Cover story by *Diuvei about women working to save Box Creek Wilderness from a power company
An article by *Diuvei (Steve Rasmussen) is the Verve Magazine cover story for October 2013:
When electricity came to Brackett Town in 1948, the men who wired the church in the onetime gold-mining village near the McDowell/Rutherford County line insisted that hanging a bare bulb from the ceiling was enough. But Nora Sprouse Worthen’s mother said no.
“She’d been to the larger churches in Marion and seen what they had,” Worthen, a 70-year-old community activist, recalls. “And so she went from house to house and talked to all the ladies and campaigned to get globes put on those light bulbs. She did that numerous times over the years — she got the ladies on her side, and they usually got what they wanted.”
Worthen’s 128-year-old family home is just over the ridge from the 5,185-acre Box Creek Wilderness. In 2004, Box Creek was named a Significant Natural Heritage Area, ranked in the state’s top 1% for occurrence and diversity of rare species.
It’s now owned by Tim Sweeney, a millionaire video-game inventor and environmental conservationist from Cary, N.C., who acquired it in late 2011 after a bank foreclosed on a failed development scheme. Thirty days later, the local electric utility, the Rutherford Electric Membership Corporation, announced its plan to condemn and clear a 2 1/2-mile long, 100-foot-wide strip through the middle of it for a new power transmission line.