Douglas Dam: Built in Twelve Months to Win a War
Near Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
The dam across the French Broad River near here was built faster than any dam of comparable size in American history, and it was built that way on purpose, because the United States was running out of time.
In early nineteen forty-two, with the country newly at war after Pearl Harbor, military planners realized they had an aluminum problem. Building fighter planes and bombers required enormous quantities of the metal, and producing aluminum required enormous quantities of electricity. The Tennessee Valley Authority already operated a network of dams across the Southeast, but demand was outrunning supply.
Congress approved the Douglas Dam bill in January of nineteen forty-two. Construction began almost immediately. At peak, more than six thousand workers were on site around the clock, working in shifts through summer heat and winter cold. The dam was completed on February nineteenth, nineteen forty-three, just twelve months and seventeen days after ground was broken. The TVA called it a world record for projects of equivalent size.
The power Douglas generated fed the aluminum smelters at Alcoa, Tennessee, which in turn produced the raw material for American aircraft. Some of that power also went to a secret facility at Oak Ridge, barely forty miles east, where the Manhattan Project was separating uranium for the first atomic bomb.
The dam created Douglas Lake, which flooded thousands of acres of the French Broad River valley and displaced the communities that had lived there. It was the trade the wartime government asked East Tennessee to make. The residents made it. The planes got built. The aluminum flowed.
Douglas Dam is one thousand seven hundred five feet long and two hundred one feet high. It still generates power for the TVA grid today, more than eighty years after workers poured its first concrete in the middle of a world war.
