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For more than 20 years, driving home was a pleasure. I’d head up the four-lane, turn at the flea markets in Ranger and drive up the hill on Blairsville Highway until I was surrounded by trees that had been here a lot longer than we have. Turning on Hedden Road, sometimes the sun’s rays couldn’t even make it rough the thick canopy, the limbs bending over the shaded road in a comforting “welcome home” gesture.
It was at that very moment, at the end of every Monday through Friday, when I mentally left the “city,” where I worked, and entered the “country,” where I lived. I didn’t even mind losing my cell signal along the way because that just made the feeling of being away from it all that much stronger. Anxiety lessened, stress reduced, blood pressure lowered – all of the things that make being home special.
Then the N.C. Department of Transportation decided that the two- and occasionally three-laned U.S. 19/129 needed a 3.8-mile, $55 million improvement project, which will likely cost much more when all of the receipts are added up since there are 108 parcels affected. Over the last few months, contractors have been removing some homes while clear-cutting the area to be used for the new highway route.
How bad does it look? Every person who has visited us since the trees were removed has missed or almost missed the turnoff on Hedden Road; I even had to hit the brakes hard the first time I drove up. It kinda feels like a Mad Max movie was being filmed in the area.
The project will add 4-foot-wide shoulders, improve intersections, fix sharp curves, and smooth out low and high sections of roadway. DOT spokesman David Uchiyama told the Cherokee Scout that construction is still scheduled to begin in the spring on the project, which will resurface the entire stretch of highway from Ranger to the Georgia state line. While U.S. 19/129 won’t be expanded into four lanes, left-turn lanes will be added at several intersections, including at Hedden Road.
The project was among a long list that were delayed by COVID-19-related funding issues, as construction was changed from 2021 to 2023. Since then, DOT officials have been meeting with affected property owners to purchase what was needed to make this thing happen.
One question remains to be answered: Why was this project so important? The state is destroying people’s homes – some where they expected to live the rest of their lives – and routing vehicles through what used to be their yard, yet this highway doesn’t even have enough traffic to be expanded into four lanes?
Look, I know the march of progress never stops, and I’m not trying to be one of those Not In My Back Yard folks. More people today are visiting Cherokee County, so we do need improved ingress and egress in the place we love to call home. However, once again, local residents had no say in a DOT project that’s radically changing their lives.
I opined on this page before this project started that a much less expensive way to improve safety along Blairsville Highway would have simply been to build shoulders throughout, install more guard rails where appropriate, add more passing lanes where possible and put in solar street lights where viable. Nothing has changed to make me think this project, in its entirety, isn’t millions of dollars that taxpayers didn’t need to spend.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. You can reach him by phone, 828-837-5122; email, dbrown@cherokeescout.com; or on X @daviddBstroh.