Here's what's at the bottom of Lake Jocassee

Eric Connor | Anderson Independent Mail

Editor's note: This story was first published in The Greenville News May 6, 2005

Divers find old lodge in Lake Jocassee largely preserved

A young couple's rented kayak cuts a subtle wake across the calm, emerald waters of Lake Jocassee.

Beneath the leisurely rowing of their oars a pastoral Atlantis rests in an endless sleep.

Debbie Fletcher knows what ghosts haunt the desolate bottom.

As tiny waves wash spring pollen onto the Devil's Fork boat ramp, tears well in her eyes at the thought of what ceased to be more than three decades ago, a casualty of hydroelectricity.

Looking over the water toward the kayakers destined for Double Springs, she can almost see where the Whitewater River once carved Jocassee Valley, a community that provided sustenance for farmers yet to join the Industrial Revolution and, years later, refuge for town and city folk escaping the summer melt.

The Whitewater converged like fingers on a hand with four sibling streams that are lost, now nothing more than an unseen source of pristine reservoir providing scenic mountain recreation and power for progress.

Today, Fletcher has found a measure of peace with her loss, 32 years after Duke Power dammed the valley's rivers to create the Jocassee Hydroelectric Station. Her comfort resides far below the shimmering waters that give way to pitch black night and stirred powdered soil.

It is a relic standing three stories high, preserved by the perpetually frigid temperatures of the deep, defying time's merciless erosion of the valley's history.

It is her home. And divers have found it.

Ten years ago, Fletcher swam in Lake Jocassee for the first time. She quickly jumped out, because, she says, "it felt like a graveyard."

Now, a measure of bitterness has been removed from bittersweet memories.

"It's easier to come here now that I've found the house," she says.

Heart of the valley

The Attakulla Lodge was long considered the heart of the Jocassee Valley community, says Fletcher, who spent summers in the lodge her family owned and wrote a history book, "Whippoorwill Farewell: Jocassee Remembered," about the valley.

For half a century, the sprawling wooden lodge operated as a bed-and-breakfast and stood as a beacon for any who desired rest 20 yards from the river's aqua waters.

Fletcher's grandfather closed the lodge to the public in the 1960s, except for friends the family would invite for weeklong summer getaways in the valley.

She spent her adolescence galvanizing memories of the lodge, before 1973 when the dam forced the Whitewater River's waters to flow upstream for the first time.

Fletcher remembers floating downstream atop inner tubes as trout nibbled at her toes; keeping Coca-Colas frosty in the not-cool-but-cold river waters; lying in her bed studying the horizontal slats in the lodge's walls and wondering why they didn't look like the walls in her Columbia home.

The children would bathe in a galvanized tub filled with water heated on the stove, then slide beneath piles of handmade quilts and blankets on cold evenings because the wood stove in the kitchen didn't give off enough heat.

A small bowling alley next door provided entertainment. Its pins had to be reset by hand.

Fletcher's grandfather had bough the lodge in the 1920s from the Whitmires, a preeminent family who first settled the valley as German immigrants. It isn't certain when the Whitmire family built the lodge (presumably sometime in the late 1800s), but it first opened for business in 1904.

The lodge was named after Cherokee Chief Attakullakulla ("Little Carpenter"). He was the father of the famed Princess Jocassee ("Place Of The Lost One"), who, legend has it, drowned herself upon learning of her lover's death.

By the time the Whitmires and other white settlers staked their claim at the turn of the 19th century, the Cherokee natives had been forced deeper into the hills and onward to the Oklahoma plains. The Cherokee lost their land to settlers; the settlers lost their land to water, a continuous cycle of claims made and yielded.

Deep roots

The Attakulla Lodge was but one piece of Jocassee Valley.

Not far from the lodge, the Victorian-inspired Whitewater Inn provided comfort for travelers before it became Camp Jocassee, a private camp for girls, in the 1920s.

"The population of the valley would triple when the girls would come in, because sometimes they'd have as many as 100 campers," says Claudia Hembree, a descendant of the Whitmires who grew up in the valley until 1957 and wrote, in longhand, "Jocassee Valley," a history of the area.

Summer days in the Jocassee Valley dawdled by. Not many pictures were taken during the Great Depression, Hembree says, and memories are simple, defined by the placidness of it all. She recalls taking long walks along the river in the early spring as the rare, indigenous Oconee Bell was brave enough to show its petals in the still-cold air.

"It was always a tradition for the kids to take a walk and see who could find the first Oconee Bell bloom," Hembree says.

She holds onto the flower as a symbol of what the valley represented. Like the fickle flower that doesn't like being moved, those few who remained in the valley when Duke Power came weren't eager to leave, she says.

In the 1940s, Duke Power had begun to research building a power station in the neighboring Eastatoee Valley, where Lake Keowee now entertains pontoon boats and lakefront homes, says Shirley Partain, a Duke Power spokeswoman. The valley was flooded in 1965, followed by Jocassee.

The Eastatoee Valley is where Dot Jackson spent her summers. Like Jocassee, it was, Jackson says, a "kind of idyllic place" where farmers lived off the land and had little use for money.

"These people didn't just own, they loved the valley," she says.

Jackson remembers her mother telling her of the story of how she married her father in 1922, 10 years before Jackson was born. Her mother's uncle objected to her mother marrying Jackson's father, as he was seen as stepping on the lower rung of the social ladder. So, the uncle shot her father.

It would be years before the couple could return to the valley.

Life in both valleys would not last much longer upon their return.

A local surveyor from Clemson had come in to study the feasibility of building dams in both valleys, Hembree says. Life along the Whitewater River always felt temporary, she says, when her father talked of the survey.

"Somewhere in my mind, I knew it was going to happen," she says. "I remember, even as a young child, my dad talking about that survey. He said, 'One of these days they're going to come in here and put a dam on this river, and it's going to be gone forever.'"

Beneath the deep

In preparation for Duke Power's 385-feet high dam, the company bought land, sold the timber and razed everything in its path to remove potential obstructions.

But the Attakulla Lodge was one institution the bulldozers spared. Fletcher says only after the valley flooded did her family agree to sell 20 acres of the land on which the lodge sat. Duke Power couldn't tear down what it didn't own.

As a result, the lodge stood as the waters rose. Unlike visions of water rushing in furiously as depicted in the movie "O, Brother, Where Art Thou?", the valley flooded slowly, allowing the lodge to stay largely intact.

Fletcher didn't watch as the waters rose to create the 7,500-acre lake with 75 miles of shoreline, but she says her Uncle Fred reported seeing from an airplane what looked like the roof of the lodge floating away and shards getting tangled up in trees. As it turns out, that wasn't true. It most likely was the roof of the building that housed the bowling alley.

Two years ago, professional diver Bill Routh called Fletcher in Columbia to ask her about the lodge. Routh, who owns "Off The Wall" charters on Lake Jocassee, had been picking the brains of anyone who researched the valley's history.

Earlier, Routh had found the site of an old cemetery. His group of divers found artificial flowers piled near a tree at the lake bottom, and they spent time during the dives propping up headstones. They also discovered the stone columns framing the girls camp, as well as a Chinese boat sunk in 65 feet of water, a popular spot for diver training exercises.

Central to Routh's belief that Attakulla could still be standing was the fact that the lodge had a masonry chimney that was anchored in the ground and rose through all three floors. That, he thought, would provide enough support to withstand the tide.

Using GPS data culled by comparing survey maps, Routh took an Aug. 4, 2004, nighttime boat ride to the general area where he thought the lodge might be. Using a remote camera from the boat, he found the lodge and videotaped it, and shortly after gathered his diving buddies to explore the lodge.

Only an incredibly skilled diver can swim down 300 feet. The trip takes 21/2 hours, and only 20 minutes of it is spent actually touring the lodge. The descent is a mere five minutes, but to avoid suffering a deadly case of the bends a diver must ascend slowly over the course of two hours, using a guide line to make sense of which way is up.

What the divers found was a building largely preserved, down to the paint on the handrails. The frigid temperatures and lack of oxygen had helped slow the decomposition process. They had landed on a portion of the lodge's roof.

Fletcher had always regretted not grabbing some piece of her beloved home, even if it were just a doorknob. While swimming around the lodge, a diver, Charles Johnson, pulled loose a wooden panel, a piece of a sidelight that had been mounted next to the front door.

He brought it with him to the surface. It now hangs in Fletcher's dining room.

But there was one other piece missing: a way for Fletcher to connect from above with Attakulla and its eternal resting place.

After years of compiling information, Fletcher had published a book in 2003 that recounts the history of the valley, the lodge and memories of family. The book has been updated to recount Fletcher's underwater reunion with her home.

A month after the first dive, the group headed out again, this time to set a copy of Fletcher's book — sealed in Plexiglas — on the front porch of the lodge.

Attakulla has lost countless memories in the deep where a beloved valley slumbers.

But it has been found, and memories begin anew.