(Note: You've gotta love this feisty old codger! What a man! It's painfully clear that he and his family are being denied any sort of reasonable access, and he's just simply saying, "If you can't do that, I want my land back!")

January 27, 2003

By Rob Johnson

Staff Writer

rjohnson@tennessean.com

The Tennessean

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Nashville, TN 37203

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The Scarboroughs of Stewart County were facing a losing battle, but they did not seem to know it. At the least, it was not their immediate concern last week.

For decades, Charles W. Scarborough, 69, and his nephew, Danny Ray Scarborough, 41, have been fuming. The government took their ancestral land -- 252 acres, including the family cemeteries -- after damming the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and leaving the massive inland peninsula Land Between the Lakes. In particular, they say, the arrangement makes it hard to tend to their family cemeteries within the confines of the U.S. Forest Service land.

They wanted a full-blown trial with witnesses -- ''That's what I paid for,'' Scarborough said -- but all they have received so far is an afternoon hearing. There was a robed federal magistrate on the bench and three representatives from the U.S. government at the defense table last week.

Unable to afford an attorney, they filed suit themselves in September against Forest Service area manager William P. Lisowsky in ''the Worshipful United States Civil Court'' and paid the $150 filing fee. The case to reclaim their property landed in U.S. District Court in Nashville and, in particular, before U.S. Magistrate Judge Joe Brown, who was entertaining last week a motion from the U.S. attorney's office to dismiss the suit.

The government, with a mountain of law on its side, ''still wants to do the right thing,'' said Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Watson.

He handed to the judge a page detailing proposed improvements that the Park Service was willing to undertake to accommodate some of the Scarboroughs' demands, including restoring a logging road and providing a key to the gates across the road and a quitclaim deed to the Stone Family Cemetery -- if it is to be used for burials only.

In return, the government asks the two men from Tennessee Ridge to drop their claim to the 252 acres the family used to own.

The judge read the settlement offer, arched his eyebrows and told the Scarboroughs that he could not give them legal advice but suggested that they seriously consider the government's proposal. The statute of limitations on challenging these property claims had run out decades ago.

That did not stop the elder Scarborough, in court wearing his everyday work clothes, from reciting the family history to the 1920s when Aunt Sallie Boswell either did or did not properly sign over a piece of property to another relative, who in turn ...

The complicated, rapid-fire recitation was hard to follow, but Brown listened for a while.

The judge interjected: ''You're still fighting the Civil War.''

''Well, there's a-gonna be one,'' the Scarborough patriarch shot back.

He grew up in Stewart County, where his ancestors settled in the early 1800s, near the banks of the Cumberland River.

He left to serve in the armed forces in the late 1950s, during which he took a stab at defending the legal rights of his fellow soldiers when they got into scrapes with the law.

''I'm not a licensed attorney,'' the retired mechanic said recently. ''But I gave it everything I had.''

The Tennessee Valley Authority took over his family's land, including five cemeteries, in 1962.

Since then, according to both Scarboroughs, it has been difficult to get to the burial plots to tend to them, visit them or to have new graves dug.

''I've got relatives who had to be buried somewhere else,'' the elder Scarborough said, ''because we couldn't get up in there.''

The U.S. Forest Service, which took over Land Between the Lakes from the Tennessee Valley Authority in 2000, counts 240 historic cemeteries in the park and claims that families from throughout the region regularly visit those sites.

''We absolutely are trying to work with the family to make sure things are settled fairly,'' said Lisowsky, the area manager at Land Between the Lakes. ''There are thousands of folks who are buried at LBL. The policy requires that there be access, and it's been the practice of TVA and now the practice of the Forest Service, to try to keep access pretty much to the level that was available when the land was either bought or taken from the families.

''In this case, if there was a two-track road, then we consider access to be a two-track road. If there were just a trail, then a trail would be equal to what was there.''

But the government will not agree to return the land.

''That's what we want,'' Scarborough said. ''And I'll tell you what: I don't trust them.''

In court last week, he made that assessment crystal clear to the judge -- and to the government officials across the aisle.

The judge told them that he understood what it means to grow up in the country, where family members are buried not in sprawling suburban cemeteries but in private corners of their ancestral property, where two mules and a wagon had sometimes served as a hearse.

''I know it's an emotional issue for you,'' the judge said, ''but you've got to deal with the here and now.''

Having survived three heart surgeries, the feisty Scarborough admittedly has one eye on the hereafter.

''It's where I want to be buried,'' he said.

How exactly he and his family will get to the old Stone cemetery remains unclear.

For now, Brown has deferred for two months his decision about whether to dismiss the Scarboroughs' claim to the land that their family used to own.

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