By the year 1948 the town of Butler, Tennessee had grown into a thriving farming community of 600 people. “Old Butler” was much like any other small town in America of that era. There were all the regular businesses one would expect to find in a growing town – 5o of them in fact – as well as two schools, a Masonic lodge and a couple of churches. But Butler had one big problem: high water.
Butler’s location at the confluence of Roan Creek and the Elk River (which formed the Watauga River) left the town prone to devastating floods, and the residents endured a number of them over the span of the town’s history. In 1942, the Tennessee Valley Authority began construction on Watauga Dam as part of a massive project that was developed with the goal of controlling the raging floodwaters of the region’s waterways.
The TVA built several dams in the region, resulting of course in several lakes. But there was something quite unique about the reservoir that would soon be known as Watauga Lake: once the dam was finished in 1948, the waters rising behind it would completely inundate the town of Butler!
In preparation for the impending deluge, the entire town was re-located to higher ground. This turned out to be quite a massive project in its own right, one that ended up requiring the rebuilding of some 125 homes as well as the businesses and other structures mentioned above. They also had to construct 55 miles of new roads, three new bridges and 66 miles of utility lines. Then, to cap it all off, they had to relocate 1,281 graves!
But move the town they did, and the residents of “new” Butler are doing quite well here in the 21st century. Old Butler still exists much as it did before the rising waters of the Watauga engulfed it, and in 1983 the “locals” got a chance to see it in all its well-preserved glory when the TVA drew down the water in the lake to allow for a thorough inspection of the dam. But when that task was finished, the dam’s gate was closed and the waters rose once again, inundating Old Butler as they had so many years before.
Although the original town of Butler, Tennessee still lies beneath the waters of the Watauga, it will be 2013 before it sees the light of day again (when the TVA performs the next scheduled drawdown of the lake). In 1948 the citizens of Butler had to say goodbye to their homes, their schools, their churches…in effect they had to say goodbye to the lives they had lived on the banks of the newly born Watauga River. But they took with them lots of photographs, and even more precious memories of the town that they had “lost” forever.