| Summary: | (6:04) Holland Greer discusses the effect of the Tennessee Valley Authority on economic and agricultural conditions in the area. This interview was conducted as part of a joint project of the Music Preservation Society and the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library. This project focus was oral lhistory interviews with area residents who had lived or worked on the Tennessee River.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Holland Greer
November 6, 2007
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Patti Hannah and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 3
Rhonda Haygood: How would you compare, based on his time as a tow boat pilot, the economic conditions before and after building the dam.
Holland Greer: Well, it was, this place was agricultural and somewhat depressed, you know the whole economy. They had farmed out the land. They came in and cleared the field way back early and planted cotton that grew up you know four, five, six feet high some times. And as it eroded off, down, washed down the streams and in the creeks and into the river and on down, the cotton came down, down, down as they farmed the nutrients out of the land. Got on down to half knee-high, they couldn’t make a living. That’s why a lot of them went west . New land, repeated the whole process. So TVA came in at a good time to rescue a whole bunch of those people, cause they worked thousands of people up and down the river not only clearing the trees and brush away before they flooded the land and raised the water up but on construction projects. You know, Wheeler, then Pickwick, and then Guntersville, a lot of those people followed the work up and down the river. And it was good money to what they were used to. Reynolds came in later on, 1940, did the same thing. Worked thousands of people, they bought farms and built houses, and really lived a good life compared to what it was before.
RH: Do you remember FDR’s visit?
HG: No, I don’t. I’ve seen pictures of it and a lot of talk, but I don’t remember anything about it.
RH: Okay. What would you say how the river has changed?
HG: Well, when they backed the water up, of course they got a lot of good farm land first off, and then all the sloughs and hollows coming back off the river. You could take a boat and go way on back up in there and of course there was good fishing and ducks and geese and other fowl would come up in there and feed. And then all this cotton land, corn land, laying out in the winter time, it eroded and the top soil went off down into these hollows. And it’s just amazing to me how far out towards the river that they have filled in. Some of that where it used to be water this deep has trees on it now. Real big. So eventually, another fifty years or so a lot of these things will be out to the river. It cuts down on the flood control capacity because you don’t have as much space to put water.
RH: Okay. What were the people like that he worked with and how many did it take to operate the tow boat? What were there jobs and that type thing?
HG: Two, on the small tug boat just two, the deck hand and the pilot. I have a picture at home of my daddy and Gaston Fields. He lived here in Florence, and he was Daddy’s deck hand at one time.
RH: So what kind of thing? Did he ever tell you exactly what he did besides move the barges around to operate the tug boat? Is there anything special that he would talk about his day? Any dangerous things that came up for him or scary?
HG: Well of course it’s always dangerous, a construction job like that. In fact, Gilbert Williams, he was standing up beside a concrete wall up there and the wind blew a barge that was not tied off, killed him.
PH: Umm
RH: Okay, any special events or experiences your dad was involved in as a tow boat pilot?
HG: Not that I recall. You know he just went to work up there. Of course, you know, you had carpenters and iron workers and electricians, there were just hundreds of them. One odd thing that was wasteful then and would be wasteful today, they would be out on that dam on scaffolding up there and doing all this and they had nail aprons, and nails and so forth and crow bars, claw hammers. When the whistle blew for quitting time, they’d just empty all that stuff out and off down in the river it went. When they came back they’d get another hammer, another crow bar and fill up the nails. They really did.
RH: I would have thought that that would have been unusual for them in that time period because things were expensive.
HG: Well, yeah, it seemed odd to me but they did it.
RH: Wow.
PH: How strange.
HG: Big time, you know, we were on a roll back then. But TVA, they were wasteful and always have been, just one of those things.
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