It’s amazing how quickly nature reclaims an abandoned place. Along steep wooded slopes, the ruins and refuse of a once-bustling lumber town lie hidden beneath dense summer growth. The high green canopy casts a shadow across the valley and creek, where wild trout ride clear flows in the current shade of a twisted steel train rail.
If you look, the evidence of Proctor, N.C. is everywhere at Hazel Creek. Human debris melds into the natural landscape. Nearly 80 years ago, Proctor was abandoned with the construction of Fontana Dam on the Little Tennessee River. The National Park Service upkeeps the town’s graveyard and the 1920s era Calhoun House. Other than that, the remains of the town are scattered brick, metal, concrete and stone.
The wide gravel trail was once Calico Street, Proctor’s main drag. It climbs the valley at a gradual slope, paralleling the creek for 15 or more miles through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the Appalachian Trail near Clingmans Dome. In places, old brickwork peeks through the trail dirt as tightly masoned as it was a century ago. The cavernous ruins of a giant lumber mill are barely visible through the trees less than 100 yards off the trail.
In 1944, Fontana Lake was filled to provide electricity for Alcoa Corporation to feed spiking aluminum demand in the waning months of World War II. The steep river valley, encompassed by some of the highest peaks in the Smokies, became one of the deepest reservoirs in the east. Over its 17-mile run, Fontana’s average depth is 135 feet. Its deepest point is 440 feet at the dam.
Several communities were completely inundated when the lake was built. Proctor is an oddity, in that much of it existed above the high-water line. Its fate was to be cut off from the rest of the world when the access road was flooded.