Book 3/12: Jordan Lake

[dorothean]

Title: Jordan Lake
Author: Heather Leigh Wallace
Publication date: 2010
Number of pages: 127
Genre: History (local history)
Book number/goal: 3/12 books on United States history

Review: This is part of the series Images of America, which are book-length photoessays about the history of local communities and sites. Jordan Lake is an artificial lake, filled in 1982, near where I live in central North Carolina. While doing real estate title searches for my job, I've sometimes come across documents from when the United States acquired land in order to build the lake, and I was curious about how that happened: why was the lake built in Chatham County? who wanted it and who didn't, and why? what people lost their land to the project and what did they say about it?

I thought this book would answer my questions, but it really ... didn't.

I did learn that one major reason for the lake being built where it is, was that this area was really prone to floods. It was devastated by Hurricane #9 in 1945 (this was before they started giving hurricanes human names). When the area's growing population needed a larger water supply, I guess the best place to flood, physically speaking, was one that flooded naturally already.

I did also learn a bit about the people who owned the land that became the lake, although not nearly as much as I wanted to. (And nothing about the sharecroppers, mostly black, who didn't own the land, but did work on it. What happened to them?)

I learned that there were environmentalist protests against the lake, and that some of the protestors went on to be enthusiastic supporters of preserving the lake and its surroundings, but the author did not actually ever say why environmentalists opposed the lake originally.

There are a lot of interesting photos of the farmland and buildings that used to be on the lake site, of the lake in progress, of the people involved in planning and building the lake, and of people currently enjoying the lake. The problem is the captions, which form most of the book's text. They are repetitive, clumsily written, and provide incomplete information with insufficient historical context.

Example: in a section about "The Locals Then and Now" there's a photo of the 1931 Pittsboro High School basketball team. All its members are young white men. The caption describes where the original Pittsboro school was located, and then says, "Most students in Chatham County attended Pittsboro High School ... Horton High School was merged with Pittsboro High School in 1970 to form Northwood High School."

This is a missed opportunity that pisses me off. In North Carolina, when you read about schools being merged in the 1960s and 70s, you can assume that this is because of desegregation. Sure enough, Horton High School was the high school for black students. It was named for George Moses Horton, who is one of the most important African Americans in nineteenth-century North Carolina history. It is completely meaningless to repeat the fact that Horton and Pittsboro High Schools were merged without mentioning race.

In my view, one of the highest functions of local history is to take places and people well known to one's audience and show how they are part of a bigger picture. If you don't do that -- if you don't even present a coherent narrative -- then you should present your work as scrapbooking, not history.

I do not recommend this book at all, unless you also know Jordan Lake and would enjoy the pictures for their own sake.