The Tennessee Valley Authority

In nineteen thirty-three, most of rural Tennessee had no electricity. Kerosene lamps lit the farmhouses. Food spoiled without refrigeration.

Pumping water meant pumping by hand. The Tennessee River flooded without warning and turned thousands of acres of farmland into seasonal swamp. Franklin Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act on May eighteenth, nineteen thirty-three, creating one of the most ambitious government programs in American history.

The TVA would dam the Tennessee River and its tributaries, control flooding, generate cheap hydroelectric power, and sell that power to the rural households and small towns that private utilities had decided were not worth the cost of wiring. Over the next two decades, workers built a system of dams that transformed the river entirely. Norris Dam, completed in nineteen thirty-six, was the first.

Wilson Dam had been built during World War One to power a munitions plant at Muscle Shoals and was transferred to TVA control. By the nineteen fifties, the Tennessee River ran through a chain of reservoirs from Knoxville to Paducah. Dozens of dams in total govern the watershed today.

The results were measurable and fast. Within a decade of TVA's founding, electric power reached a large share of rural homes in its service territory. Farmers got refrigerators and electric pumps.

Factories followed the cheap power and built plants along the river corridor. Per capita income in the valley, which had been a fraction of the national average in nineteen thirty-three, climbed steadily toward parity. The costs were real too: more than fifteen thousand families were displaced from land that became reservoir bottom.

Historians still weigh the accounts.