Calvert City: TVA's Industrial Windfall

Calvert City was a quiet railroad stop named for landowner Potilla Calvert when the Paducah and Elizabethtown line came through in eighteen seventy. For decades it stayed that way. Then in the nineteen forties the Tennessee Valley Authority finished Kentucky Dam four miles away and everything changed.

The dam sent cheap electricity down the wire, and a local merchant named Luther Draffen had been lobbying chemical companies for years to come take advantage of it. Pennsylvania Salt Manufacturing was among the first to follow. Five more industrial plants followed in the early nineteen fifties.

Today Calvert City is home to sixteen industrial facilities, most of them chemical manufacturers, clustered along the Tennessee River where barges, rail, and TVA power converge. The whole transformation took less than a decade.