Calvert City, Kentucky

Calvert City, Kentucky is a small industrial city on the Tennessee River whose fortunes were completely transformed by the TVA's Kentucky Dam, completed in nineteen forty-four. Before the dam, Calvert City was a small river town. After it, cheap hydroelectric power made the area attractive for heavy chemical manufacturing.

Companies producing chlorine, plastics, and fertilizers built large plants along the river through the nineteen fifties and sixties, turning Calvert City into one of the most concentrated chemical manufacturing zones in Kentucky. The plants brought jobs but also a complicated environmental legacy. Today the Calvert City area includes Superfund cleanup sites alongside continuing industrial operations, a story common to many small American cities that bet their futures on mid-century industrial development.