Sentimental Journey:

The Bible says that Heaven’s streets are paved with gold, but the nearest place I knew to heaven on earth had a dusty road which followed every bend in the river as it wound its way into an enchanted land.” 

In her book Whippoorwill Farewell: Jocassee Remembered, author Debbie Fletcher describes the scenic Jocassee Valley her family cherished for generations, a land of treasured childhood memories, a beloved place called home that is now covered by the waters of Lake Jocassee, more than 300 feet deep. 

The Attakulla Lodge, Jocassee Valley’s bed and breakfast, was named for Cherokee Chief Attakullakulla (meaning 'Little Carpenter'), whose people once called this land home. Attakullakulla’s daughter was the legendary Jocassee, whose name meant ‘Place of the Lost One.’

The Lodge was built by Henry Whitmire, Jr. As Fletcher noted, the exact date of the construction is unknown, but the Whitmires ran the building as a hotel at least by 1904.  It was sold to Fletcher’s maternal grandfather in the 1920’s and run by her maternal grandmother prior to and during World War II.

Fletcher and her parents lived in Columbia, South Carolina, but Jocassee Valley in Oconee County was the place she called “our retreat – our place of refreshment – a place where we could truly relax and spend time enjoying the river, the food, the scenery.”

As Fletcher recalled, the Lodge had a large wrap-around porch overlooking the Whitewater River. She noted in her book, “I was told I never saw it ‘in its glory’, but, to me, it was still the most beautiful place on earth.” 

The Lodge closed to guests in the 1960’s.

Fletcher’s childhood memories included sitting by the river drinking Coca Cola, swimming or inner tubing in the river, and also watching her older brothers, Jimmy and Bucky, build model airplanes and fly them out of a second- or third-story window of the Lodge, emulating her Uncle Buck, who, during the war when a Citadel cadet with his commission, would fly over the mountains at Jocassee Valley.

Camp Jocassee for Girls, founded in 1922, was run by sisters Ludie and Sarah Godbold and then later by husband and wife directors Walt and Barbara Foy.

The Camp was located on the Whitewater River, and activities included baseball, kickball, volleyball, horseback riding and horse shows, swimming, archery, tennis, diving, editing a camp newspaper, dancing, tumbling, camp fires, and hiking (short hikes and also long hikes to Whitewater Falls).

The two-story Victorian style house at Camp Jocassee was built in the 1890’s by Fletcher’s great grandfather, William Macajah Brown, who, with Fletcher’s great grandmother, Sarah Louise ‘Lou’ Glazener Brown, had traveled by horse-drawn wagon from the mountains of western North Carolina, crossing over the state line into South Carolina, where they would raise their eight children.

Fletcher’s family owned 276 acres at Jocassee, including 22 acres of bottom land where the houses and airstrip were. 

In her book, she writes, “The idyllic sights and sounds of Jocassee are forever lost… except in the hearts of those of us who lived and played there….I wish I had understood the magic of the place, before it was too late. But a child thinks that things will last forever.”

'Forever' was cut short by Duke Power's (now Duke Energy) multi-million dollar project which created a man-made lake by flooding the Jocassee Valley.

Fletcher described the last time she saw Jocassee Valley and the Attakulla Lodge, before the lake’s creation. “I remember I was so distraught at the road’s condition, gutted by all the logging trucks lumbering in and out. The dirt road was absolutely destroyed – pitted with deep potholes, rough and rugged. It was an effort to enter Jocassee by car. "

Attakula Lodge, she said, had been  "pillaged by looters who helped themselves to whatever was of any use. Even mantlepieces had been stripped from the fireplaces….It was like saying goodbye to a dying friend, but without the hope of Heaven’s reunion. The Lodge was a tough ol’ lady who, for half a century, had welcomed many a weary traveler. Only much later in life did I realize the impact this place would have on me.”

Fletcher has enjoyed blessed reunions, of sorts, with her beloved Attakulla Lodge, the first time on August 7, 2004, three days after the Lodge was found with cameras by Bill Routh, of the Lake Jocassee Dive Shop, three years after he found the steel bridge and the pillars at Camp Jocassee. 

When Routh and fellow divers returned this year to dive on the Attakulla Lodge for the first time this season, Fletcher accompanied them along with one of her granddaughters, Olivia, and Fletcher and Routh reminisced with this writer about previous dives and about their love for Jocassee.

Among the divers this day was Charles Johnson, who, along with the late Jackie Smith, had been the first to touch the Attakulla Lodge since 1971 and had brought Fletcher back a sidelight from the Lodge’s front door. He and Smith were a team, Johnson explained. “I met Bill through Jackie. Jackie and I started diving together, and it kind of progressed from there.  The historical side of this, the story (of the Lodge), just makes it worth everything. And I met Debbie and her family. They’re special people. I was trying to find something to bring back to her, and Jackie was busy doing a tie-in, so I had a little bit more time to look around. That’s when I found the sidelight and brought it up. It made her happy. 

“It’s very exciting,” he said. “Of course, there’s a little bit of anxiety involved, because you don’t know what you’re going to get into, because all kinds of hazards could be there, but that’s part of what makes it exciting, to go and see something where nobody’s been. That’s kind of the drive. It’s intense. It’s cold. It’s deep.  I don’t think people can understand, unless they’ve been here, how it can get so confusing, because you have such limited visibility. It’s like looking through a hole all of the time. You can’t step back and see the big picture.”

Johnson called all of his years diving to the Lodge “an adventure,” and he added, “I still love it.”

After a few years of the Lodge dives, the divers discovered that the Lodge was turned on its side and the porches were missing.

“That was hard for me to accept,” said Fletcher. “I had pictured it in my head still upright, and porches on the front and everything. Somebody took the porches off. It was unoccupied for a couple of years while Duke was coming in and doing all of the clearing.” She explained that looters came and removed parts of the house, including the front door and a stairwell. 

“The only reason the Lodge is still here is because they (Duke Power) made a snafu and knocked down our log cabin before they bought it.” Her father succeeded in obtaining a restraining order against the power company. “Duke was not supposed to go on our land at all. I found out from a very reliable source, who was there in the valley a lot when they were demolishing, that Duke built a road going up our driveway right in front of the Lodge. They weren’t supposed to touch our property. I’m sure they figured that nobody would ever know, but they did. They might have very well been the ones who removed the porches. There wouldn’t have been a lot of room.”

In the beginning, Fletcher wasn’t sure it was the Lodge that had been found, because she had thought that the Lodge had been lost. 

“When my uncles flew over the lake when it was filling, they saw hardwood floor material high in the trees, over by Devils Fork, which was the intersection of our property, so we made the assumption that the Lodge had lifted off its foundation. We just ‘knew’ it was gone.”

In 2003, a year before the Lodge was discovered, Fletcher had published her book about her family’s history with Jocassee and the Lodge.

 “I met a lady at a book signing,” Fletcher said. “She told me something about the cedar shake shingles. Her husband had climbed up on the roof and removed cedar shake shingles and made her a planter for her den. I’m thinking, the Lodge had a tin roof. I don’t know what she’s talking about. Well, Charles brought me a bag of cedar shake shingles, and it turns out the tin was laid on top of the cedar shake shingles, so the actual roof was cedar shake shingles. There are a lot of those still there, scattered around.”

Fletcher recalled her first meeting with Routh, who, after finding the Girls Camp and the Mount Carmel cemetery under the water of Jocassee, was interested in finding more. 

“Bill didn’t know me at the time, but he was interested about what might have been left,” Fletcher said. “He initiated this whole thing. When he saw my pictures, he asked about the chimney.  The chimney wasn’t on the outside. It was on the interior. If it had been an exterior chimney, it probably would have fallen away from the house. If it had one on the other side of the house, too, it probably would be upright. The water came in very gradually. It did start to lift off and float. 

“It took some doing to find it. I remember we were sitting in the Wendy’s restaurant the first time I met him. Bill had gotten into contact with Anna Simon, who was a reporter and who went to Camp Jocassee many times, and she said, ‘You need to talk to Debbie.’ So, she put the two of us together. When he was coming through Columbia shortly after that, we met. I brought boxes and spread out pictures. I had gone to Duke Energy’s archives, which was at their home office, in Charlotte. The employee gave me a survey of my family’s property which showed the coordinates of it. He also gave me a copy of a big map of the valley with all of the markings on it and with the lake superimposed on top of it. I remember that Bill and I were about to wrap up, and he noticed that survey, and he said, ‘Debbie, what is that?’ I said, ‘Oh, the survey of our property.’ And he looked at it. There’s a surveyor in Salem who likes to pinpoint the location of historical things, and he wanted to help us, so he logged the depth coordinates as best he could. It was just a matter of waiting for nice, calm weather.”

Routh found perfect calm weather late one August night in 2004. Alone in his boat, with a camera down 300 feet deep in the waters of Lake Jocassee, he looked for two and a half hours, Fletcher said. 

“He sent me an e-mail at 6:00 the next morning. I was in a hurry to get out of the door that day, and I didn’t check my e-mails. Bill called me and said, ‘Have you checked your e-mail yet?’ I said, ‘No. I’m sorry. I’m late for work.’ He said, ‘Go check your e-mail.’ It said that he had found what he believed to be the Lodge. He left a cable tied to the marker, so that we could find it. That was on a Wednesday. The following Saturday is when Charles and Jackie dropped down on it for the very first time. They dropped down at 300 feet in pitch black without a line to really follow. I was watching them on the monitor. They were writing when they were coming back up, and I saw that Charles had the sidelight on his arm. I couldn’t imagine what that could be. It looked like a shutter, but the Lodge didn’t have any shutters. It wasn’t until they brought it up, and I got a good look at it, that I could tell it was a sidelight. It had that same brown paint on it that the Lodge had.  I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that that was what they were on. The Lodge is so big, so, when Jackie came back and said, ‘That’s a huge house,’ I knew, because there were no huge houses left intact. I can’t even begin to explain what kind of day that was.”

“I was looking for something manmade,” Routh explained about his search for the Lodge. “I never expected to see a building. I was looking for foundation. When Debbie did a book dedication, she wanted to come out here, tie a brick to it (the book), drop it, and have closure. And I thought it’d be kind of cool to take the book down and put it on the foundation stone, front steps. That’s what I was looking for.”

“If the Lodge hadn’t been found,” said Debbie, “that link would not be here. It would be a history book. But it’s like a living history that they can go to, take pictures of, and bring me stuff back.”             

During this day’s dive, Fletcher cautioned the divers, “You guys be safe. Be safe.”

As she does during each dive, Fletcher prayed with the divers before they went down.

The safety divers went first, followed by the divers who dove all of the way to the Attakulla Lodge on the bottom of the lake.

Among the treasures brought up by one of the divers this day were cedar shake shingles and also hearth stones which were part of the Lodge’s chimney foundation.

Fletcher has been on nearly all of the Lodge dives, and occasionally has dove part way, to meet the divers. She said that there have been probably 15 or 20 different divers. “Some just come and dive it one time. One guy came from Houston, Texas last year just to dive on the Lodge.” She noted that Johnson has probably dived to the Lodge more than any of the divers who have accompanied Routh.

Once all of the divers were down, Fletcher jumped from the pontoon to the lake waters and took a swim. “That was wonderful,” she said. “That was very refreshing, very refreshing. It really is unbelievably cold. I mean the water is cold when you first jump in it.”

While the divers were down, exploring, Fletcher shared more of her memories of Jocassee Valley.

 “The best way I can explain the Valley is like in The Wizard of Oz, when she lands in Oz and she opens the door and everything is in Technicolor. That’s what it felt like entering the Valley.”

 Fletcher keeps in touch with several women who, when they were girls, attended Camp Jocassee. “So many of them were originally from Florida,” Fletcher said. “The camp director who took over when the Godbolds turned over the reigns went to college in Florida, so she had a lot of contacts down in Florida. The girls would ride the train up from Florida to Seneca, and they would pick them up and bring them here. These girls loved it. That was the only way they were going to get to enjoy Jocassee (at Camp Jocassee). We had our own place. And I hated it when they invaded the swimming hole.  They still maintain close ties to each other. They get together. They can still sing all of the camp songs. They remember everything. They’ll cry when they come up here.”

Routh has been diving for three decades, having taught himself to dive in the waters of Lake Jocassee. After diving in the Cooper River for many years, with his captain’s license he began a charter boat service on the river. “At the same time I had the boat, I’d bring it from Charleston to the mountains,” he said. “I’d run it up here for two weeks, then I’d dive down there for a week, back and forth.”

Routh said that he has been inside the Attakulla Lodge several times. “I’ve seen every inch of it.

“I’m an adventure junkie,” he said. “When I crawl around in the black water of the Cooper River, it’s because of the find, looking for stuff that’s been laying on the bottom of that river -- prehistoric fossils, artifacts. I just like that really cool stuff. And when I found the Camp Jocassee for Girls, that was cool, not cool enough to become a certified diver to go to those depths. I found it with surface equipment. I dropped a camera. I found the fridge, and then we found the Camp for Girls, which is right beside that. But that didn’t push me over the edge -- until I found Attakulla Lodge. And then they started taking my cameras down and taking pictures, and I’m talking to the guys who were down on the bottom, and I’m looking at the pictures going, ‘Well, you weren’t holding the camera right. Something doesn’t seem right.’ It took us six years to determine unanimously. I’d already felt this way early on, but nobody agreed with me, because I wasn’t there. So when I got certified to do those 300-foot dives, then I got to go down, and then I still kept saying the same thing, ‘It’s not right. This thing is laying on its side.’ And no one agreed with me. It took us two years of diving, two seasons of diving, before we had conditions like today, where everyone could see what I had seen and agreed with me that it was laying on its side. So it kind of became a unanimous agreement three years ago that it was laying on its side. But it took us that long before we all agreed that was the way it was.” 

Routh holds a passion to keep going back to dive at the Attakulla Lodge. “I still want to go back because it’s a special place,” he said. “I feel a part of it because of the stories that I’ve heard from Debbie Fletcher and so many other people, the same with the bridge and the Girls Camp, talking to all those girls who were campers when they were eight years old all the way up till they were 13 years old. Their summer was going to Camp Jocassee, and to talk to those women and to hear their childhood memories, to go there and see it for myself -- all I think about are all the stories that they told me. I didn’t have a personal experience there, but I felt like I knew the place because of their stories. So that’s what drives me to go back. It’s to know that I have a connection -- indirectly, but it’s a connection -- to these places, and it’s just really cool. You never really know what you’re going to get until you get there. We had every reason to believe we were going to have a bad dive today in terms of visibility, and it was everything but. It was wonderful. At no point at all in the dive did we have bad visibility. Normally, we pass through clouds of sediment suspended in the water column. So, you could have great visibility at the surface and then bad visibility at 100 feet and then great visibility on the bottom. And you can have bad visibility on the bottom and great visibility everywhere else. So you never know what you have until you go through it and see it. It was a wonderful surprise today to have the kind of visibility, with all of the rain and everything else and the lake coming up and having been empty for two and a half years. Everything would have pointed to a day with bad visibility, and it was phenomenal. It was almost as good as I’ve seen it ever in all the dives that I’ve done. I’ve probably got somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 to 20 dives on this hotel now, and this is probably right up there with the top day I had in terms of visibility. It was a great day. 

 “Every chance I get, I talk to somebody who has a past in that valley. I’m looking for any piece of information, photographs, anything like that that will help us tell their story when we have someone ask us. That’s what keeps their memories alive -- for us to continue telling the stories that they pass to us."