ABSTRACT
It took a lot of men and machines to rebuild the Tennessee Valley. This vast area of eroded hillsides and exhausted land, stretching from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee to the flat lands of Alabama, had suffered years of rapacious forestry and over-farming over the course of the nineteenth century. But in ten short years, from 1933 to 1943, in the midst of the Great Depression, 40,000 square miles of worn out land in seven southern states were replanted with trees and seeded with demonstration farms, nurseries and fish hatcheries. Seven mainstream and eleven tributary hydroelectric dams were built, turning 650 miles of wild river into stillwater lakes.1 Transmission wires were stretched far beyond the reach of the river, to carry electricity – or as the farmers of the time called it, “light” – to the farms and households of one of the most rural regions of the United States. Tens of thousands of people were moved off low-lying farms and resettled into existing towns and new model communities. Navigable waterways allowed goods to circulate up and down the river. New “freeways” threading through the valley brought in visitors to witness the incredible transformation of a devastated land into a productive modern landscape.
