Big Dam, Big Ideas

Abstract

Big Dam, Big Ideas Jefferson S. Rogers Norris Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) first major project, was completed on July 28, 1936, three years after Congressional approval. The dam is named after Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska who is considered by many to be the “father” of TVA. It was and remains an impressive, if not especially picturesque, feat of early twentieth century engineering. More importantly, it is also a landscape of big ideas. This landscape can be initially appreciated by sizing it up with some numbers. Located about 25 miles northwest of Knoxville, Tennessee, Norris Dam rises 265 feet from its base and extends 1,860 feet across the Clinch River. At its foundation, the dam is 208 feet thick. Inside the powerhouse (partially shown in the lower right of the image), two Westinghouse generator units produce a net capacity of 110 megawatts of electricity which is enough power to supply roughly 90,000 households. The “Streamline Moderne” style of the dam and its adjacent structures was applied by architect Roland Wank. In terms of its fundamental aspects of engineering and style, Norris Dam served as the prototype for fifteen other dams built by TVA in the 1930s and 1940s (Kowalczyk and Thomason 2016, TVA 2016b). The reservoir behind the dam, Norris Lake, is another significant feature of the landscape. It covers 33,840 acres (52.8 square miles) in surface area; its complex shoreline runs a distance of nearly 810 miles. Flood-storage capacity of the lake is 1.1 million acre-feet (TVA 2016b), an amount that could cover nearly all of the greater Knoxville metropolitan area with a foot of water. The forested hills that are visible in the background of the image belong to two state-run entities: Norris Dam State Park and Cove Creek Wildlife Management Area. Another good way to appreciate Norris Dam is to discover its rich philosophical and political heritage. Along with being TVA’s first major project, Norris Dam represents a very noteworthy milestone of the country’s Conservation Movement. In the decades prior to TVA’s creation and Norris Dam’s construction, conservationists and politicians had made considerable progress in developing governmental mechanisms designed to protect large tracts of natural resources while still allowing for their exploitation under federal stewardship. The Yellowstone Act (1872), Forest Reserve Act (1891), Antiquities Act (1906), and Organic Act (1916) were among the many conservationist breakthroughs of this era. Large-scale federal policies and programs that targeted the nation’s waterways were also undertaken, such [End Page 377] as the creation of the Mississippi River Commission in 1879 and passage of the Reclamation Act (1902), Flood Control Act (1917), and Water Power Act (1920). The development of federal river and watershed management policies was, however, uncoordinated, piecemeal, and often undermined by competing interests (Arnold 1988). The handling of the Tennessee River is a case-in-point. The Tennessee was a particularly troublesome river with several major navigational barriers and occasional catastrophic flooding events. Between 1918 and 1925, the US Army Corps of Engineers built Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals, Alabama to improve barge navigation along the Tennessee and generate the hydroelectricity needed for several nearby nitrate ammunition production plants. Throughout the Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover administrations, however, politicians fiercely debated whether or not Wilson Dam’s hydroelectric facilities and the nearby nitrate plants should be sold to private interests. Senator Norris defied many of his fellow Congressional Republicans by successfully leading efforts to keep them within the public domain (Arnold 1988). The Wilson Dam project also spurred federal interest in how the Tennessee River system could be more extensively controlled and exploited. Between 1922 and 1930, the Corps of Engineers presented to Congress a series of major studies on how the Tennessee River watershed could be managed through the development of a coordinated network of multipurpose dams. Among the thirty-five sites identified in the 1922 report was a description of a prospective dam located at a site where Cove Creek emptied into the Clinch River. “Dam No. 3” as it was called, became the precursor to Norris Dam (US Congress 1922: p. 120–121). By 1930, the Hoover administration supported...