Referring to the area along Hazel Creek as a ghost town would be a bit misleading. Situated on the north shore of Fontana Lake in Swain County, North Carolina, this valley could more properly be called a “lost society.”
Hazel Creek flows steeply down from the crests of Silers Bald and Thunderhead Mountain in the southern portion of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Today the area is virtually deserted. The valley is visited by only a trickle of hikers and anglers who brave the treks of more than a dozen miles to reach the area, or cross Fontana by boat.
But this has not always been a lonely place.
Several communities were established here beginning in 1829 with the arrival of Moses and Patience Proctor, who built a cabin near the confluence of Shehan Branch on Hazel Creek. This site soon came to be known as Proctor.
In 1883 copper was discovered along the course of the Sugar Fork, a feeder stream of Hazel Creek farther up in the mountains. That led to the founding of the Medlin community at the mouth of the Sugar Fork.
Then a century ago the region experienced a boom. Beginning in 1907, when the Southern Railway line along the Little Tennessee River reached the mouth of Hazel Creek, the valley’s few early settlers were joined by others intent upon reaping a harvest of timber and copper ore from the region.
Among those coming to Hazel Creek was the R.M. Ritter Lumber Company in 1910. They founded the town of Ritter at the junction with river, built a spur rail line up Hazel Creek and constructed their large Hazel Creek Plant in the community of Proctor. That facility eventually employed up to 1,000 workers and the population of the valley rose to more than 1,500 persons.
Soon Proctor was home to a post office, school, train depot, cafe, barbershop, movie theater and community center. The village even boasted of having its own doctor and dentist. However, the boom lasted only until 1928, when Ritter had logged the surrounding mountainsides, closed its mill and moved on.
The communities in Hazel Creek valley continued to exist through the Depression years of the 1930s. With coming of World War II and the need for electricity to power war industries, Fontana Dam was built on the Little Tennessee. The rising lake flooded the town of Ritter and cut off all rail and road access to Hazel Creek. In November 1944 the last families were forced out of Hazel Creek valley. A few years later the region became part of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.
Today the National Park Service still maintains a gravel road following the old rail bed up Hazel Creek. That is to accommodate visits by the expatriate families to the cemeteries of the valley. The NPS ferries vehicles across Fontana to make those visits possible for that aging and dwindling population.
For other visitors, all travel is via foot or horseback. When trekking up the Hazel Creek Trail the woodlands are full of reminders of the region’s heyday. The only standing structure in Proctor is the Calhoun House that was constructed in 1928. In the vicinity, however, a number of foundations and ruins of buildings associated with the Ritter facilities litter the valley, along with chimneys of family cabins.
The easiest way to visit this valley for some hiking or trout fishing on the stream is to contact outfitter Steve Claxton. He can arrange transportation across Fontana for groups of up to 10 on a comfortable pontoon boat. On his package plans visitors arrive to find the campsite already set up with spacious tents, camp chairs and other amenities. Claxton them serves as camp master, cook, historian and fishing guide for the group.
When sitting in the shade of the massive trees in the campground, it is hard to imagine the site was once the baseball field for the Proctor school that operated from 1915 to 1944!
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