tnmuseum.org/junior-curators/posts/underwater-ghost-towns-of-tennessee
Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. “Union County.” https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/union-county/
Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. “Norris Dam.” https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/norris-dam/
Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. “Lewis Hine.” https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/lewis-hine/
Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. “Big Ridge State Park.” https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/big-ridge-state-park/
Historic Union County. “Beneath the Waters of Norris Reservoir.” June 4, 2018. https://www.historicunioncounty.com/article/beneath-waters-norris-reservoir
Historic Union County. “Early History of Big Ridge Leading to Creation of Norris Lake.” https://www.historicunioncounty.com/article/early-history-big-ridge-leading-creation-norris-lake
Historic Union County. “The Creation of Big Ridge State Park.” https://www.historicunioncounty.com/article/creation-big-ridge-state-park
McDonald, Michael J., and John Muldowny. TVA and the Dispossessed: The Resettlement of Population in the Norris Dam Area. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.
McDonald, Michael J., and John Muldowny. “Loyston.” Tennessee Valley Perspectives 2, no. 3, Spring 1972.
Tharpe, William G. To Loy’s Cross Roads. Maynardville, TN: Union County Historical Society, 1989.
Webb, William S. An Archaeological Survey of the Norris Basin in Eastern Tennessee. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 118. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1938. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/15441
Walker, Melissa. “African Americans and TVA Reservoir Property Removal: Race in a New Deal Program.” Agricultural History 72, no. 2, Spring 1998.
Schaffer, Daniel. “Environment and TVA: Toward a Regional Plan for the Tennessee Valley, 1930s.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 43, no. 4, Winter 1984.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Union County.” Tennessee County Fact Sheets. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/union-county
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee Place Names and Post Offices.” https://sos.tn.gov/tsla
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection.” https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-map-collection
TopoZone. “Loyston, TN.” https://www.topozone.com/tennessee/union-tn/city/loyston/
Tennessee River Valley Geotourism. “Loyston Sea.” https://tennesseerivervalleygeotourism.org/entries/loyston-sea/
Tennessee Magazine. “Tennessee’s Underwater Ghost Towns.” June 1, 2021. https://www.tnmagazine.org/tennessees-underwater-ghost-towns/
University of Tennessee Special Collections. “Norris Dam Photos, 1933–1936, MS-2005.” University of Tennessee Libraries, Knoxville.
Author Note: Loyston is one of those Appalachian places where the map changed, but the memory did not disappear. Stories like this remind us that progress often came with a cost paid by families, farms, churches, schools, and cemeteries.