Tellico Dam is a concrete gravity and earthen embankment dam on the Little Tennessee River that was built by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in Loudon County, Tennessee. Planning for a dam structure on the Little Tennessee was reported as early as 1936 but was deferred for development until 1942. Completed in 1979, the dam created the Tellico Reservoir and is the last dam to be built by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Unlike the agency's previous dams built for hydroelectric power and flood control, the Tellico Dam was primarily constructed as an economic development and tourism initiative through the planned city concept of Timberlake, Tennessee. The development project aimed to support a population of 42,000 in a rural region in poor economic conditions.
The dam has been criticized as a wasteful pork barrel project, a transfer of wealth from homeowners to developers, and bad for the environment. Inundation of the Little Tennessee required the acquisition of thousands of acres, predominantly multi-generational farmland and historic sites such as the Fort Loudoun settlement and several Cherokee tribal villages, including Tanasi, Tennessee's namesake. Most of the acreage around the final lakeshore, originally seized through eminent domain, was sold to private developers to create retirement-oriented golf resort communities such as Tellico Village and Rarity Bay.
Because the Tellico Dam project was believed to threaten the endangered snail darter fish, species, environmentalist groups sued the TVA to halt the project. In 1978, the Supreme Court of the United States, in Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, ruled in favor of the environmental groups and declared that the completion of Tellico Dam was illegal. Ultimately, the legal action only delayed the dam's completion by two years. A clause in the fiscal 1980 federal public works appropriations bill declared the project exempt from the Endangered Species Act, and in November 1979, the dam was completed and the reservoir began to fill.
Background
Preliminary planning and Timberlake initiative The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility company created by U.S. Code Title 16, Chapter 12A, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933, part of the New Deal. Its shares are owned by the federal government, but TVA operates like a private corporation and receives no taxpayer funding.
The agency was initially tasked with modernizing the Tennessee Valley region, using experts in economic development, engineering, planning, and agriculture. In fact, the TVA focused primarily on electricity generation, flood control, and combatting human and economic problems.
In 1936, TVA began studies for hydroelectric dam sites as part of its Unified Development of the Tennessee River (UDTR) plan. Early TVA plans suggested the construction of a dam along the Little Tennessee River at its mouth at the Tennessee River next to Bussell Island. This became known as the Fort Loudoun Extension, an expansion of the nearby Fort Loudoun Dam. The project was canceled on October 20, 1942, because of financial constraints imposed by U.S. involvement in World War II.
In 1959, the TVA reapproved development of the Fort Loudoun Extension, now called the Tellico Project. The justification for the project was to improve the economic conditions of the Little Tennessee watershed, through land and recreational development. This project, which encompassed acreage in Loudon, Blount, and Monroe counties, became known as the City of Timberlake Plan, named for journalist Henry Timberlake, who explored the Cherokee villages that once occupied the area. Timberlake, the TVA's ambitious attempt at creating a city from scratch, had a projected population of 42,000. The project was promoted as a demonstration of economic development for the rural poor, transforming the Little Tennessee Valley into a thriving urban center. The Tellico Dam would provide a large reservoir for recreation and for freight transport to proposed industrial sites with access to the Tennessee River through a canal. The dam would not produce electricity, but the canal would enable an additional 23 MW of power generation at the Fort Loudoun Dam by diverting flow from the Little Tennessee River.Jack Neely, "Tellico Dam Revisited." Originally published in the Metro Pulse Online. Accessed at the Internet Archive, October 2, 2015. (.doc format) The Timberlake project was initially supported with congressional aid and investment from the American aerospace manufacturing company, the Boeing Corporation. In 1974, the Tennessee state legislature unsuccessfully proposed a bill seeking to incorporate the Timberlake area into a city. Boeing determined that the project was not economically feasible and withdrew in 1975; the plans never fully materialized.
Property acquisition and eminent domain
The Tellico Dam project required the acquisition of nearly of property for its development. The reservoir created by the dam was forecast to extend over with an extra in flood control reserves. For the remaining area, TVA allocated for residential, recreational, and industrial development as part of the proposed Timberlake planned city project. The remaining land served as buffer zones between development areas and the reservoir. When the TVA began to approach property owners in the Lower Tennessee Valley for the development of Tellico Dam, several communities that TVA sought to "modernize" through this project were at the time in touch with most of the modern Appalachian society that TVA had contributed to since the 1930s. Members of the river shed communities least impacted by modernization reacted most positively to TVA's plans, compared with the more modern communities. Historians of the project have suggested that most TVA personnel did not understand the complexity of the communities that they were intruding into with the Tellico project, leading to more heated opposition.
The Tellico Project was revealed to the public as early as 1960, with reactions similar to previous TVA projects. Public meetings commenced throughout the Little Tennessee Valley in the mid-1960s at civic spaces in Loudon, Blount, and Monroe counties to address concerns raised by citizens about the Tellico and Timberlake projects. At the time, TVA officials did not expect that the Tellico Project would be met with anything more than token opposition. In 1963, small clusters of Little Tennessee Valley landowners and businesspeople formed a community group known as the Fort Loudoun Association opposing the Tellico project. Extensive local opposition emerged at a public forum on September 22, 1964, at Greenback High School in the town of Greenback, located on the proposed eastern shore of the Tellico reservoir. Four hundred residents attended with over 90% reporting strong opposition. Attendees grew hostile, perceiving the Tellico project as an intrusion. One month after the contentious meeting at Greenback High School, anti-Tellico individuals formed a larger opposition group, the Association for the Preservation of the Little Tennessee River. This move showed that project opposition was not one that "would easily buckle and roll over before the mighty presence of the Tennessee Valley Authority".
The property acquisition phase of the project required the use of eminent domain, a statutory right granted to TVA at its establishment by Congress in 1933. This legal authority allowed TVA to take ownership of private property for uses the TVA deemed to be for public benefit. Many property owners concerned about seizure of land reported that TVA personnel provided "taking lines" about the extent of private land acquisition that was planned. Many viewed these actions as TVA overreaching their authority, provoking more public opposition to the project. Compared with TVA's early hydroelectric projects, the documentation of residents to be relocated was poorly executed. TVA officials did not document the exact number of families that were affected, even after the property acquisition process had started in 1963. Initial estimates suggested the removal of 600 families, whereas the actual number was closer to 350 families. The individuals in each of these 350 families were not recorded. Most of the families who were required to move complied, but three unwilling property owners were evicted by U.S. Marshals and watched their houses being demolished as they were evicted. The Tellico project also had a significant impact on farming, with 330 farms along the Little Tennessee River lost following inundation. In total, $25.5 million was spent by the TVA for land acquisition.
Engineering and construction
The engineering design of the Tellico Dam project consisted of a by concrete gravity dam with flood gates, a earthen dam, and an , navigable canal connecting the Tellico Reservoir impoundment to the Fort Loudoun impoundment of the Tennessee River. The dam itself created the Tellico Reservoir impoundment of the Little Tennessee River. The Tellico Reservoir with a full pool water capacity of , a drainage basin of , and a water surface area of . Along the shoreline of the proposed reservoir, roughly would be acquired to be cleared and graded for future residential, commercial, industrial, and recreational area development.
Construction on the Tellico Project began on March 7, 1967, with clearing work for the main dam structure. Work on the concrete structure of the dam was complete by October of the next year. Other portions of the dam constructed with earth fill were complete by August 1975, with the river flow from the original Little Tennessee soon forced via pump through the completed sluice gates of the main concrete dam. Around this time, work on coffer dams to assist with the main dam were complete. By the time of the forced closure of construction, work on the Tellico Project was nearly 90% complete, aside from final land clearing, recreational facility preparation, and a highway system that was nearly finished.
In total, $63 million was endowed for the construction of the concrete dam and spillway, the main earth dam, coffer dams, roadway and railroad facilities, reservoir clearing, utility relocations, access roads, a canal with access to the Tennessee River, public use facilities, and general yard improvements. Most of this funding was used for the dam, over of state, county, and local access roads, and three large-scale bridge replacement projects. The TVA also invested another $3.6 million for two major road projects scheduled for initial work starting after the completion and opening of the Tellico Dam structure. Officials with the Tennessee Department of Transportation expressed doubt about the completion of the Tellico Parkway (State Route 444), one of these major road projects.
The TVA received nearly $665,000 in revenue as the project was underway. Timber cleared for the project provided $99,000 and farmland and housing seized by the agency was leased with a revenue close to $566,000. Labor costs for the project totaled $24.7 million, with most of this associated with the construction of the main Tellico Dam structure. Engineering, planning, and administrative services for the project cost $14.7 million.
Environmental impacts and legal action
Prior to any construction work, the Tennessee Fish and Game Commission addressed concerns to TVA personnel that the construction of Tellico Dam would bring the demise of trout fishing on the Little Tennessee.