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| Pete Matthews Jr © 2023 |
| 2023-04-23 50 Tennessee River walk, Knoxville TN |
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The Tennessee River System begins on the worn magnificent crests of the southern Appalachians, among the earth's oldest mountains, and the Tennessee River shapes its valley into the form of a boomerang, bowing it to its sweep through seven states. Near Knoxville the streams still fresh from mountains are linked and thence the master stream spreads the valley most richly southward, swims past Chattanooga, and bends down to Alabama to roar like blown smoke through the floodgates of Wilson Dam, to slide becalmed along the crop--cleansed fields of Shiloh, to march due north across the high diminished plains of Tennessee and through Kentucky spreading marshes toward valley's end where finally, at the toes of Paducah, in one wide glossy golden swarm the water stoops forward and continually dies into the Ohio..... -- Knoxville-born novelise James Agee, then a 23-year-old business writer for Fortune Magazine, describing the river in a 1933 article about TVA. ____________________ No man can say what is the source of the Tennessee. It draws its waters from all points of the compass within an area extending over the southwestern end of the Valley of Virginia and the lofty, impenetrable mountains of East Tennesses, Western North Carolina, and Northern Georgia..... No other great American river, after pointing its course for 350 miles in one general direction, changes its mind, veers around, and flows for 200 miles in the opposite direction. ...it is as irregular, as various, as rebellious as the huge valley region that it drains. -- "Fugitive" Poet Donald Davidson (1893-1968) |