"An American Ideal"
(Text adapted from TVA.gov content of the same name)
New urban theorists are hard at work designing the town of the future. But Norris, Tennessee,
built by TVA nearly 70 years ago, beat them all to the punch.
In recent years, communities
across America have experimented with whole new ways of thinking about city planning. Urban-growth boundaries, meant to preserve
the farmland and wilderness on a city’s fringes, are being approved. To keep themselves compact and efficient, some
cities are beginning to mandate smaller yards, and the porch is making a surprising comeback.
New towns like Seaside and Celebration, Florida, are designed from the ground up to be pedestrian-friendly and to
foster a feeling of community. New Urbanists startle their elders with ideas about clustering commercial areas in pods to
prevent sprawl along highway corridors.
But if you ask today’s most radical
New Urbanist to draw up a picture of the ideal community of the future, don’t be surprised if he or she sketches something
that looks very much like Norris, Tennessee. That’s the same Norris TVA planned and built back in 1933.
With the help of designer Earle Draper, TVA Chairman Arthur Morgan created a town that still seems
forward-thinking today. In many ways Norris, set in the Tennessee hills 20 miles north of Knoxville, is the embodiment of
these brave new 21st-century ideals.
The immediate purpose of the town was to house the workers building Norris Dam
four miles away on the Clinch River. The second purpose, which may have been even more important to Morgan, was to show America
that cooperative living works.
The houses would be built on a modest and tasteful
scale, with an eye to community as much as comfort. In design, they would balance the traditions of the Tennessee Valley (building
materials of natural stone and native cedar, and a porch on every house) with modern conveniences. In this rural region, which
in 1933 was less than 10 percent electrified, Norris would be fully electric, with ceiling heat and refrigerators.
And it would be completely walkable. The people of Norris would be able to visit their neighbors,
mail a package, fill a prescription, do some light grocery shopping, and meet the kids at school, all without getting into
a car. The town would be surrounded by a buffer zone of protected, undeveloped forest that would keep the ugly outside world
at bay.
Drive into Norris on a spring afternoon. There’s not much traffic to obey the 20-mile-an-hour speed limit. Most of the
houses, with their natural chimneys and cedar shingles, blend into the forest. Many don’t face the street directly,
but turn toward one another, as if in conversation. Between them, paths take off through the woods in different directions.
It seems almost like summer camp.
A meandering few blocks
away is one of the largest buildings in Norris, two stories plus a capacious attic. It was originally the TVA ceramics lab.
It represents one of the more poignant stories connected with Norris’s founding. Arthur Morgan dreamed that the town
would live on long after work on Norris Dam had ended. His idea was to use native materials and skills to start a ceramics
industry, which would sustain Norris after the dam was finished. It never worked out as he hoped. Ironically, the home of Arthur Morgan, who planned the town as an egalitarian haven, is different from any of the
others. Located on East Circle near the town center, it’s much larger, and it stands so far from the road that you can
only catch glimpses of its blue-gray siding between the trees. Morgan may have justified the size and privacy of his abode
with the fact that he and his wife, Lucy, were occasionally called upon to entertain Eleanor Roosevelt as a houseguest.
Nearby, old Norris High is still there. It’s now a busy middle school facing the old Commons
in the center of town. This big Georgian-style brick building was once the largest electrically heated structure in the entire
world.
Some things have changed in Norris. TVA gave up control of the city in 1948, when the government auctioned it off; a Philadelphia
consortium bought Norris for just over $2 million and sold it in pieces, mainly to residents. If it’s still idyllic
these many years later, that may be a testament to its near-perfect design—and to the will of the people who choose
to live here.
Norris is primarily a bedroom community for Knoxville, Oak Ridge,
and other pragmatic cities. Many of its residents aren’t proletarian factory workers, but retirees and young parents
who want their kids to grow up in a community where the crime rate is very nearly zero.
But
even after a 60-year absence, Arthur Morgan, the utopian dreamer, would know his way around. Today, as many cities construct
bike paths and consider urban-growth boundaries, America seems to be moving slowly in the direction Norris, and TVA, pioneered
in 1933. Norris may not be the self-sustaining model city that Arthur Morgan envisioned back then—but somehow it’s
still an American ideal.
