History

The Tennessee Valley Authority had been reshaping the river systems of the upper South since 1933, bringing electricity to rural communities that had never had it and controlling the floods that had periodically devastated the valley. Fontana, planned as one of the final links in the TVA dam system, was an already ambitious project when the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 transformed it into a wartime emergency. The atomic weapons programme, then being assembled at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, required enormous quantities of electricity for uranium enrichment, and Fontana was identified as the fastest available source.

Construction was accelerated to a pace that would have been considered impossible under peacetime conditions. A workforce of several thousand operated around the clock, and the dam was completed in 1944 — less than three years after construction began and ahead of the original projected schedule. The electricity it generated flowed to Oak Ridge without the workers who built it knowing what it was for; the Manhattan Project was classified at the highest level, and the residents of the construction camps had no knowledge of their contribution to it.

The dam required the relocation of communities in the Little Tennessee valley, whose residents lost homes, farms, and ancestral burial grounds. The displaced families were promised a road that would connect the surviving communities on the north shore of Fontana Lake to the outside; the road was begun but never completed. It became known as the “Road to Nowhere,” a paved surface that ends abruptly in the forest and is now a hiking trail in the national park.