The TVA's Knoxville: New Deal on the River
Near Knoxville, Tennessee
On May eighteenth, nineteen thirty-three, Congress passed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act by a wide margin. President Roosevelt signed it the same day. The agency that was created had powers that no American federal entity had held before: authority to generate and sell electricity, build dams, manage floods, develop navigation, and plan land use across a seven-state region. Its headquarters went to Knoxville, a city of a hundred fifty thousand people on the river the agency was named for.
The Tennessee Valley at that moment was one of the poorest regions in the nation. Floods regularly destroyed crops and towns. Less than three percent of rural farms had electric power. Annual per-capita income in the valley was less than half the national average. Malaria was endemic. Senator George Norris of Nebraska had spent more than a decade fighting for a federal project at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and Roosevelt's New Deal finally gave him the vehicle.
Construction on Norris Dam began on October first, nineteen thirty-three, the agency's first project. A planned community called Norris was built nearby to house the workers. Roughly twenty-eight hundred families were displaced from the Norris Basin to build the reservoir. They received relocation assistance. They lost land their families had farmed for generations. The TVA built the town of Norris without Black residents; Black workers were employed at lower wages in segregated job classifications throughout the agency's early decades.
By nineteen forty-five, the TVA operated twenty-one dams on the Tennessee River and its tributaries. Rural electrification had reached the vast majority of the valley's farms. Flood damages had dropped sharply. But the agency had also displaced well over a hundred thousand people across its dam projects, purchased or condemned hundreds of thousands of acres, and reorganized a landscape that had sustained communities, including Cherokee ones, for centuries.
The headquarters building on Gay Street is still the TVA's main office. The agency still provides electricity to nearly ten million people across seven states. The valley it transformed is not the same valley that existed before it arrived.
