ANDERSON COUNTY — Wanda Pruitt Sizemore, 71, keeps two sheets of onionskin paper in a Sunbeam bread bag in the drawer under her oven, and both of them are for the same house.
The first is dated March 1935. Her grandparents, Orville and Ada Pruitt, filled it out after a TVA survey crew drove stakes across their upper field to mark where the water from Norris Dam would stop, which put the house about forty feet under. The Pruitts took the house apart and moved it up the ridge a little over two miles, a distance the form gives as 2.3, and were paid the mileage.
The second is dated October 1936. A second crew came through with better instruments and the stakes moved. The house had been on dry ground all along. “Mamaw said the man told them they were welcome to stay put,” Sizemore said. “Granddaddy said he’d already paid to have a well dug up there and he wasn’t going to waste it, and she said she was not hauling water up that ridge another winter with the garden sitting empty down below. So they went back down.”
The return trip was also 2.3 miles, and TVA paid that one too. Sizemore has never been able to find out whether anybody at the agency noticed.
What bothers her is the porch swing. It hung from the same two hooks for decades, and those hooks went in on the ridge in 1935, in a slightly different spot on the porch than the first ones, because her grandfather didn’t have the original measurements with him. When they moved back down he used the ridge holes and left the old ones open. “You can still see them, about eight inches over,” she said. “Every one of the grandchildren has asked me about those, and I tell them the swing was up on the ridge for a while.”