Land Between the Lakes
Land Between the Lakes

Author: Frank E. Smith

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0813186609

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Land Between the Lakes Recreation Area lies in western Kentucky and Tennessee, between two huge lakes formed by dams on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Some 170,000 acres bounded by 300 miles of shoreline, Land Between the Lakes is blessed with a rich variety of plant and animal life. Conceived and administrated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, it is a unique recreational experiment which has drawn admiring visitors from around the world. Frank E. Smith, director of TVA, tells the story of the transformation of submarginal land into a large-scale, multiple-use recreation facility that provides recreation and entertainment for thousands of visitors as well as producing a positive, dynamic stimulus to the continued economic development of the entire Tennessee Valley. Planned for fullest use of human and land resources, Land Between the Lakes is of utmost importance to recreational planners, conservation specialists, administrators, and to millions of Americans who seek their recreation in the out of doors.

The Land Between the Lakes
The Land Between the Lakes

Author: Ronald A. Foresta

Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1621900207

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Between Barkley and Kentucky Lakes—two great, artificial bodies of water in western Tennessee and western Kentucky—lies a wooded land that looks from above like the flattened thumb of a green giant. Once a land of marginal farms and small settlements, this 240-square-mile peninsula, known as the Land Between the Lakes, has been a national recreation area for the last half-century. Its rolling, wooded hills and open bottomlands give the place charm but little majesty. The place swallows up its few campgrounds and visitors they attracts, creating a vacuous tranquility. In this volume, Foresta explores how this forgotten and bypassed region became a national recreation area. He uses its history to retrieve our old attitudes toward nature, progress, and personal development. He also uses its history to retrieve a vision of the future that rallied idealists, intellectuals, and even public officials to its banner. In the early 1960s, the Tennessee Valley Authority set out to create a great park for posterity at the Land Between the Lakes. The park was to host the vast stretches of leisure that wealthy, secure, and more equal Americans of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would have at their disposal. It would be a place where such Americans could turn that leisure into happiness, psychic well-being, and strength of character. The TVA cleared the land of its inhabitants to create the park, removing people from their homes and severing their roots, thus effacing the history of the place. It then set about reshaping the land in the image of an anticipated future. But when that future never arrived, managers struggled to fit the place to the America that actually came into being. In the end they failed, leaving the Land Between the Lakes enveloped in a haunting sense of emptiness. A deft blend of environmental history, geography, politics, and cultural history, Land Between the Lakes demonstrates both the idealism of mid-twentieth-century planners and how quickly such idealism can fall out of alignment with the flow of history. In so doing it explores a forgotten vision of the future that was in many ways more appealing than the present that came into being in its place.