The Tennessee Valley and What the Dams Changed

Drive through the northern third of Alabama and you will be on land that the Tennessee Valley Authority remade from the ground up beginning in nineteen thirty-three. The dams, the reservoirs, the cheap electricity, the fertilizer plants, the flood control, all of it changed what was one of the poorest and most flood-prone regions of the country into something that could sustain industry and hold population. It is one of the largest public works experiments in American history, and it started at a site in Alabama.

Muscle Shoals, on the Tennessee River in the northwestern corner of the state, was the pivot point. The river there fell about one hundred thirty feet over thirty-seven miles of shoals, the most significant drop anywhere on the Tennessee, and it had blocked river navigation for generations. The federal government had begun building a dam and two nitrate plants at Muscle Shoals during World War One, to produce explosives and, later, fertilizer.

When the war ended, the facilities sat idle. Henry Ford offered to buy them in nineteen twenty-one, and for years a political battle raged in Washington over whether to sell to Ford, continue federal ownership, or do something else entirely. Senator George Norris of Nebraska blocked every attempt to privatize or abandon the Muscle Shoals facilities for more than a decade.

When Franklin Roosevelt took office in nineteen thirty-three, he asked Congress to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal corporation with the authority to build dams, generate power, and manage the entire Tennessee River watershed. Congress agreed. It was the first time the federal government had taken on the wholesale economic development of a multi-state region.

In Alabama, the TVA built Wilson Dam, which had been started under Wilson and finished in nineteen twenty-four, plus Wheeler Dam, Guntersville Dam, and several more on Alabama's stretch of the Tennessee. The reservoirs created by those dams are now the backbone of the state's recreational economy in the north. Wheeler Lake and Guntersville Lake draw fishermen from across the Southeast.

Guntersville has been called one of the best bass-fishing lakes in the country. More consequentially, cheap TVA electricity made northern Alabama a viable location for manufacturing. The aluminum plants, the chemical plants, and eventually the defense industries that arrived before and during World War Two all depended on it.

Huntsville's transformation from a cotton-market town into a rocket-science city would not have happened without the TVA's power grid beneath it. The river that once stopped boats became the thing that powered everything.