Taken and Delivered - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 140

the protected river corridor for management and logistical reasons. Many longtime forest
users, however, did not understand the uneven road closure policy.
After 1974, Forest Service managers continually used a public safety argument to justify
the selective road closures in Georgia and South Carolina. In light of the high fatality
rates and drowning incidents that resulted from the popularity of Deliverance , Forest Ser-
vice personnel wanted to limit easy access to the river's dangerous sections where visiting
hikers and swimmers might (and did) get swept over rapids or pinned by the river's current.
Most of the local users did not float the river, but they had used the old roads to access fa-
vorite campsites, swimming spots, and picnic areas. Or as former Forest Service recreation
planner Charlie Huppuch recalled, people would drive vehicles into the Chattooga River
and wash them. 81 When the Forest Service finally gated roads after 1974, most trout fisher-
men faced less than a one-mile walk “to their favorite holes.” 82 These restrictions and user
policies did coincide with the river's evolution from a site of local leisure to a regional and
national destination for select visitors or well-equipped river-runners. Despite the Forest
Service's and local newspapers' attempts to explain the road closures before and after the
fact, local residents who may not have chosen to participate in the designation process re-
sponded to what they interpreted as a continued loss of local control and traditional access
rights to the river.
“Retro Frontiersmen,” as defined by the late Jack Temple Kirby, who had watched in-
dividuals, corporations, and federal agencies close the “open range” and enclose resources
once considered freely accessible for generations, turned to an old tool and instrument of
protest. The forest fires that raged between 1974 and 1978, according to one local historian,
were arsonists' responses to the Chattooga's final designation as a wild and scenic river. 83
Arson as a form of protest was certainly not new to the Chattooga River's valley. In early
1972, two men and one woman were caught “setting woods fires” in the Warwoman Dell
Wildlife Management Area. 84 Wet conditions, however, thwarted attempted arson in the
spring and fall of 1975, but drier conditions in February 1976 contributed to more than
fifty fires that burned 800 acres on a single weekend in Georgia's Rabun County. Chatta-
hoochee Forest Service supervisor Thomas attributed the arson to a “fire-style protest of
state and federal restrictions” by a minority of “angry mountaineers” deprived of access
and “exiled” from the Chattooga River corridor. But he also linked the fire-style protest to
the past, dating to 1911, “when the Forest Service began regulating timber cutting, clos-
ing access to protect rivers and blocking off old logging roads.” In the course of two short
months during 1976, Georgia's Chattahoochee National Forest lost 3,800 acres to fire in
three counties—approximately as much forest burned in sixty days as had been burned in
the previous two years—all in part of the larger local reaction to forest policy and feder-
al intrusion throughout the mountain region in the 1970s. 85 According to another source,
between 1969 and 1973, South Carolina's Andrew Pickens Ranger District—which the