Norris plans a big 75th-birthday party
Norris has begun planning for a big 75th-birthday celebration for the city in early 2024.
But there’s a catch.
Apparently no one in the city knows exactly what day Norris officially became a city, and several dates have been tossed out as potentially the correct ones.
Former city Councilman and Vice Mayor Larry Beeman brought up the issue during the recent March City Council meeting.
Beeman has taken the role of chairman of the 75th Year Birthday Recognition Steering Committee, created by the Norris Historical Society.
According to what he has found, he said, the state legislature passed the bill giving Norris a city charter on April 5, 1949, which some people have considered to be the official establishment of the city. (The town itself dates to the early 1930s, when the Tennessee Valley Authority created it to house workers building Norris Dam.)
But Beeman said the governor most likely signed the legislation on April 7, which would have made the bill final.
“The lady in charge of Norris archives found where her father-in-law, R.G. Crossno, was in Nashville when all of this was being done in 1949. He was the first mayor of Norris.
“He had written notes that the House passed the bill on April 5, then on April 7, the governor signed the legislation. April 7 date was the date we used for the 50th birthday celebration. I probably would stay with that date.”
Beeman noted that April 9 was mentioned in an executive action signed by then-President Harry Truman in October 1949 that allowed TVA employees to hold positions in the Norris city government.
“At that time, federal employees were not allowed to participate in municipal governments, but President Truman’s order made an exception for TVA employees in Norris, “ Beeman said.
“Truman’s order referred to April 9 as the official charter date for the city of Norris.”
During the March 13 council meeting, Councilman Bill Grieve said his research turned up another date, Feb. 1, 1949, as the official Norris incorporation date. That came from records with the UT Municipal Technical Advisory Service, he said.
Beeman said Monday that he now wishes he hadn’t brought the date issue up during the council meeting, and had just stuck to the April 7 date that was used for the 50th birthday.
But because April 7, 2024, will be a Sunday, the actual Norris birthday celebration most likely will be a day earlier, on Saturday, Beeman said.
“We will have things happening throughout the year, but we’ll probably have the actual celebration on the [Saturday],” Beeman said. “It will look a lot like one of our July 4 celebrations. It will start maybe 2 p.m. and go through until 6.
“Hopefully, we’ll have a lot of people there,” he said. “We want a lot of people to show up for a group picture, like the one we took for the 50th birthday. We had a few hundred show up for that – the photo is still hanging on the wall in the community building.
“We will also plan to do a photo of the group from a drone overhead,” Beeman said.
“Nothing’s final yet. but we are planning to have a play produced on the history of Norris,” he said. “The Norris Little Theatre group is going to do that. And we’re talking with the Museum of Appalachia about letting us put on the play there.”
Beeman said he’s been living in Norris for the past 49 years.
“My first job out of graduate school was in Norris in 1974,” he said. “We raised our two boys here. It was a good place to raise kids.”
Councilman Chuck Nicholson will be looking into the date issue to try to determine which date should be considered official, Beeman said.