Tuckasegee River

Panthertown to Fontana

The Tuckasegee starts high in southeastern Jackson County, North Carolina, where Panthertown and Greenland creeks come together. The first stretch, from the source down to Tennessee Creek, is classed by the state as Outstanding Resource Waters. The river flows northwest through the middle of the county, takes the West Fork at the community of Tuckasegee, passes Cullowhee, Dillsboro and Bryson City, and enters the Little Tennessee in Fontana Lake at about 1,703 feet, in Swain County. Wikipedia gives it sixty miles and a 655 square mile basin.

The Gazetteer derives the name from Tsiksitsi, a Cherokee town that stood beside the river, and glosses it “crawling terrapin,” for the sluggish water. Wikipedia gives a different word, daksiyi, “Turtle Place.” The gage at Bryson City has recorded 61,600 cubic feet a second, which is a fast terrapin.

The Smokies’ south side

Bryson City grew up on both banks. The river’s largest tributary, the Oconaluftee, rises near Newfound Gap in the middle of the national park, runs through Cherokee and comes in near Ela. Wikipedia lists Deep Creek, Noland Creek and Forney Creek among the Tuckasegee’s tributaries too, and the state counts those among the best-known trout streams in North Carolina. Its 1999 surveys rated the stream insects in Deep Creek and the Oconaluftee excellent. The state’s verdict on the whole subbasin that year was “excellent,” with one exception. Beech Flats Prong, at the top of the Oconaluftee below US 441, ran acid from the Anakeesta Formation, the same pyritic rock that fouled the Tellico’s North River when a highway was cut through it.

Cherokee people have lived on this water a very long time. Kituwa, held to be the Cherokee mother town, stood in a valley beside the Tuckasegee, around a mound about 170 feet across and five feet high where, the tradition holds, the Cherokee received their laws and their first fire. The Eastern Band bought the land back in 1996 from a family that had owned it for most of the twentieth century. Stone fish weirs, which Wikipedia credits to people who lived here before the Cherokee, still show in the riverbed at low water. The most intact, a V of stones, is near Webster.

Dams above, one gone below

The upper river works for Duke Energy. Its East Fork project runs the Tennessee Creek, Bear Creek and Cedar Cliff powerhouses, and the West Fork project the Glenville powerhouse, on Lake Glenville, and the Tuckasegee. Together they make about 51 megawatts, and federal regulators relicensed them in May 2011. Duke Power had bought them from Nantahala Power and Light in 1988.

Lower down, at Dillsboro, stood a small dam twelve feet high and 310 feet long, built in 1913 by the Fish and Wildlife Service’s account, or in 1909 as a wooden dam later rebuilt and raised, by the dam safety engineers’. It was rated at 225 kilowatts, and Duke no longer ran it. Under 2004 settlements for relicensing its western North Carolina dams, Duke agreed to give it up and surrendered the license in 2007, and the Jackson County commissioners spent several years in court trying to keep it, arguing that Dillsboro needed the power and the old dam brought visitors. They lost. Demolition was under way by late January 2010.

What came back

Before the dam came down, biologists made three passes through the riverbed just below it and moved 1,137 Appalachian elktoe, a federally endangered mussel, upstream out of the way, along with 54 wavy-rayed lampmussels. The Tuckasegee population of the elktoe is one of the largest left. In 2002 the Fish and Wildlife Service had named 26 miles of the river, from Cullowhee to just north of Bryson City, as critical habitat, one of six surviving populations then known. The same rule noted that the mussel was already gone from parts of the upper Tuckasegee, where the impoundments had weighed heaviest. By October 2010 elktoe were living in the reach that had been a pond for a century, and only seven were confirmed dead at the relocation site.

The fish surveys before removal found 38 species in the river below the dam, 24 above it and 11 in the reservoir. A Fish and Wildlife Service biologist said the sicklefin redhorse, a sucker up to 26 inches long that the state lists as threatened, would gain another ten miles of river. The Wildlife Resources Commission says the redhorse runs up the Tuckasegee and the Oconaluftee from the Little Tennessee to spawn over cobble in late winter or early spring.

Anglers know the river for a different reason. The Commission stocks a delayed-harvest section from the NC 107 bridge at Lovesfield down to Dillsboro, catch and release from October into early June, with brook, rainbow and brown trout.