Ford restoration Press

March 19 2008   

Knox News Sentinel recently published a story about River Place on the Clinch. Here's an excerpt:KYLES FORD, Tenn. - This is East Tennessee's ridge-and-valley region, where the rivers flow down from neighboring southwest Virginia and the mountains are long and low.At the junction of State Highways 33 and 70, between Clinch Mountain and Newman Ridge, is the community of Kyles Ford. Cross the steel bridge over the Clinch River and you come to River Place, a renovated general store and a cafe that are part of a rural development project centered on the beauty and isolation of Hancock County.On a hillside behind the store are four brand-new cabins overlooking a bend in the Clinch River. The cabins are for rent, as is a nearby farm cottage built in the late 1800s.Across the Clinch River is an 850-acre tract purchased recently by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency from The Nature Conservancy. The property features a seven-bedroom farmhouse that has been carefully restored and is scheduled to open on Earth Day, April 22, as the Clinch River Conservation Center and Retreat.Tying all of this together is the Clinch River.The shoals at Kyles Ford contain at least 35 species of freshwater mussels, perhaps more than any other site on earth. According to The Nature Conservancy, 29 of the mussel species are rare and imperiled.The health of the Kyles Ford mussel shoal, and the Clinch River in general, is threatened by a variety of pollution sources that include riverbank erosion, bacterial input from cows wading in the river, and coal mining activity from upstream in Virginia.The environmental conference center will include a mussel museum in the farmhouse's living room. There also are plans for a canoe livery on the upper Clinch River, which is free-flowing until it reaches the backwaters of Norris Lake near the Hancock-Claiborne county line.Overseeing River Place on the Clinch and the conference center project is the Clinch River RC&D, a rural development organization serving Claiborne, Grainger, Hancock, Hawkins and Union counties.