Muscle Shoals Canal
Alabama
For a century the Tennessee River here was the great barrier of the South. Across the stretch called the Muscle Shoals, the river dropped more than one hundred thirty feet in about thirty-seven miles through waterfalls, rapids, sandbars, and islands, halting boats cold. A first canal was attempted in the eighteen thirties and abandoned for lack of money.
The successful one, built under the Army Corps of Engineers and finished in eighteen ninety, ran fourteen and a half miles with nine locks, and was among the longest steamboat canals of its day. A rail track beside the water let a locomotive tow boats through. One of its engineers was a young lieutenant named George Goethals, who would later build the Panama Canal.
The shoals are gone now, drowned beneath the calm pools of Wilson and Wheeler Dams.
