GF

The Widow Belivet had one child, a spinster daughter named Therese. Therese taught sixth grade at Glen School. Her marital status had kept her teaching longer than many female American teachers; she was thirty-nine this Friday, May 28, 1943.

Glen, Alabama, was once a small but thriving port on the Tennessee River, but the massive Tennessee Valley Authority dam completed in 1924 ended that nigh-century of Glen’s prosperity. Before the dam, Glen sat at the foot of a forty-mile stretch of rapids, which prohibited river transport above that point. For over a century, Glen had been where goods were loaded or unloaded off riverboats for land transport east past Sally, Alabama, to the head of the rapids. The head was where the Elk River flowed into the Tennessee River. These shoals ran the length of Plain County, Alabama. The Belivet and Aird families had made their fortunes managing the river traffic shipments.

Glen now held on economically via smatterings of logging, commercial fishing (catfish), trapping, and farming. Farming was challenging in the rocky soil and hilly terrain of these foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

At least Glen didn’t suffer the fate of its Boom County sister city across the river. Riverton now lay submerged under the broad man-engineered lake. Such losses were a small price to pay for the navigable river highway, flood control, and cheap hydroelectric power provided by the series of TVA dams — the greater good.

After recess, she’d instructed her students to use the facilities, drink from the water…