Residents of the St. Clair County town of Steele celebrated a victory last year, when Alabama Power withdrew plans to build new dams that might have cost them their homes.

Now these residents — and local Native American tribes — are joining together to try and get the land around Chandler Mountain protected against such developments forever.

One reason for that: emerging evidence that the mountain top has been a revered site for native tribes for thousands of years.

“It’s a sacred mountain,” said visiting archaeologist David Johnson, who became aware of the site last year, when the area was threatened by the proposed dam project.

Chandler Mountain is a natural, bowl-shaped mountain located in Etowah and St. Clair Counties, about 40 miles northeast of Birmingham.

Last year, Alabama Power tried to get approval to build a pumped storage hydropower project on the mountain, that would have likely forced many residents off their land through eminent domain, potentially flooding parts of the town of Steele.

The power company wanted to build a large dam to create a lake on top of the mountain, and several dams to create smaller reservoirs at the bottom of the mountain. The company would build massive pumping stations to pump water uphill during non-peak hours and allow it to run downhill over a turbine to generate electricity during times of high demand.

Alabama Power withdrew its application to build the project after weeks of local opposition and reporting from AL.com on the potential consequences of the project.

The project likely would have destroyed or flooded what Johnson says are stone structures left by native people hundreds, if not thousands of years ago.

“We have found evidence that indicate, different types of evidence, different levels of evidence, that indicate that for thousands of years, Native Americans have seen Chandler Mountain as a sacred special area,” Johnson said.

Johnson said he has surveyed several properties around the mountain and says he has found significant evidence of Native American activity going back thousands of years, including rock cairns, petroglyphs carved on cliff faces, stone fences and turtle piles.

Johnson has previously studied the Nazca lines in Peru, hypothesizing that the intricate designs are maps that follow groundwater sources in the water-scarce region. He also worked on the effort to preserve Split Rock Mountain in the metro New York area, and numerous other sites in North America.

He gave a presentation last week for around 75 people at the Steele Community Center highlighting his findings so far in the area and showing photos taken from Chandler Mountain compared to other sites of Native American cultural importance.

“[Chandler Mountain] has all the aspects of all the sacred mountains I’ve ever studied,” Johnson said.

Johnson during the Thursday meeting also encouraged Chandler Mountain residents to contact him to survey and document any potential native sites on their property to help bolster their arguments that the land should be protected.

“The more examples I have of these features, and the more we see the similarities and how they come together, the better we can read them and understand better as to what they’re saying about the ancient past, and how to preserve them for the future,” he said.

Johnson said many similar features have already been destroyed across the country.

“Because so many have been destroyed, we’re trying to identify those locations and preserve what’s left,” he said.

Representatives of Alabama’s Native American tribes were also present to watch the presentation and to show their support for conserving the land around Chandler Mountain.

“This is an important site and there’s a lot of ancestral ties here when talking about Chandler Mountain,” said Seth Penn, a member of the Cherokee Tribe of Northeast Alabama and the southeast coordinator for the Indian Nations Conservation Alliance.

Penn said Chandler Mountain has cultural significance for multiple tribes in Alabama.

“It’s an area of where our territory as Cherokee people met the Creek territory,” Penn said. “We have been in discussion with the Southeastern Muscogee nation, one of the other state recognized tribes here in Alabama and their chief has also issued support for these initiatives because we as indigenous people collectively understand the importance of the cultural ties to this location.”

Penn said his ideal resolution would be for the land that was intended for the dam project to be sold to an outside group — Native or otherwise — for preservation.

“For us, indigenous people, we know very much our ties and our connections to Chandler Mountain and the surrounding area,” Penn said. “A lot of the footprints that we have left behind as we have been removed, or I always like to say attempted removal, because some of us are still here.

“There’s nine tribes still left in the state of Alabama. So really, part of this is preserving and telling the story of ‘we’re still here’ too.”