The Tennessee River rises in the mountains of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, and its main stream forms at Knoxville where the Holston and French Broad Rivers join. Its valley covers 41,000 square miles and receives an average of 52 inches of rain each year, and in water discharged into the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers the Tennessee is about equal in size to the Missouri. The Tennessee Valley Authority harnessed the river through a multipurpose system of dams and reservoirs that regulates floods, improves navigation, and generates electric power. High dams on tributaries create large storage reservoirs that hold back floodwaters and release them as needed to maintain downstream navigation depths while also generating electricity, and the system also helps protect the lower Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Nine main-river dams with locks create a 650-mile navigable channel from Knoxville to the Ohio River, an important part of the nation's inland waterway system connecting 20 states. After developing virtually all the river's power resources, TVA also built large coal-burning steam electric plants to meet growing regional demand. Its power is sold at wholesale to cities and rural electric cooperatives for retail distribution to homes, farms, businesses, and industry, while a few large industrial users and U.S. Government defense installations are served directly, including the atomic plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Paducah, Kentucky. Nickajack Dam, on the main stream of the Tennessee River, generates electricity and forms a 46-mile link in the Tennessee Waterway. It was built from 1964 to 1968 to replace Hales Bar Dam, 6 miles upstream; Hales Bar was completed in 1913 on leaking limestone foundations and later had to be demolished.

Photo: Lee Hattabaugh

Photo: Lee Hattabaugh