Wheeler Dam is on the Tennessee River south of here, between Lauderdale County on the north and Lawrence County on the south, 275 miles above the river’s mouth at Paducah, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. It is one of nine Tennessee River dams operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, 15 miles upstream from Wilson Dam at Florence and 74 miles downstream from Guntersville Dam. It was the first project undertaken by the Tennessee Valley Authority on the Tennessee River after Franklin D. Roosevelt created the agency in January 1933, while Wilson Dam had already been built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Built to improve navigation and bring flood control and economic development to the region, it was named for General Joseph Wheeler, a Confederate general in the Civil War who later became an Alabama congressman and advocate of federal development of the Muscle Shoals. Construction began on November 21, 1933, employed 4,700 workers at its peak, and was completed on November 9, 1936, at a cost of $87,655,000, with the water backed up in 1937. At 72 feet high and 6,342 feet long, it is the lowest of the nine dams on the Tennessee River, and Alabama State Highway 101 crosses it. Wheeler Dam was pivotal in covering the shoals that had hindered navigation on the middle section of the Tennessee River, and Wheeler forms one of nine reservoirs creating a 652-mile stairway of navigable water from Paducah, Kentucky, to Knoxville, Tennessee. The reservoir covers 67,070 acres of water surface and creates 1,027 miles of shoreline. The Tennessee Valley Authority purchased 103,400 acres of land for it, cleared 31,228 acres, removed 840 families and 176 graves, and relocated 30 miles of road. The reservoir forms a 74-mile-long channel with a water depth of nine feet to the base of Guntersville Dam, and its minimum evaluation is 550.5 feet. Work on the first Wheeler Lock, now used as an auxiliary lock, began in 1933 and it went into operation in 1934 although work continued until 1937; measuring 60 feet by 360 feet, it raises and lowers vessels up to 52 feet between Wheeler and Wilson Lakes. Construction on a second lock began in 1960 and it entered operation on May 8, 1963; measuring 110 feet by 600 feet, it also raises and lowers vessels 52 feet. Barge traffic on Wheeler Lake has made it a major center for shoreline industrial development along the Tennessee waterway, and it is also a major recreation and tourist attraction.