The Tennessee River is the largest tributary of the Ohio River. It is approximately long and is located in the southeastern United States in the Tennessee Valley. The river was once popularly known as the Cherokee River, among other names, as the Cherokee people had their homelands along its banks, especially in what are now East Tennessee and northern Alabama. Additionally, its tributary, the Little Tennessee River, flows into it from Western North Carolina and northeastern Georgia, where the river also was bordered by numerous Cherokee towns. Its current name is derived from the Cherokee town, Tanasi, which was located on the Tennessee side of the Appalachian Mountains.
Course
The Tennessee River is formed at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad rivers in present-day Knoxville, Tennessee. From Knoxville, it flows southwest through East Tennessee into Chattanooga before crossing into Alabama. It travels through the Huntsville and Decatur area before reaching the Muscle Shoals area, and eventually forms a small part of the state's border with Mississippi, before returning to Tennessee. The river misses Georgia by about . The Tennessee River's route northerly through Tennessee defines the boundary between two of Tennessee's Grand Divisions: Middle and West Tennessee.
The Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project providing navigation on the Tombigbee River and a link to the Port of Mobile, enters the Tennessee River near the Tennessee-Alabama-Mississippi boundary. This waterway reduces the navigation distance from Tennessee, north Alabama, and northern Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico by hundreds of miles. The final part of the Tennessee's run is north through western Kentucky, where it separates the Jackson Purchase from the rest of the state. It flows into the Ohio River at Paducah, Kentucky.
Dams
The river has been dammed numerous times since the 1930s by Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) projects. The construction of TVA's Kentucky Dam on the Tennessee River and the Corps of Engineers' Barkley Dam on the Cumberland River led to the development of associated lakes, and the creation of an area called the Land Between the Lakes. A navigation canal located at Grand Rivers, Kentucky, links Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley. The canal allows for a shorter trip for river traffic going from the Tennessee to most of the Ohio River, and for traffic going down the Cumberland River toward Tennessee.
Important cities and towns
Bridgeport, Alabama
Chattanooga, Tennessee
Cherokee, Alabama
Clifton, Tennessee
Crump, Tennessee
Dayton, Tennessee
Decatur, Alabama
Florence, Alabama
Gilbertsville, Kentucky
Grand Rivers, Kentucky
Guntersville, Alabama
Harrison, Tennessee
Huntsville, Alabama
Killen, Alabama
Kingston, Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee
Langston, Alabama
Lenoir City, Tennessee
Loudon, Tennessee
Muscle Shoals, Alabama
New Johnsonville, Tennessee
Paducah, Kentucky
Savannah, Tennessee
Scottsboro, Alabama
Sheffield, Alabama
Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee
Signal Mountain, Tennessee
South Pittsburg, Tennessee
Triana, Alabama
Waterloo, Alabama
History
The river valley was once home to several Native American tribes. At Painted Bluff, in northeast Alabama, painted glyphs dating to ca. 1400 A.D. have been discovered among cliffs overlooking the river.
The first major battles of the American Civil War occurred along the river in 1862. The commander in the western theater, General Henry Halleck, considered the Tennessee River to be more significant than the Mississippi.
Name
The river appears on French maps from the late 17th century with the names "Caquinampo" or "Kasqui." Maps from the early 18th century call it "Cussate," "Hogohegee," "Callamaco," and "Acanseapi." A 1755 British map showed the Tennessee River as the "River of the Cherakees." By the late 18th century, it had come to be called "Tennessee," a name derived from the Cherokee village named Tanasi.