Mood:
not sureTopic: "The Prophecy"
John Hendrix was a preacher, if that's what you want to call people like that. He also drank. The story goes that somewhere around the year 1900 he heard a voice telling him to sleep in the Tennessee woods, and to pray for forty days and forty nights. On the forty-first day, he emerged wild-eyed and told some people at a little country store that he'd had a "vision."
Yawn, thought Frodo. Here we go again.
The vision, he said, revealed to him that on a spot mid-way between the farms of Sevier Tadlock and Joe Pyatt on Black Oak Ridge will sit the center of authority for a city. "A railroad spur," he said, "will branch off the main L&N line, run down toward Robertsville and then turn toward Scarboro."
"Big engines will dig big ditches, and thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, and there will be great noise and confusion, and the earth will shake," continued John Hendrix. "Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be."
"I've seen it. It's coming," he said.
John Hendrix died in 1915. His grave is within a mile of a railroad spur as described in his "vision." The grave today overlooks a massive manufacturing facility
Frodo was unmoved, but hesitant.
In 1940, construction had started on a community now known, around the world, as Oak Ridge. The farms once belonging to Sevier Tadlock and Joe Pyatt straddle the hill where the headquarters of the Manhattan Project, nicknamed "the castle on a hill" was built. Thirty years later, the Department of Energy built a concrete and glass building on the same site, and it remains as the "center of authority" at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The city itself is fully contained within the area known as Bear Creek Valley.
Frodo has been concentrating on the words "the greatest war that ever will be." Like most of us, Frodo hopes that this second part of "the Prophecy" is as accurate. He also wonders about what it was that John Hendrix drank, and where he got it.
