Appalachian Community Histories – Oak Grove, Washington County: Hall’s Ford, Boone Lake, and a Community Remade
Oak Grove sits in the northern part of Washington County near Gray, where Oak Grove Road winds through a landscape of churches, subdivisions, wooded ridges, and the irregular shoreline of Boone Lake. To someone passing through today, there may be little to suggest that the community once reached into a different landscape along the Watauga River, one where families crossed at Hall’s Ford, children attended a rural Oak Grove school, and generations of residents buried their dead on ground that would eventually disappear beneath a federal reservoir.
The documentary history of Oak Grove is not organized around a courthouse square, railroad station, or incorporated town government. Instead, its story survives in pieces. A school appears in county records. A Baptist congregation organized during the Great Depression. Deeds identify family properties along the river. Cemetery records reveal generations of Halls, Riffeys, Russells, and others. Then, in the early 1950s, Tennessee Valley Authority engineers arrived, acquired flowage rights, relocated graves, and raised the waters of Boone Reservoir across part of the old community landscape.
Oak Grove did not disappear. In fact, the United States Census Bureau eventually defined it as a census-designated place containing thousands of residents. Yet beneath the modern community lies an older Oak Grove whose geography can only be reconstructed by putting roads, deeds, cemeteries, church records, maps, and the waters of Boone Lake back together.
A Community Written Into Schools, Roads, and Family Ground
There does not appear to be a single surviving document declaring when Oak Grove was founded. That is not unusual for rural Appalachian communities. Many acquired their identities gradually as families settled along the same roads and waterways, attended the same schools and churches, buried relatives in the same cemeteries, and began using a common place name.
Washington County itself possesses an unusually deep documentary record. Its first deed book contains land transactions reaching back to 1775, while 392 surviving county tax lists cover portions of the period from 1778 through 1882. Those records provide the larger archival framework from which the ownership history of the future Oak Grove community can eventually be reconstructed parcel by parcel.
More direct evidence comes from education records. Washington County’s historical school inventory includes Oak Grove among the county’s former rural schools, while the county public school system dates to 1873. A historical Oak Grove School is also recorded close to the center of the modern community. Together, those references show that the Oak Grove name was attached to an established rural neighborhood before Oak Grove Baptist Church was organized in 1932.
The school was one of the institutions around which rural community life revolved. Before consolidated schools and school buses carried children farther from home, small county schools could serve as meeting places as well as classrooms. They gave scattered farm neighborhoods a recognizable center even when there was no incorporated town surrounding them.
In Oak Grove, the school, the road that retained the community’s name, and the family burial grounds near the Watauga all point toward a settlement pattern that was already well established by the early twentieth century.
Oak Grove Baptist Church Takes Root During the Great Depression
The clearest institutional history belonging directly to the community comes from Oak Grove Baptist Church.
According to the congregation’s own historical record, Baptists living in the Oak Grove community of Gray did not have a church of their own before 1932. During one of the worst years of the Great Depression, an acre of land was donated for a church building. The property was formally deeded for Baptist church purposes on June 27, 1932.
The date gives Oak Grove history an unusually precise anchor. The congregation did not create the community, which was already known by that name, but it established an institution that would become one of its most enduring landmarks.
The original church served Oak Grove through the Depression, World War II, and the first decade of the postwar period. Those years brought tremendous changes to Washington County. Automobiles made Johnson City, Kingsport, and other employment centers easier to reach. Rural schools were increasingly consolidated. Electricity and modern utilities spread into the countryside. Most dramatically for Oak Grove, the Watauga River itself was about to be transformed.
Even as TVA engineers were remaking the nearby river system, the congregation was planning its own expansion. On February 4, 1959, Oak Grove Baptist Church began a building program to replace its original structure. In less than two years the congregation had a new sanctuary seating about 400 people, along with thirty classrooms, office space, a balcony, and a baptismal pool.
The timing is striking. Within roughly a decade, both the physical landscape surrounding Oak Grove and one of its central institutions had been substantially rebuilt.
Hall’s Ford and the Older Oak Grove Landscape
The strongest surviving connection between Oak Grove and the landscape that existed before Boone Lake is found at Hall’s Ford.
Cemetery research based upon TVA files, Washington County deeds, maps, and field investigation specifically identifies Hall’s Ford with Oak Grove in Gray. The James Nathaniel Hall Cemetery stood on the left bank of the Watauga River in this area and eventually disappeared beneath Boone Lake.
The cemetery itself demonstrates how much older the community landscape was than the 1932 church. Among the graves later relocated were members of the Hall family who had died during the nineteenth century, including Elizabeth Hall in 1883, James Hall in 1886, and several children and relatives whose deaths reached still farther back into the 1800s. Other Hall graves dated from the opening decades of the twentieth century.
These were not isolated recent burials placed on land shortly before the reservoir was built. The burial ground represented several generations of family history rooted beside the Watauga.
Hall’s Ford likewise preserves an older way of understanding the landscape. Before reservoirs, modern bridges, and expanded highway systems, river crossings mattered enormously. A ford connected farms, roads, kin networks, churches, mills, markets, and neighboring communities. Even when the physical crossing disappears, its name can survive in deeds and family memory long after the old road has ceased to function.
In Oak Grove, Hall’s Ford eventually became a place that could no longer be crossed at all. The river valley around it was about to become part of a lake.
TVA Comes to the Watauga
The transformation began as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s postwar expansion of hydroelectric generation and flood control in upper East Tennessee.
Congress authorized Boone Dam in August 1950. TVA began construction almost immediately and completed the project with remarkable speed. The gates closed on December 6, 1952. Boone’s first generating unit entered commercial service in March 1953, followed by the remaining units later that year.
TVA described the project as part of a broader effort to generate electricity while reducing damaging floods downstream, particularly around Kingsport. Its massive 1958 technical report, The Upper Holston Projects, documented the planning, acquisition of land, engineering, construction, costs, and initial operation of Boone and the other major projects developed in the upper Holston basin.
From an engineering perspective, Boone was a successful piece of regional infrastructure.
From the perspective of individual communities, the project meant something more complicated.
Reservoirs require land. They change shorelines, road systems, property boundaries, river crossings, farms, and familiar landmarks. Areas lying below the future water elevation had to be purchased outright or subjected to flowage easements. Burial grounds created another problem entirely because the dead could not simply be treated as another line on a property map.
Oak Grove became one of the communities where these large federal objectives collided with intimate family landscapes.
Ninety-Four Graves at Hall’s Ford
TVA records identified 94 graves in the James Nathaniel Hall Cemetery at Hall’s Ford.
Forty-seven were removed.
Forty-seven were not.
The removals took place between June 30 and July 11, 1952, only months before Boone Dam’s gates closed. The cemetery survey based on TVA documentation records the names of many whose remains were transferred to other burial grounds. Some went to Gray Community Cemetery. Others were reinterred at Hales Chapel, Edgefield United Methodist Church Cemetery, Africa Cemetery, and a cemetery in neighboring Sullivan County.
The remaining graves present a more haunting part of the story. TVA records indicated that 47 unidentified graves remained. Twenty-eight of those were believed to contain infants. The cemetery itself, approximately 210 by 240 feet according to deed research, is now beneath the surface of Boone Lake.
Washington County records help pin the old burial ground to the pre-reservoir landscape. Deed Book 266, page 380, and Minutes Book 20, page 69, both from 1952, specifically concerned releases by heirs involving the cemetery property. Researchers also used Deed Book 258, page 343, and Minutes Book 18, page 519, to establish the boundaries of nearby parcels and reconstruct the burial ground’s location.
This is where Oak Grove history becomes unusually tangible. The old community does not survive only through a story that someone remembered decades later. It can be reconstructed from county deeds, TVA records, cemetery relocation lists, modern tax maps, and geographic coordinates.
The water covers the cemetery, but the documentation remains.
The Riffey Grave Beneath Boone Lake
Another burial site lay immediately east of the Hall property on land belonging to Ora Hall Riffey, a descendant of the same extended Hall family.
TVA designated it Cemetery No. 5 for the Boone Lake project.
Unlike the large Hall cemetery, the Riffey burial ground contained only one known grave. There was no marker or inscribed stone, and TVA could not determine the identity of the person buried there. The remains were not removed. The site is now barely beneath the surface of Boone Lake.
The property records capture the transition from riverfront farmland to reservoir shoreline with unusual clarity. In 1951, Deed Book 258, page 587, recorded Ora Hall Riffey granting the United States a flowage easement. In 1953, after the reservoir had been created, Deed Book 270, page 485, recorded her sale of the property to J. A. and Elsie Meredith.
A flowage easement sounds technical when written into a deed book. On the ground, it meant accepting that water created by a federal dam could cover part of a family property.
In this case, that rising water also covered a grave whose occupant had already been forgotten by name.
Maps of a Landscape That Changed
Historical maps make it possible to see what written descriptions sometimes hide.
Before Boone Reservoir, the Watauga followed its natural channel through farms, bottomland, roads, fords, and family properties. After impoundment, coves extended into the countryside and the familiar line of the river became a broad reservoir shoreline.
TVA continued mapping that new landscape after construction. Its October 1959 Boone Reservoir Properties series recorded property ownership and distinguished between lands TVA retained, declared surplus, or transferred. The maps are valuable because they capture the transition only a few years after impoundment, when many pre-reservoir owners and property patterns could still be identified.
For Oak Grove, comparing those maps with earlier deeds and topographic surveys can help reveal not simply how much land went underwater, but how the community was reorganized around the new lake.
The reservoir did not erase Oak Grove. Instead, it redrew part of it.
Old approaches to the river ended at the water. Former riverfront property became lakefront property. New roads and residential areas developed around the shoreline. Places once understood through farms and river crossings gradually became associated with boating, fishing, recreation, and waterfront homes.
The transformation was physical, but it also altered how later generations understood the landscape.
Oak Grove Cemetery and a Community That Continued
Not all of Oak Grove’s burial history disappeared beneath the reservoir.
Oak Grove Cemetery remains beside Oak Grove Baptist Church on Oak Grove Road. A 2008 survey recorded generations of local families including Cash, Snyder, Sanders, Friday, Harrison, Smith, Tucker, Hannifin, Depew, and others. Military inscriptions identify residents who served during World War I, World War II, Korea, and other periods of American military service.
The cemetery and church form a visible counterpart to the submerged Hall and Riffey burial grounds. One part of Oak Grove’s history remains accessible beside the road. Another survives below the lake.
Oak Grove Baptist Church continued to grow after the reservoir era. The congregation celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1982. Plans for additional educational space followed, and a new educational wing was dedicated on June 9, 1991.
By then, the surrounding countryside was becoming increasingly connected to the Johnson City and Gray suburban corridor. The rural Oak Grove of small schools, family farms, and a ford across the Watauga was giving way to a community shaped by highways, commuting, residential development, and Boone Lake.
Still, the old name survived.
From Rural Community to Census-Designated Place
The federal government eventually gave Oak Grove boundaries that earlier generations would not have recognized.
For the 2010 Census, the Census Bureau defined the Washington County Oak Grove census-designated place with a population of 4,425. The federal geographic record placed its center near the same area where Oak Grove Road, the historic school location, and the church preserve the older community name.
By the 2020 Census, the defined Oak Grove CDP contained 4,482 residents.
Those census boundaries should not be mistaken for the precise limits of historic Oak Grove. Rural Appalachian communities rarely developed within formal surveyed municipal lines. A person living near Hall’s Ford in 1900 would have understood the neighborhood through roads, families, churches, farms, streams, schools, and nearby communities rather than a Census Bureau polygon.
Still, federal recognition shows something important.
Oak Grove survived.
The school disappeared. Hall’s Ford disappeared beneath the reservoir landscape. One cemetery was partly removed and flooded. Another grave remained where it had been placed and disappeared under the lake. Farms changed hands. Roads changed. The church rebuilt. Houses spread across former countryside.
Yet the community name continued strongly enough to become attached to a modern population numbering in the thousands.
Remembering the Oak Grove Beneath the Modern Landscape
Oak Grove is easy to misunderstand if its history begins with the modern census place.
Its deeper story lies along the Watauga.
It lies with the families who buried their dead at Hall’s Ford during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It lies with children who attended the rural Oak Grove school before consolidation changed public education. It lies with Baptists who received an acre of ground in the middle of the Great Depression and built a church in 1932. It lies in Washington County deed books where ordinary property transactions suddenly became part of one of the largest landscape engineering programs in American history.
Most of all, it lies beneath Boone Lake.
When TVA closed the gates of Boone Dam in December 1952, water covered more than acreage. It covered portions of a lived landscape where roads had meaning, farms carried family names, and burial grounds tied generations to particular pieces of earth.
The modern lake is itself now historic. Families have spent more than seventy years fishing, boating, building homes, and making memories along its shoreline. Oak Grove Baptist Church remains active. Oak Grove Cemetery continues to preserve the names of local residents. Thousands of people still call the larger community home.
That does not erase what came before.
Oak Grove is therefore a story of continuity as much as loss. The community survived one of the largest physical transformations in its history, but parts of the older landscape can no longer be visited in the ordinary sense. To find them requires deeds, TVA maps, cemetery records, church histories, old school references, and an understanding that the smooth surface of Boone Lake conceals a geography that once looked entirely different.
At Hall’s Ford, some of that older Oak Grove is still there.
It is simply underwater.
Sources & Further Reading
Oak Grove Baptist Church. “Story & History.” Gray, Tennessee. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.oakgrovebc.org/story-history
Tennessee Valley Authority. The Upper Holston Projects: Watauga, South Holston, Boone, and Fort Patrick Henry. Technical Report No. 14. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Upper_Holston_Projects.html?id=slrVAAAAMAAJ
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Power for Peacetime.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.tva.com/About-TVA/Our-History/Built-for-the-People/Power-for-Peacetime
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Boone Reservoir.” Accessed September 12, 2026. TVA Boone Reservoir
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Boone Reservoir Land Management Plan.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.tva.com/environment/environmental-stewardship/land-management/reservoir-land-management-plans/boone-reservoir-land-management-plan
Tennessee Valley Authority, Division of Reservoir Properties. Boone Reservoir Properties, Sheet 2. Map. October 1959. Rare Maps Digital Collection, East Tennessee State University. ETSU Sheet 2
Tennessee Valley Authority, Division of Reservoir Properties. Boone Reservoir Properties, Sheet 3. Map. October 1959. Rare Maps Digital Collection, East Tennessee State University. ETSU Sheet 3
United States Geological Survey. Boone Dam, Tennessee. 7.5-Minute Topographic Quadrangle. 1940. USGS historical map
United States Geological Survey. Boone Dam, Tennessee. 7.5-Minute Topographic Quadrangle. 1959. USGS historical map
Edwards, Gordon M. “Hall (James Nathaniel) Cemetery.” Washington County TNGenWeb and Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee, 2015. https://tngenweb.org/washington/records-data/cemeteries/cemeteries-of-washington-county-tennessee/cemeteries-of-washington-county-tennessee-h-i-j-k/hall-james-nathaniel-cemetery/
Edwards, Gordon M. “Riffey Cemetery.” Washington County TNGenWeb and Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee, 2015. Riffey Cemetery
Cemetery Survey Team of Northeast Tennessee. “Oak Grove Cemetery.” Washington County TNGenWeb. Surveyed 2008. Oak Grove Cemetery
Washington County, Tennessee. Deed Book 266, p. 380. 1952. Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, Tennessee. Washington County Archives
Washington County, Tennessee. Minutes Book 20, p. 69. 1952. Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, Tennessee. Washington County Archives
Washington County, Tennessee. Deed Book 258, p. 343. 1951. Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, Tennessee. Washington County Archives
Washington County, Tennessee. Minutes Book 18, p. 519. 1952. Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, Tennessee. Washington County Archives
Washington County, Tennessee. Deed Book 258, p. 587. Flowage Easement, Ora Hall Riffey to the United States. 1951. Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, Tennessee. Washington County Archives
Washington County, Tennessee. Deed Book 270, p. 485. Ora Hall Riffey to J. A. and Elsie Meredith. 1953. Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, Tennessee. Washington County Archives
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. “Early Tax Lists.” Jonesborough, Tennessee. Washington County Early Tax Lists
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. “Deed Book A, 1775–1782.” Jonesborough, Tennessee. Washington County Deed Book A
Washington County TNGenWeb. “Schools in Washington County.” Accessed September 12, 2026. Washington County historical schools
National Archives and Records Administration. “Records of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Record Group 142.” Guide to Federal Records. Accessed September 12, 2026. National Archives RG 142
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Washington County Genealogical Fact Sheet.” Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. Accessed September 12, 2026. TSLA Washington County guide
Johnson City GIS Division. Washington County, Tennessee Roads. Map. 1976. Rare Maps Digital Collection, East Tennessee State University. ETSU 1976 road map
State of Tennessee. Washington County Geographic Features. Map. Received 1986. Rare Maps Digital Collection, East Tennessee State University. ETSU geographic features map
East Tennessee State University, Archives of Appalachia. “Rare Maps Digital Collection.” Accessed September 12, 2026. ETSU Rare Maps
Herald and Tribune (Jonesborough, Tennessee). 1869–present. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/2014218225/
Rowell, George P., and Company. American Newspaper Directory. New York: Geo. P. Rowell & Co., 1873. See entries for Jonesborough’s Herald and Tribune and Union Flag and Commercial Advertiser. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/gdc/scd0002/0012/00123363747/00123363747.pdf
United States Environmental Protection Agency. Report on Boone and South Holston Reservoirs: Washington, Sullivan, and Carter Counties, Tennessee. National Eutrophication Survey Working Paper. Washington, DC: Environmental Protection Agency. EPA report
Bennett, Charles M. Washington County, Tennessee Tombstone Inscriptions, Plus Genealogical Notes. 3 vols. Washington County, Tennessee. Cited in regional cemetery research concerning the Hall and Riffey burial grounds. Tennessee State Library and Archives Washington County guide
Author Note: As an Appalachian historian, I am especially drawn to communities whose older landscapes survive only through deeds, maps, cemeteries, and family records. Oak Grove is a powerful example of how a familiar modern place can contain another history beneath its roads, shoreline, and even the waters of Boone Lake.