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Clinch Trails Blog
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Re-routing the Clinch River near St. PaulApril Cain, a
St. Paul native now living in Richmond, emailed me some fascinating
information to supplement my tale of Oxbow Lake's
construction.
She wrote: "Oxbow Lake exists because of my father's "impossible dream" of moving the Clinch River so that it would not flood South Saint Paul almost every year."  April pointed me to Do
or Die or Get Along: A Tale of Two Appalachian Towns by Peter
Crow. The book devotes most of a chapter to the four years of
meetings and deal-making required to reroute the river. An
unlikely trio of HUD, TVA, and the state highway department banded
together to get the job done, united in the goals of moving the town
out of the floodplain, providing a commercial district and space for a
wastewater treatment plant, and opening up a path for a new highway
through St. Paul.The group needed to get a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to reroute the river, and that in turn required a positive recommendation from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the EPA. Unfortunately for the plan's proponents, the portion of the Clinch River that ran through St. Paul was chock full of endangered mussels, and neither Fish and Wildlife nor EPA were thrilled by the idea. In the end, Senator John Warner had to pull some political strings to move the project along. Whether or not the river rerouting was good for the Clinch River's aquatic life, residents of St. Paul were largely in favor. Tom Fletcher, one of the players in the drama, described what now stands in the river's place: "This whole area
that houses all these buildings, the river went right through the
middle. It is a shopping center, which features both Food Lion
and Food City. It has a bank, a Hardee's, a Pizza Plus, a Dollar
General, a Family Dollar, Rite-Aid Pharmacy, Riverside Medical
Clinic. We have a space here that we use as a softball field for
our high school team. We have a Chevron, an Exxon, another
pharmacy, a Burger King. There is a plaque in the bank where the
center of the river used to be." Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed.
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