Douglas Dam is a hydroelectric dam on the French Broad River in Sevier County, Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. The dam is operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built the dam in record time in the early 1940s to meet emergency energy demands at the height of World War II. Douglas Dam is a straight reinforced concrete gravity-type dam 1705 feet (520 m) long and 202 feet (62 m) high, impounding the Douglas Lake. The dam was named for Douglas Bluff, a cliff overlooking the dam site prior to construction.
Location and access
The French Broad River winds its way westward from the Appalachian Mountains, gaining considerable strength after absorbing the Pigeon River and Nolichucky River near Newport before eventually joining with the Holston River at Knoxville to form the Tennessee River. Douglas Dam is located above the mouth of the French Broad. The area is a geological border between the Foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains (which rise to the south) and the Appalachian Ridge-and-Valley range. The reservoir includes parts of Sevier, Jefferson, Hamblen, and Cocke counties.
Road access is available by Tennessee State Route 338 which crosses the river just downstream of the dam. Interstate 40 (Exit 407) passes a few miles to the north. The dam is also accessed from I-40 exit 412 via Deep Springs Road and Tennessee State Route 139.
The dam does not have any navigational locks.
Background and construction
During 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested Congress to allocate funding for a dam on the French Broad River in East Tennessee. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in the United States entering World War II, construction of this dam became a high priority in order to generate hydroelectric power for national defense purposes. Large amounts of electricity were needed to produce aluminum and magnesium – vital metals for wartime warplane-manufacturing.
When the TVA first asked Congress for the funds to construct Douglas Dam in late 1941, U.S. Senator Kenneth McKellar (D-Tennessee) opposed the project because it would flood some of fertile farmland important to the local food canning industry. McKellar succeeded in blocking this project for two months, but his opposition was overridden because of national defense needs. The Office of Production Management predicted that wartime industrial production would peak in 1943, and that the generating capacity of existing and planned TVA projects would be short by 230,000 kilowatts of electric power.
Congress approved the project in January 1942 and President Roosevelt signed the bill into law on January 30, 1942. Construction began immediately on February 2 as a rush project, and it used blueprints, civil engineers, construction workers, and construction machinery from the nearby Cherokee Dam, which had been completed a few weeks earlier in late 1941.
The construction of the Douglas Dam and its accompanying reservoir required the purchase of of land, of which were forested and had to be cleared. This project also required the relocation of 525 families and 32 cemeteries, and the rerouting of several miles of roads. Supplies for the construction of the dam were hauled to the site by the Smoky Mountain Railroad, which had constructed a spur line to the site from nearby Sevierville. Profits from supporting the dam construction saved this railroad from bankruptcy.
The Douglas Project required the construction of ten smaller, earthen saddle dams to fill in gaps along the adjacent ridgeline and permit a higher water elevation than would otherwise be possible. Most of these saddle dams are located in the hills southeast of the main dam. One protects downtown Dandridge, Tennessee, which along with the communities of Shady Grove, Oak Grove, and Rankin, was originally scheduled to be flooded by the reservoir behind the dam. However, the citizens of Dandridge appealed to the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, noting that this town was the only place in the United States named for Martha Washington, the wife of the first president George Washington. Mrs. Roosevelt ensured that a saddle dam was built to protect Dandridge from flooding. The saddle dam was built of earthen fill, and reinforced on its lakeside by gravel and riprap.