TVA and Norris Dam: Electricity at the Price of a Valley

The Tennessee Valley Authority broke ground on Norris Dam on October first, nineteen thirty-three, months after President Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act into law on May eighteenth. It was the first dam in what would become a thirty-dam system across seven states, the largest public power project in American history.

The Tennessee Valley Authority's stated mission was transformation: rural electrification, flood control, economic development in one of the most isolated and impoverished regions in the country. The valley between the Cumberland Mountains and the Smokies had no electrical grid. Farms that had been worked by the same families for generations were lit by kerosene, cooled by root cellars, watered by hand-dug wells. The dam would change all of that.

To build the reservoir behind Norris Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority displaced families from the Clinch River valley: the official Tennessee Valley Authority figure is two thousand eight hundred forty-one families, which is the documented count in Tennessee Valley Authority records from the period. Some accounts suggest a slightly larger total, closer to three thousand, when households without formal legal title are included. The families received depression-era fair-market prices for land that in many cases they had never expected to sell. The Tennessee Valley Authority offered displaced workers the opportunity to live in Norris, a newly planned town nearby, one of the first American towns built on greenbelt design principles. Most displaced families were not eligible for the Norris housing.

The dam was completed on March fourth, nineteen thirty-six. Within a decade, the Tennessee Valley Authority had brought electricity to rural Appalachian homes across an enormous swath of the South. The transformation was real. The dispossession that funded it was also real. Both facts belong in the same account.

Norris Dam is now a National Historic Landmark. The reservoir behind it, Norris Lake, is a recreation area. The Clinch River valley it replaced is underwater.