The Tennessee River rises in the mountains of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, and its main stream begins at Knoxville where the Holston and French Broad Rivers join. Its valley covers 41,000 square miles and averages 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 multi-purpose 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 producing electricity, and the system helps protect the lower Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Nine main river dams with locks create a navigable channel 650 miles long from Knoxville to the Ohio River, an important part of the nation’s inland waterway system connecting 20 states. After developing virtually all of the river’s power resources, TVA also built large coal-burning steam electric plants to meet growing regional demand. TVA sells power 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. Wilson Dam, completed by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1925, transferred to TVA in 1933, and later greatly modified, has the largest power capacity of any TVA dam, and its reservoir flooded the dangerous Muscle Shoals rapids to make that stretch of river commercially navigable.

Photo: Deborah Spencer

Photo: Deborah Spencer

Muscle Shoals, Alabama · USA