Scona Lodge 1946

Scona Lodge 1946

by James Buchanan 

    I am going to try to describe Scona Lodge as it existed in 1946 the year my family lived

there. I was only 10 years old so I am sure my memory will not be perfect. This was

before Chilhowee Dam had been built and its lake caused some major changes at

Scon.  I was never back to Scona afterwards to see those changes.Scona Lodge was a private 

retreat for the very top executives of the Aluminum Company of America( Alcoa), and guests that they wanted to influence such as US senators, representatives, other high level government officials, high ranking military officers, and dignitaries such as state governors. The lodge was on the

South side of the Little Tennessee River across from the Alcoa company town of Calderwood, Tennessee and to get to it you needed to take a  ferry owned and operated by Alcoa across the river to it. Very appropriately Alcoa named their lodge Scona which means "across the water" or

 "across the river" in Cherokee. You could also get to the lodge by a primitive gravel road that

 ran along the south side of the river, but that was not the normal route in 1946. To ensure that no strangers used that route to get on lodge property, the entrance to the lodge from it was blocked by a locked chain. The lodge was intended to be very private and it was. The picture is of the Scona

lodge as it looked in 1946. It was located a good ways back from the river – maybe at least a couple hundred feet. 

Above:  Jim's photo of Scona in its prime. 

    The lodge was splendid inside and outside. The main room faced the river and had high

beamed ceiling and a large river facing window and a large stone fireplace as you might

surmise from the large stone chimney. There was a large bear skin rug on the floor and

a muzzle loading rifle above the fireplace mantel that had some connection to my

family. I think it had belonged to my mother’s uncle Will Lequire who had lived back in

the mountains behind the lodge. The dining room, servers station, kitchen, and pantry,

were across the back of the building. There was a small basement with a wine and

liquor room as well as some storage space. The dining room had one long rectangular

table that could accommodate around 20 or so and a large plate glass window that provided a good view of the golf course. All the interior room walls were paneled with

native woods. I do not recall how many bedrooms there were. I seem to recall there

were around eight or ten, but I don’t really remember how many there were. Each was

paneled with a different type of wood and went by the name of the wood. I remember

there were the hickory bedroom and the buckeye bedroom, but I don’t recall what the

others were.

   There were four other houses on the lodge grounds. The house for the on site manager

where we lived was next door to the main building and would have been just out of view

to the left of the lodge in the picture of the lodge. Then much more to the left and just up

river across Tallassee Creek and located right by Tallassee Creek was the ferryman,

Jim Edwards’ house, that sat right on top of an Indian mound. There were a number of

Indian mounds on the property. Then in a little cove about a quarter mile on upriver from

Tallassee Creek were two more houses. Johnny Gibson, who served as the lodge

hunting and fishing guide as well as a jack of all trades for entertaining the guests, and

his family lived in one of them, and the person that took care of the farm and his family

lived in the other. Yes – there was an active farm with a few cows and a couple of riding

horses. The cows provided milk for the families that lived there as well as the lodge. The

horses were for the lodge guests to ride but I seldom recall any doing so. There was

also a two or three car garage cut back into the mountain somewhat behind the lodge

that had rooms above it for the lodge staff, cooks, maids, & butler. I can’t recall if it was

on the upriver side of Maroney Branch or the downriver side. The lodge staff did not live

on site. They were only brought in when the lodge had guests, which was only on

occasional weekends. They were all black people that lived at Alcoa, Tennessee and

seemed to have had weekday jobs at the Alcoa plants at Alcoa. Typically, there were

only three of them, a cook, a housemaid, and a butler, but if there were a larger than

normal number of guests planned there would be more lodge staff brought in.

 

   The manager’s house, the one we lived in, was a nice house for that day and time. Its

exterior was simple white painted wooden weatherboard siding. It had six rooms as I

recall. The upriver side of the house included a living room with a small patio that faced

the river and it had a large stone fireplace with a raised stone hearth. The living room

was followed by a dining room and then the kitchen and a small back porch. A hall ran

down the middle of the house and on the downriver side next to the lodge were three

bedrooms and a bathroom. Across the back of the house was a porch that had been

enclosed and was mostly windows above waist level so I guess it could have been

called it a sun room, but it didn’t get much sun facing the mountain that was directly

behind the house. There was just room for the road that ran from the ferry to the lodge

to pass between the house and the base of the mountain. The house had central heat;

that is, all of it except the enclosed back porch which was my bedroom. It also had a

phone line to the outside world and one of those old time crank telephone on the back

porch to call Jim Edwards to let him know when to take the ferry over to pick up arriving

guests.

     The ferryman’s house was a much smaller simple white weather boarded house with

three rooms and a front porch. I don’t recall if it had a bathroom. I know it had running

water in the kitchen. The front porch was a common gathering point and it was very

conveniently located so you could see the ferry landing across the river and see if

anyone needed ferried across. I spent lots of time on it with Jim. Often some of the old

mountaineers who lived in the mountains behind the lodge would visit Jim and sit on his

porch swapping wild yarns. A number of them, as well as Jim, had been in WWI and in

France so they had lots of war stories.

  The other two houses were not as nice and they were out of view of the lodge guests.

They were more your basic mountain house of that time. I don’t think they had indoor

plumbing, but I am not sure. I was never in either of them. The one Johnny Gibson and

his family lived in had lots of nearby pens for the hunting dogs and a good number of

little individual enclosures for the fighting chickens Johnny raised. He was involved in

cock fighting which I think was illegal even in those days. I don’t know of him ever taking

a lodge guest to a cock fight, but I guess that could have happened. I do remember

seeing some of his cocks that lost their fight and that he had pitched in the river on his

return still floating in the eddy currents caused by the ferry boat.

   There were a number of other buildings on the property including a barn, a milk house,

and some sheds for the farm equipment just up river and somewhat behind the

ferryman’s house. They were maybe about 100 yards from the river and near the start

of the Tallassee Creek valley. There was a small building just out of view to the right of

the main building to store the golfing equipment and grounds keeping equipment. There

was a log cabin a little ways up the mountain to the left of the lodge that was for the

gentlemen to retire to in the evenings to smoke, drink, and play cards. The cabin had

one big room with a couple of pool tables and several card tables. There was also a

small room that had a magnificent display of Indian relics that Jim Edwards had found

on the lodge grounds. There was also a rest room and the big room had a nice big

stone fireplace. There was a nice gradual fairly wide walking path up to the cabin that

started just to the left of the garage.

   For entertainment, the main attraction was the nine-hole golf course. Playing golf

seemed to have been what most of the guests were most interested in, but there were

other things for them to do. There were two tennis courts located somewhat between

the lodge and the river. There were a couple of outdoor deck shuffleboard courts next to

the lodge. There was a large rose and flower garden and goldfish pond on the up river

side of the little branch that ran between the lodge and the manager’s house where we

lived. Google maps show it as Maroney Branch, but I don’t recall us ever using that

name – we just called it “the branch”. It was a good place for me to catch crawfish and

spring lizards for fishing bait. There was a little dam a ways up it that provided a gravity

operated source of water for the gold fish pond and to water the flower garden and

maybe the golf course. It was piped down to them and gravity did the rest. The flower

garden extended almost down to the river. The goldfish pond was right beside the

sidewalk that went between the lodge and the manager’s house. It was above ground

with the sides of the pond built with stone like that used for the lodge. It was maybe 10

feet by 15 feet and there were lots of big frogs that lived in it as well as the goldfish.

There was a large field between the manager’s house and Tallassee Creek. In it, we

had a large garden, and there was a skeet and trap range about midway down it. The

range was in an area that appears to have been flooded and a little upriver from the

post Chilhowee Lake ferry landing. The pre-Chilhowee Lake ferry landing was around

100 yards up river from the mouth of Tallassee Creek. I don’t recall any of the guests

ever using the range. But I figured out how to operate the mechanisms that shot out the

clay pigeons and some of the boys that lived at Scona and I would try to shoot them

with our sling shots. I don’t recall us ever hitting one.

  The lodge also had a couple of about 12 foot aluminum row boats and a couple of about

the same size wooden row boats for guests to use for fishing in the Little Tennessee,

but they were seldom used by the guests. Most of the guests just seemed to prefer to

play golf. My Dad actually built the two wooden row boats shortly after we moved to

Scona because your feet got really cold in the aluminum ones. The temperature of the

river was around 50 degrees because most of the water in it was coming out of the

bottom of the lakes up stream such as Calderwood, Tapoco, and Fontana lakes and the

aluminum boats provide no insulation – your feet got really cold. The river was so cold

no one went swimming in it. There was a nice little pool a little ways up Tallassee Creek

that the Scona boys used as a swimming hole. It was still very cold, but not nearly as

cold as the Little Tennessee.

   A few of the guests would be taken out in the row boats to fish in the somewhat placid

section of the river where the ferry crossing was located, but starting about even with

the lodge was some very serious rapids that small boats dare not venture into. And

going very far up river was limited by more rapids. There was a good place to fish from

the bank up river across from the Calderwood power house and some guests were

taken fishing there. There was a decent gravel road that provided easy access to the

location. It also seems that Johnny Gibson would take some guests fly fishing at

Abrams Creek or some of the other somewhat nearby trout streams in the Park.

   There was no canned (fenced) hunting at the lodge in 1946 or at any time that I know

of. Johnny Gibson did take some guests dove and quail hunting in the Tallassee Creek

and Milligan Creek valleys and on property Alcoa owned down river. In 1946, the

Tallassee Creek valley up to the junction of Milligan Creek was cleared and had fields

used to grow crops to feed the lodge farm animals. The Milligan Creek valley was also

cleared a good way beyond where it ran into Tallassee Creek. Some of the fields might

have been planted with millet or some other grain to attract the birds but I am not sure

of that. The hunting that most guests experienced was “coon” hunting conducted by

Johnny Gibson. He always had a good number of coon hounds as well as bird dogs.

And for those that don’t know what coon hunting consist of; it is typically a bunch of

folks that go out in the woods and build a fire and set around it drinking booze and

listening to the hounds’ bay if they can find a raccoon to chase and tree. The raccoons

may be annoyed a bit but they are generally not harmed. At least, this is the way coon

hunting was conducted at the lodge.

    As was the case with the people that worked in the lodge, the five or so men that

maintained the golf course and the lodge grounds – did not live on the lodge grounds.

They lived back in the mountains behind Scona in a little hamlet known as the Mountain

Settlement. It was about five miles from Scona and they walked as a group to and from

work often leaving for work before daylight. There was a primitive road they used that

actually employed a small creek bed as the roadbed in places. It was barely navigable

with our 1935 Chevrolet. I went along with Dad once in the old Chev to visit one of the

workers for some reason – I am not sure why – but we made the trip OK. On this trip we

passed by my mother’s Uncle Will Lequrie’s place – it was a white weather boarded two

story farm house typical of that day and time and one of the most substantial houses we

saw on the trip. The grounds workers also severed as caddies on the weekends as did

Johnny Gibson and very occasionally my dad when there were an extra-large number of

guests. Dad despised having to caddy and it was one of the main reasons he quit his

job at Scona.

    The lodge grounds were on what had been the Cherokee villages of Tallassee. It had

been one of their main villages along the Little Tennessee River and is mentioned by all

the early explorers to the area. And the site had been occupied by native people for

eons before the Cherokee. There were lots of mounds on the grounds that predated the

Cherokee with the ferryman’s house built right on top of one of them. There were a

couple more very prominent ones in the field leading up to the ferry landing on the

Calderwood side of the river. But the most interesting one was a large rectangular one

parallel to Tallassee Creak maybe a hundred or so feet long in the Tallassee Creak

valley just a little ways below Tallassee Creek Falls. All the mounds had been dug into

by early settlers looking for treasures and ruined from an archaeological standpoint. Our

garden soil was filled with flint chips from years of the Indians making arrow heads on

the site. I found a number of imperfect or incomplete arrow heads in it, but no good

ones. I assumed the ones I found had been discarded due to mishaps in their

manufacturing. Jim Edwards had sacks of arrow heads, spear heads, tomahawks, and

other Indian relics he had found on the property. There were also the displays of some

of the best Indian relics he had found in the lodge and the log cabin up behind the

lodge. About half way between the lodge and the Calderwood power house was an

overhanging bluff that Jim said archaeological evidence indicated had been used for

eons as a shelter. Perhaps the most interesting relics were located a good ways up the

Milligan Creek valley. A good ways up Milligan Creek were a number of American

walnut groves and amongst those groves were some low lying rock outcroppings with

lots of little half spherical indentations in them just the right size for a walnut. Jim said

the Indians made the indentations to place walnuts in to hold them while they cracked

them. The walnuts must have been a very important part of their diet for them to have

made the number of “walnut cracking holders” there were. There was also a great

lookout that the Indians had used on a bluff behind the lodge. It provided an excellent

view both up and down the river. It was easy to reach via a good walking path that lead

off from the little road that went up Maroney Branch by the little dam. I forget whether

the path to the lookout started above or below the dam. I think it was above the dam.

   

   The lodge site was owned by a well off family from New Orleans during the late

eighteen hundreds and used as their summer residence to get away from the heat and

disease of New Orleans during the summer. They went back to at least the eighteen 

eighties because sometime during the eighteen eighties my grandfather Buchanan’s

Mother worked as their cook and house keeper and they lived at the site that was to

become Scona. The property seems to have passed into other hands before Alcoa

bought it in the early nineteen hundreds when they were making plans to build

Calderwood Dam. Alcoa demolished the existing house and built the lodge in the picture

sometime in the nineteen twenties or early nineteen thirties and this lodge building

existed up until Alcoa demolished it in 1996. They had actually stopped using it a few

years earlier. There were some large very tall pecan trees on the lodge grounds that it

was assumed had been planted by the family from New Orleans. They were taller than

the pecan trees you see in a pecan orchard and their pecans were small and bitter so

we did not bother with them but the squirrels really feasted on them. I wonder if any of

them or their offspring still exist today.

    The lodge had two 1942 four door Buick Roadmaster sedans used to transport the

guests and the lodge staff to and from the lodge, and sometimes my dad had the use of

one of them to take us kids that lived on the lodge grounds to and from school. They

were the newest and most elegant cars around since car production had been shut

down in early 1942 due to the shift to war production and hadn’t restarted yet. How

Alcoa got some of the very last cars produced I have no idea. A Mr. Huddleston that

was the overall manager of the lodge most often took care of getting the lodge guests to

and from the Knoxville Airport which is actually located near the city of Alcoa. But

sometimes my dad would use one of the Buicks to pick up guests and he very often

picked up and returned the lodge staff to their homes at Alcoa. I often went along with

him if it was a weekend or in the summer. I don’t recall Dad ever having to pick up

supplies for the lodge and certainly not any alcohol. The lodge did have a good supply

of beer, wine and liquor of all types, but how it got there I have no idea. Both Blount

County that needed to be traversed to get to the lodge and Monroe County where the

lodge was located were dry counties then so it would have taken some sort of

bootlegging operation to get the alcohol there. Perhaps that was one of the odd jobs

Johnny Gibson did. But I really don’t know how it got there – I never saw any being

delivered.

    As I understood the arrangement, it was only the very top echelon of Alcoa executives

that had general use of the lodge: The president, vice-presidents, and the very top

manager of the various major Alcoa plants and their families. Sometimes there would be

special events where lower level executives would get invited to the lodge and there

were a few afternoon only parties that included a variety of people. I don’t recall ever

seeing any children or even teenagers as guests while I lived there. There are some

children in the picture of the lodge so it seems children were guests at some point in

time. And only very occasionally do I recall any women guests. And I saw most of the

guests as they came and went. During the summers and weekends, I spent all the time

I could hanging around the ferry with Jim, especially when the lodge guests were

coming and going. I had quickly learned it could be a very lucrative way to spend my

time. I would tie the ferry up after a crossing and remove the chain that was hooked

across the on and off ramps to keep cars from rolling off. It was a good safety

precaution because there was always the danger one of the vehicle drivers would forget

to engage their parking brakes. When it was time to go back across, I would do the

reverse, untie the ferry and reconnect the chain. And just for being present and doing

what little I did, the lodge guests would give me tips. Typically it was just change, but

often it was a dollar or two, and once someone gave me a five dollar bill which was

really a lot of money in 1946. That was more than the typical adult made in a day in that

part of rural Tennessee. I discovered that the more I looked like a poor little mountain

kid the better the tips so I tried to look and act the part. Heck, they all probably had

unlimited expense accounts.

Below:  Jim's photo of his Dad and the ferry man Jim Edwards.  

     

    The ferry was upgraded while we lived at Scona. When we moved there, the ferry was a real antique. It would only hold two cars or a medium sized truck and was powered by what looked like a very small steamboat strapped to its downriver side. The little boat actually had a small paddle wheel for propulsion, but had a gas motor that powered the paddle wheel instead of a steam engine. The gas motor looked like something from the late eighteen hundreds and was not very reliable. The ferry could cross the river without power by adjusting its angle to the current just as a sailboat adjusts its sails to the wind, but the crossing might take a couple of hours or

even a lot more time depending on the current. The picture is of Jim Edwards and my dad on the ferry with Jim adjusting one of the two big spoked wheels used to

trim the angle of the ferry. You can see the other wheel behind Jim. They looked like the wheels or helms used to steer a ship. They controlled the lengths of the cables that ran from each end of the ferry up to a cable that ran across the river and kept the ferry from being carried downstream. By making one or the other of the tethering cables longer or shorter via the wheels, the angle of the ferry to the river current could be controlled. Even when the motor was operating OK, the ferry was always trimmed to have the current help speed up the crossing.

    Exactly when in 1946 the new ferry arrived I am not sure but it seems it was in operation

by the summer. It had been the ferry further down the river at Niles Ferry near what was

then the little town of Morganton, Tennessee. Morganton was about 14 miles upriver

from where the Little Tennessee runs into the Tennessee. It seems that shortly

beforehand, I don’t know the exact time, the Highway 411 Bridge across the Little

Tennessee near Niles Ferry had been completed and a ferry was no longer needed

there. I assume the new ferry was hauled all the way to its new location by trucks, but I

don’t know exactly how they got it there. They could have brought it part way up the

river. Back in the mid eighteen hundreds a channel had been blasted into in the river up

to a little above Chilhowee so that steamboats could get to a cotton mill located near the

mouth of Abrams Creek. But the mill had been closed since the Civil War and the

channel unused by large boats from that time on as far I know. So I guess they could

have brought it up the river to Chilhowee and portaged it the rest of the way, but I don’t

really know how they got it to Scona other than the last leg would have had to have

been by truck. At that time, there was a gravel road that followed the old railroad bed up

the North side of the river from where Highway 129 left the river to Calderwood so I

guess they could have taken that route instead of up and over the curvy/ twisty more

common 129/115 route to Calderwood. The new ferry was lots larger than the old one. It

could hold six cars in two rows of three, but I never saw more than three cars on it at a

time. It had a much more modern motor. Its motor looked like a big outboard motor that

was mounted so it could be pivoted 180 degrees. It was turned one way to go across

the river from Scona to Calderwood and then turned the other way to return back to

Scona. The new ferry could also be trimmed so the current helped move it along.

Sometime before the new ferry was operational, Alcoa needed a large bulldozer on the

Scona side of the river and they felt it was too heavy for the old ferry so they took it

across the river at the old fording location a little ways downriver. I went up to the Indian

lookout and watched it make its way slowly across the river. It made it OK. They used it

to improve the river channel for better run off up near the outlet of the powerhouse.

They would close off the Calderwood Dam gates and cause the river level to fall a lot so

they could take the bulldozer out into the riverbed and work on the channel. When they

would lower the river for this and other reasons, Jim Edwards and I would take one of

the lodge row boats out and recover lots of lost fishing lures that had gotten snagged by

roots and sunken logs and other rip-rap, but were exposed with the low water. I still

have a few of the fishing plugs we recovered.

   

   The lodge cuisine had an outstanding reputation. I never had a meal in the lodge, but I

did have some of the leftovers. Typically, by late afternoon Sunday all the guests,

cooks, maids, and butlers were gone and my mother would make a tour of the lodge to

see that it was all secure, doors locked, lights out, and any leftover food taken care of.

Taking care of any leftover food typically meant taking it to our house for our dinner. If

there were a lot of leftovers, Mother would take some to the other two families that lived

on site or the ferryman, Jim Edwards. Jim always had first priority being single and with

no family. This closing up of the lodge was the only direct lodge related function I

remember my mother doing. She was not involved in any way with the operation of the

lodge or entertaining the guests. The most common entrée at Scona was Cornish hens

and the most common dessert was strawberry shortcake with rum infused into the

whipped cream. We had lots of both. Whipped cream with rum in it was a little different

taste than us kids were accustomed to, but we liked it. The food and everything at the

lodge was free for the guests. Access to Scona had to have been a really great job perk

for those Alcoa employees that reached the corporate level to have it, and it would have

provided a splendid little getaway for those guests that got invited to it. It was a much

different time and place with much different tax laws and ethics requirements for both

the Alcoa executives and their guests. It is a real shame that it is gone, but the coming

of Chilhowee Lake really took away a lot of its original specialness and character and

today’s tax and ethics requirements would make it impossible for it to operate as it did in

its heydays. The experience of living there a year was a truly wonderfully and unique

experience for me, and It was one of the saddest days of my childhood when I heard we

would be leaving Scona.

Below:  a photo sent by Jim with an article about the planned auctioning of the furnishings of Scona Lodge after its demolition.