This is an opinion column.

Property was supposed to be sacred.

A person’s home is their castle, right? I mean, you’re pretty much free to shoot somebody if they barge through your door and try to take something.

Depends on who it is, I guess. And how they do it.

It is always heartbreaking to see family land taken for highways or by public officials, by eminent domain no matter the cause. It should be rare and well considered, reserved for moments clearly in the interest of the common good. It ought to be a last resort.

So it’s frightening to see what’s happening in and around Steele, in St. Clair and Etowah counties, along Chandler Mountain. Landowners have told AL.com’s Dennis Pillion they fear their property has already been devalued by an Alabama Power Co. plan to build two reservoirs above and below Chandler Mountain.

They can’t plan their own futures while the utility and the federal government decide their fates.

I feel for them, and for this place. I’ve spent enough time in those woods to know it is special.

Chandler Mountain is as Alabama as it gets, with hills and hollers, sheer cliffs and striking rock formations. With a cross on top overlooking a Methodist camp. With people who’ll gladly give you shirts off their backs if you don’t seem too nosy.

It’s home to the best tomatoes you can find for a summer sandwich, and for the kind of stories that are just wild enough to be true. Of Native American burial grounds, historic conflicts and outlaws.

It is said the infamous train robber Rube Burrow hid out there for a time. And a story has been handed down about a Confederate deserter who hid beneath the cliffs near Steele and survived with help from a local widow who was kind enough to bring him food. That story has a happy ending, at least from this county’s point of view. That runaway “repented for his treatious (sic) ways” and rejoined the Confederate army. He and the widow married and presumably lived happily ever after.

But it is not just a place of colorful history, and characters. It is a place where regular people staked out lives on land handed down through generations. A place where others, drawn to its beauty and serenity, more recently built homes they planned to pass to their children.

SEE MORE: ‘Who’s going to buy my house now?’ Alabama Power reservoir plan draws ire

‘This will destroy our town’ Residents fight Alabama Power on dams, reservoirs

Chandler Mountain Project: What we know so far about plan that could displace a town

We don’t know all the details of this project, which is disconcerting. We don’t know how many people will be affected directly or indirectly from noise or industry or inconvenience or simply a forced change of their geography and community. We don’t know if FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, will approve those plans, a decision that would allow the power company to acquire land by eminent domain.

We don’t even know if Alabama Power is fully committed to carrying it out.

The company has been quick to say that the decision has not been finalized.

We do know a few things.

• If FERC gives Alabama Power the green light to build two reservoirs on more than 1,500 acres it will forever change the nature of this unique and lovely land. And its people.
  
• Alabama Power Co., within this state, gets what it wants, from the mewling Public Service Commission and public officials too cowed or coddled to question. Oversight within the borders is a joke.
  
• And Alabama Power – with an uncommonly high rate of return on equity, thanks in part to the above – will do what is most profitable for Alabama Power.
  

Taking someone’s land should never be done lightly. It should always be without corporate profit incentive, in the light of day and with complete accountability.

If the federal government gives Alabama Power the ability to seize this land, there is but one thing to do.

Grieve for this land and these people. And their stolen dreams.

John Archibald is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.