The Tellico Dam and the Overhill Towns Under Water

Forty miles southwest of Knoxville, the Little Tennessee River once ran through a valley that the Cherokee had occupied for at least a thousand years. The towns along its banks, Chota, Toqua, Citico, Tanasi, the settlement that gave the state its name, had been centers of Cherokee governance, ceremony, and daily life since before Europeans reached the continent. This was the Overhill country, and it was among the most significant Indigenous cultural landscapes in the eastern United States.

In the nineteen sixties and early seventies, the Tennessee Valley Authority proposed a dam on the Little Tennessee that would create a reservoir for flood control and recreation. The Tellico project was controversial almost from the start. Eastern Band Cherokee representatives, archaeologists, environmental advocates, and local farmers objected. A small fish called the snail darter, discovered in the river in nineteen seventy-three, became the focus of a legal battle under the newly passed Endangered Species Act. The case, Tennessee Valley Authority versus Hill, reached the Supreme Court. In nineteen seventy-eight, the court ruled six to three that the law required halting the dam to protect the fish.

Congress responded by attaching a rider to an energy appropriations bill in nineteen seventy-nine that specifically exempted the Tellico Dam from the Endangered Species Act. President Carter signed the bill, reluctantly. The dam was completed. The reservoir filled. The Overhill towns, including Tuskegee, where Sequoyah was born, went under water that same year.

The archaeological record was excavated under TVA contract in the years before inundation. Artifacts, site maps, and analysis are archived. The specific names of those settlements, the details of which the public record contains and which it does not, are not fully accessible in a single source reviewed for this track. What is established is that the sites are gone. The dam is there. The fish was later found in other rivers and its listing was downgraded. The valley the snail darter was supposed to protect no longer exists.