Our farm is located south of the Tennessee River, in an area composed largely of Roane County, but with portions of Loudon, Monroe, Meigs, and McMinn. It is bordered by the river on the north and west, Interstate 75 to the east, and State Highway 68 to the south. It is called South of the River, or simply by its initials, SOR.
John Muir walked these valleys on his way to points farther south in the 1860s. Eventually, he ended his journey in a still-wild Florida, many lifetimes before modern souls touched down in the Orlando airport for their annual blowout at Magic Kingdom.
At approximately 150 square miles, South of the River is crossed by a few broad and fertile valleys that run northeast to southwest. The valley of Ten Mile, cut down the middle by SR 58, which carries travelers from Oak Ridge to downtown Chattanooga, is the largest and most developed. But Paint Rock Valley, much of its large landholding concentrated historically in a few families, is the more pastoral and picturesque.
The western border of South of the River is inhabited by a small population of exiles of the upper middle class, now living large in retirement on the river in grandish houses with speedboats out back. Pushing in on them from the surrounding ridges and small valleys and hollers is the majority of the population, much of it brought together by the 2.5 churches per square mile that call SOR home.
That area is where we live, a vast community of smaller farms like our own, family-operated dairies, and one-to-two-acre hardscrabble homesteads. There is very little commercial life, aside from the occasional general store, in South of the River, and no incorporated towns. There are lots of gardens, pigs, cattle, chickens, and multipurpose workshops.
The designation “South of the River” is often used derogatorily by residents north of the river. It’s a wrong-side-of-the-tracks designation. But to those who live South of the River, it’s a place where boys still learn to stick-weld and girls still put up produce with their grandmothers, a hinterland of self-reliance, affordable enough for working people to own a modest piece of land, though never to grow rich from the same.
Twenty-first century South of the River is still, much of it, a tight-knit land of multigenerational families living next to each other. Like Roane County at large, SOR until 10 years ago had no building codes, leaving the architecture and site location eccentrically random. This area always has been, and probably always will be, a make-do landscape — a mix of modest homes with well-tended gardens and pieced-together trailers that repurpose abandoned schoolbuses to house goats.
My guess is that South of the River, which has never enjoyed wealth, will maintain a resilience long after more prosperous and less resourceful communities fall into crisis. That you can’t miss what you never had might just be the proud motto of the ridges and valleys of SOR. That reality might also be the area’s greatest strength.
2.5 churches per square mile is an interesting demographic statistic. Any notion whether it is on the rise? From where you sit, any idea whether the population of domestic animals has been growing or receding during the Miller tenure in the SOR?
Wrong side of the _____________ (tracks, town, river… you pick) is so widely used I wonder how much pain it inflicts on those who buy into the narrative. How much chest thumping among those accidentally finding themselves on the “right” side?
I knew some folks from Chicago while I was in college who would refer to everything below Joliet as “down state”. To be fair, their seeming irreverence to geographic reality was not always tied to characterizations of the wrong-side narrative. But among some this wrong-side attitude was obvious and pretty juvenile. To be a “southerner” in that situation was fine with many of us.
Goat housing school buses – spells resilience with a capital ‘R’.
The 2.5 is a poetic license that I urge you to grant to your humble blog writer.
I was actually wondering about the old Walton’s tv show – their lifestyle ‘as a model for sustainability’ when everything blows up/ heads south (you know what I mean). I even did a search on it, and found only one referrence, but it didn’t focus on the lifestyle, it was rather a bleak outlook on ‘bug-ou-location/rural escape, as not being a reliable safe plan. (I couldn’t agree less, but it isn’t worth arguing- it all depends on what actually happens).
I think I found something of what I was seeking in that search, here.
Religion generally can be helpful in life – and churches very much so, in extreme times, in bonding communities, but I would hope it wasn’t mandatory to fit in.
Wow, that takes me back. They certainly practiced a pretty low impact life, one very much focused on self-sufficiency.
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