#TVA July 21

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

Spending weeks in Florence Alabama has educated me about the Tennessee Valley Authority of TVA. Just across the Tennessee River from Florence is Muscle Shoals AL. It was in Muscle Shoals that TVA got its start.

It all began in 1933. President Franklin Roosevelt’s created Depression-era New Deal programs including a goal to provide jobs and electricity to the rural Tennessee River Valley. The Tennessee River Valley covers an area that spans seven states in the South. The TVA was envisioned as a federally-owned electric utility and regional economic development agency. It all came about thru the 1933 TVA Act

The Act tasked the TVA with: improving the navigability of the Tennessee River; providing flood control through reforestation of marginal lands in the Tennessee Valley watershed; developing agriculture, commerce and industry in the valley; and operating the hydroelectric Wilson Dam. Today the Tennessee River is a 634 mile water highway thanks to the TVA.

Staying in a hotel that overlooked Wilson Dam on the Tennessee River in Florence AL I was curious about the history of the TVA. That view of the dam from my room was the birthplace of the TVA. The dam is massive some 137 feet in height and a lock lift that is 94 feet in height. One of the highlights of my stay was seeing a barge loaded with fertilizer pass thru the lock.

Wilson Dam got authorized to be constructed as a hydroelectric dam at Muscle Shoals in 1916. Wilson Dam was to provide power for a munitions plant during WWI. The war ended before the dam got finished.

Construction on the project languished through the 1920s while Congress debated what to do with the property. Some senators wanted to sell the dam to a private company while others thought the government should retain public control of the property.

Debate raged on about should it be private or public but the TVA Act sealed its fate to become a public power company. The agency built 16 hydroelectric dams in the Tennessee Valley between 1933 and 1944 using the Wilson Dam as a model.

Today TVA provides electricity for 153 local power companies serving 10 million people in Tennessee, Alabama and five other states.