Pigeon River

Off the Balsams

The Pigeon is a Haywood County river for most of its length. The West Fork rises below Mount Hardy at 5,320 feet and the East Fork below South Spring Top at 4,190, both on the north side of the Great Balsams. The Mountaineer reckons the river falls from about 6,000 feet to about 1,400 in its forty miles through the county, and that nearly all of Haywood drains out by it. Hominy Creek, which goes east to the French Broad in Buncombe County, is the one large exception. The river takes its name from the passenger pigeon, which once came through the valley on migration.

Below Canton and Clyde it runs north. Cataloochee Creek comes in out of the eastern Smokies at Waterville Lake, and Big Creek joins at the Waterville powerhouse, just short of the state line. From there the river runs about 26 miles through Cocke County, Tennessee, and enters the French Broad near Newport, on Douglas Reservoir, at about 1,001 feet. Wikipedia gives it seventy miles and a basin of about 704 square miles, neither figure cited.

The mill

A pulp mill opened at Canton in 1908, and from then on, in the wildlife commission’s 2004 account, the river below it ran dark. It carried dioxins, furans and chloroform downstream, and North Carolina classified the river’s best use as waste disposal. People in Tennessee were complaining by 1911 or 1912, depending on the source. In 1983 Tennessee sued North Carolina. The EPA vetoed North Carolina’s permit for the mill in 1985, and a federal judge upheld the veto.

The fight came to a head in 1988. Hearings in Asheville and Knoxville drew about 11,000 people, which the Christian Science Monitor called the largest turnout in the history of EPA hearings, and the agency got 160,000 letters. EPA tests that summer found 80 parts per trillion of dioxin in brown trout fillets below the mill, where the FDA advised against eating fish above 25. North Carolina closed the river to fishing from Canton to the state line. Downstream, Newport pumped its drinking water six miles over a mountain rather than treat the Pigeon. Upstream, Champion International employed about 1,800 people at Canton with a payroll of $100 million and said the eighty-year-old plant could not meet Tennessee’s color standard without shrinking.

The cleanup took two decades. North Carolina lifted its last fish advisory in August 2001. Tennessee had told people in April 1989 to eat nothing from the river, eased that in 1996, and by 2002 its biologists were finding no fish over the state’s dioxin limit, though they still called the water’s color objectionable at low flow near the line. The last advisory below the mill was lifted in January 2007. By then the mill was worker-owned and, by the wildlife commission’s account, discharging no measurable dioxin. The lawsuits ran on. A jury awarded $2 million to Tennessee landowners in 2005, in the third class action against the mill, and in 2010 the mill’s permit was given a variance from the color standard. On March 6, 2023, Pactiv Evergreen announced it would close the mill, with about 1,100 jobs in Canton.

The dam and the tunnel

Below Canton the river runs into Waterville Lake, behind Walters Dam, a concrete arch 180 feet high and 800 long that Carolina Power & Light began in 1927 and finished in 1930. A tunnel 6.2 miles long carries the water north to a brick powerhouse at Waterville, rated at 112 megawatts, and leaves about twelve miles of river bypassed. The state’s 2002 dioxin report credits the dam with holding back contaminated sediment. Under the federal license renewed in 1994, the utility had to put water back in the bypassed reach once the river met stated standards. Rafting on the upper river starts at the powerhouse. On September 27, 2024, during Hurricane Helene, Cocke County officials reported that the dam had suffered a catastrophic failure and ordered evacuations downstream, including in Newport. Duke Energy, which owns it now, said the reports were false.

Putting the fish back

By the wildlife commission’s estimate the river once held about 40 kinds of mussel and 95 native fishes. Pollution had wiped out every mollusk in the river and many of the fishes, and the dams left no way for them to come back on their own. “There wasn’t a natural colonization route because of the dams on the river,” Steve Fraley of the commission told the Smoky Mountain News. So people carried them. Snails went back in 1996 and 1999 and nine common mussels in 2000. The Pigeon River Recovery Project, begun in 2001 by state, federal, university and industry partners, moved more than 29,000 fish of 20 species and 220,000 snails of six species by 2010, taken from the French Broad basin and the upper Pigeon.

Gilt darters released in the lower river were breeding by 2003, and a 2005 survey found them in nearly every riffle. Shiners stocked above Waterville Lake in 2004 were probably lost that September, when the floods from Hurricanes Frances and Ivan collapsed part of Interstate 40 into the gorge and shut the mill for about three weeks. The project planned to stock them again. By 2010 silver and telescope shiners had settled into fifteen miles of the North Carolina river, and gilt and stripetail darters and the mountain brook lamprey had taken hold in Tennessee.