03/28/2026
The Tennessee Valley Authority Surveyor Who Found the Cemetery
James Aldous Whitaker had been a land survey technician with the Tennessee Valley Authority since 1934, working the survey crews that were mapping the land that the TVA's reservoir projects would flood — the valleys of the Tennessee River and its tributaries that the dam construction program was transforming from farmland and small communities into the series of reservoirs that would generate the electricity and flood control that the TVA had been created to provide.
He was twenty-nine years old in 1936 when his survey crew was working the Hiwassee River valley in Cherokee County, North Carolina — the valley that the Hiwassee Reservoir project would flood — and was conducting the property boundary surveys that preceded the TVA's land acquisition process. The survey work brought him into parts of the valley that the road access did not reach and that the TVA's preliminary land maps, compiled from county deed records and aerial photography, had not fully characterized.
On a Thursday afternoon in October 1936, working a survey line through a wooded hillside above the river bottom, James found a cemetery. It was not on any TVA land map. It was not referenced in any of the county deed records his crew had been working from. It contained approximately sixty graves marked with fieldstone markers, some with carved inscriptions in Cherokee syllabary — the writing system that Sequoyah had developed in the 1820s and that the Cherokee families who had remained in North Carolina after the 1838 removal had continued to use.
He noted the location in his survey field book and reported it to the crew chief that evening. The crew chief reported it to the TVA's land acquisition office the following week. The land acquisition office contacted the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' tribal office in Cherokee, North Carolina.
The cemetery — which the Eastern Band identified as a nineteenth-century burial ground belonging to families who had remained in the Hiwassee valley after the removal period — was excluded from the reservoir inundation zone. The TVA modified its Hiwassee Reservoir filling plan to preserve the cemetery above the waterline. The modification required a minor adjustment to the reservoir's full pool elevation in that section.
The cemetery is above the Hiwassee Reservoir waterline today. James's October 1936 field book notation is in the TVA's survey records. He surveyed for the TVA until 1958 and retired to Knoxville. The sixty families whose ancestors are buried on that hillside do not know his name.
"He found an unmarked Cherokee cemetery on a wooded hillside above the Hiwassee River valley in October 1936 while running a survey line, noted it in his field book, reported it through his crew chief, watched the TVA modify its reservoir filling plan to preserve it above the waterline. The cemetery is above the waterline today. His field book notation is in the TVA survey records. The sixty families whose ancestors are buried there do not know his name."
