The Things I’ve Seen

“I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed.” - Marco Polo on his deathbed, 1324, apparently? Uncharted said so.

“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.” Pierre de Fermat, though that was about maths.

We’re continuing the Thing I Saw on Hales Bar Lock and Dam. Yes, this one is a two-parter. A first for me! You may want to go back and read the previous issue…well, two issues ago if you haven’t yet, though I don’t think it’s strictly necessary. You’ll miss some of the context, some of the references, but frankly there is just too much history in the world. Even reading Hales Bar Dam part 1 won’t give you everything you might want to know, and my summary is just a glimpse through my eyes.

This is my way of saying if you’re new here, or just didn’t bother with part 1, it’s OK: you can just move forward. I don’t mind, and I think you’ll still enjoy this one.

There’s Money in the Valley

In December of 1968, the last boat made its way through the Hale Bar Lock, adjacent to the dam. I didn’t catch enough information on this trip to know where it was going, or even which way it was headed. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) finished construction on the 80’ high, 3700’ wide Nickajack Dam downstream, but it could not fulfill its purpose with Hales Bar Dam in the way. The soon to be formed Nickajack Lake would overrun the dam, but not by enough to save boats from the danger of ramming it in in passing. The Hales Bar Dam was breached, ending its storied career. Old age probably got its founder in June 26, 1969, but it’s somewhat poetic to think that protracted legal battles, loss after loss to the TVA, and the breach of the dam he set out to build 65 years earlier finally did him in.

This started earlier, much earlier, going back to the formation of the Americas as a continent. Geologic forces creating the Tennessee River valley and its treacherous river, inspiring chilling legends. We covered some of this in the last issue, and today we’re jumping forward to December 15, 1887. Josephus Conn Guild. His namesake and grandfather sounds like a man worth a deeper dive, but out of scope here—a judge who was known for his opposition to forceful Cherokee removal, but no angel in racial harmony, and imprisoned for about a year as a traitor to the United States. Our Josephus Conn Guild’s father, Josephus Conn Guild, Sr.¹ , was a renowned engineer of his time. Our Guild will follow in his footsteps, and benefit from his family’s name and wealth, in his quest for…I’m not sure. On the surface it just looks like more wealth. As if the goal was to make the Guild name something that would be remembered in US History like the Carnegies or the Rockefellers. I’ll let you decide where that ended up.

After using the family connections and money to pursue an education through 1904, Guild and his father’s business partner Charles James identified the Hales Bar site as a site ripe for financial exploitation. They could solve two problems at once:

1. a well-built dam could potentially, finally, make the river navigable. The thought process went that the dam, if properly built, could mitigate much of the natural dangers in the area. Anyone who could control the natural environment could control the lock and its fees.

2. if you’re building a dam, why not build a hydroelectric plant? Electric utilities were largely private ventures at the time, hydroelectric power was relatively new and burgeoning² , and nearby Chattanooga was built on challenging terrain which made the logistics of coal-fired steamers difficult. Using natural resources to provide power to the market was a slam dunk.

This was an incredible engineering challenge, and would require a lot of money, but the Guilds were a step ahead there. They brought along Nicholas Brady, son of Anthony N. Brady³ , who all you need to know is that he’s just super duper rich⁴ . They founded the Chattanooga and Tennessee River Power Company, which they’d later consolidate into Tennessee Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

The Money Drains Out of the Valley

W.J. Oliver and Company from Knoxville gets awarded the contract in October 1905. They note there’s some problems with the dam design, but get started on the Town of Guild which would become Haletown eventually. 12 rooming houses, a hotel, dining rooms, a post office, and a commissary supported the influx of 1500 workers who had encamped. The dam itself did not make any significant process as I can see before Oliver abandoned the work. March 1908, Baillie and Dumary took on the project, and pulled a Grampa Simpson. By December 1909, William H. Flaherty finally agreed to build the dam as designed. Their predecessors had a point: the dam was a cursed project, built on cursed ground. It also grappled with hydrologic realities that engineering either failed to understand or refused to recognize in the face of piles of cash. It’s hard for a rich man to understand a concept when it get in the way of him getting richer⁵ .

As the dam went up, the limestone did what limestone does. The crews constantly battled leaks from underground streams both existing and likely introduced from the weight and stress of all the work. A lot of grout was the planned solution, though even that did little to abate the issues. Divers would frequently go down, try to patch up a stream or crack, only to find it just pushed water through more previously undiscovered paths.

During this time, Chattanooga was starting to get electrified. It wasn’t a coup de grace, but the clock started ticking. Josephus Conn Guild, Junior, our Josephus Conn Guild as we talked about earlier, had taken over primary responsibilities for managing the dam construction in 1907. Senior died in 1913, a bit too early to see Hales Bar Dam completed on 13 November 1913. That means he also didn’t live to see the rocky start it would have. Initially, the dam delivered power to Jasper and Whitwell, a far less lucrative delivery than to Chattanooga. This was also paying off an ambitious use of a relatively new use of caissons, large watertight-ish retaining structures that allowed work to proceed “underwater”. The limestone was a poor foundation for such work, and added with the weight of the concrete for the dam, the contract for excavation exploded to at least 5 ½ time the original estimate. Some estimates for the dam itself are for 10-15x the initial planned cost. The concrete was continually damp under the incessant leaking and seepage, and never fully cured properly. “Rag Gangs” would take rock, rags, carpet, burlap sacks of concrete, whatever they could get their hands on, to try and patch the dam and backfill around grout. It was a desperate move to find something that would plug the leaks and not further balloon the budget. Nothing really worked long-term though, and the dam leaked through its entire existence.

The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Evicted by the TVA

While the dam and power plant never did stop leaking, it did function well as a lock and was able to, for the most part, deliver power to the region. The Guilds and the James’ and the Bradys of the world, titans of their era, were simply no match for physics. The realities of the Tennessee River Valley were too much to overcome by sheer will, and while numbers are not available, this has all the hallmarks of your classic hubris-inflated boondoggle.

It wasn’t just the dam construction and operation - a lot of money went in to the concept itself. The town that was built. The wheeling and dealing that killed other projects in the region. For example, a dam and power generation facility was planned near Scott’s Point in April 1904. It was all slated to break ground, when the Hales Bar project came in and had it squashed. I doubt this was the only competitive project, as one of the driving factors was delivery of power to Chattanooga. While it did provide some power eventually, other (non-hydroelectric) projects beat them to the punch. I can imagine they had a different vision of a world where the dam went up quickly and easily, being first or at least early to market.

What’s a wealthy person to do in the face of such paltry profits? Well, when you’re too big to fail, you lobby the government! The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), created in 1933 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, was the authority that would provide navigation, flood control, and electricity generation in the Tennessee Valley⁶ . The TVA provided a lot of much needed jobs during the Great Depression, and had some incredible benefits for the region. It was also a juicy bailout target for the Chattanooga and Tennessee River Power Company⁷ , and its assets (the dam, lock, and power generation) were acquired by the TVA in 1939.

The TVA launched a massive battle against dam leaks, and declared victory in 1943. With the leaks solved forever, they increased the generating capacity, improved the lock, and generally spent a bunch of money to improve the dam for decades to come.

Boils and other curiously turbulent water features started appearing downstream of the dam in the 50s. It turns out, the dam increased the thing, actually leaking even more water. Dye tests confirmed by 1960 that the dam was leaking more than ever, and in danger of collapse. Part of that might have been all the investments in increased generating capacity—more generation requires more water, which puts more pressure on the dam and its limestone base which is not a recipe for success. That and increased river traffic from larger ships made the TVA re-evaluate the practicality of fixing the Hales Bar Dam and expanding the lock, and they went to authorize a new dam. Downstream, Nickajack Dam was authorized in January 1964, “ground” broke on April 1st, and it was completed by the end of 1967 complete with a new lock.

The dam did not come without cost, though. Like in Needful Things, the TVA extracted a price on the landscape—not in dollars, but in its soul. To provide a lock for modern boats, assure control of the river valley farther upstream than Hales Bar Dam had to, and provide for more reservoir capacity and recreation, the dam had to raise the water level in the valley around Haletown and the site of the former Cherokee Nickajack settlement. Most of Haletown, its graveyards, the likely burial site of Dragging Canoe, and the Nickajack Cave system were all submerged. The river was tamed, the power flowed, and this bit of the Tennessee River Valley just West of Chattanooga was “tamed”.

A Dam Wild Time (and a necessary pun)

The dam opened with 14 3kW generators. It would later add more, ending up at 99,700 kW of total capacity, and if you go on the tour you can see the generator floor. The generators are long gone, moved to the Nickajack Dam in the 60s. The tour will take you through the offices, long devoid of the desks and chairs and inboxes of their time. The control panel, outdated, was stripped for parts and scrap. You’ll walk through the transmission rooms, dangerous places. The dam claimed many lives. One worker was dragged underwater by a rope in a freak accident. Violence plagued the community, as building and operating the dam was a high stress job. It’s a ghost hunter’s dream, and the tour…is a haunted tour! You’ll learn not just about the dam, but the odd goings on, from some folks who are steeped in the history. The tour guides train and read multiple sources of history, including Nonie Webb’s works. That’s where I found out about them!

Amazingly enough, I couldn’t find any evidence of children killed in the dam. That may sound like a weird thing to say, but Haletown was on the East shore of the river. One of its conveniences was a schoolhouse, which kids from the west shore of the river would regularly attend. There was no bridge across the river at the time, and schoolchildren would walk into the lock, downstairs, and through the dam to the power plant. They navigated a dark, damp corridor seeping and at times leaking water. When they arrived at the dam, they climbed what I believe is close to a hundred feet of industrial metal stairs past sluices and turbines to pop up right between two generators. The last leg of the spiral staircase is still there, covered to prevent an accidental fall. They’d walk across the generation floor and out the door to their education, then repeat the trek in reverse to go home. Some days, the dam tunnel would just flood. And I only had to walk uphill several miles both ways through the snow. I had it easy.

It’s filled with settled muck, those infamous leaks dragging in water and sediment over decades. There’s probably a ten foot fall into a shallow pond, though if I understand correctly the original height would have been closer to a hundred feet. The dam has been tamed.

I don’t know much about ghosts, but I do know about Pascal’s Wager. Simplistically, if you must make a choice, and one choice can only be neutral or lead to downsides, and the other choice can only be neutral or lead to upsides, might as well make the upside choice. Maybe I’m being a bit unfair, but the wager blows past a lot of complexity as well, so…I don’t feel too badly about it.

The choice you can make is simple: if you take the tour, bring a flower for those who lost their lives, sometimes to violent ends, at Hales Bar Dam. Maybe ghosts aren’t real. Maybe you’ll look silly. But maybe, just maybe, the spirits will smile on you and show you something special. And more importantly, maybe you’ll keep in touch with a deep seat of your own humanity. Remember those who came before, remember that we all are part of a long line of history, and that we can care just a bit about others that we’ve never even met.

A Nod to The Past

I left out SO MUCH, and if Nonie Webb is any indication, I know NOTHING. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how I could have told this better, what choices I made in leaving things in or taking things out, and so on. Did I do the subjects justice for the amount of ink spilled?

I don’t know if that’s important, honestly. Sometimes, there’s a craft and you have to hone it. My stated goal is to write about the Things I’ve Seen. I give no loftier ambitions, and honestly, even having concerns like this is at odds with what I’m claiming I’ve set out to do. Frankly it’s a disservice to the goal of posting my writing to dive so deeply and get so wrapped up in each issue. More time reflecting is less time writing and posting. Maybe I care more about the topics, or even in general, than the very pedestrian goal allows. Maybe this is something else entirely.

It kind of has to be, though. Right? The Things I’ve Seen are actual, real-world things. They have context, a place in the world. There are webs of relations woven through them. It’s pretty naive to think I could simply say I’ve Seen this Thing, isn’t that neat? I’m not wired that way, and if you’re still reading this, you’re probably not either.

That doesn’t help me in my effort to ship things. Maybe I need to reconsider the goals of this newsletter. Maybe it’s always been something more, and until I figure out what that is I’ll have a hard time understanding what it means to complete an issue. Likewise, I do really feel that the process of just writing, even something as simple as a blog about Things I’ve Seen, is good practice. There’s no shame in writing to write. There’s no shame in saying this is a written thing, it’s not edited, it’s not polished, it just is, and you can have it. Somewhere in between is what this newsletter is, and finding that sweet spot will probably help in knowing when to dig and when to call it day.

History is going to have to be part of that middle ground, though. I think I went too far, and for my current schedule I simply can’t commit to this kind of reading and digging regularly. I can still find time to do some digging, read some sources (or at least parts), and nod to all the things that came before. There’s probably other things I’m letting hold me back as well, but at least knowing what this is and where to go (and not go) can’t hurt.

See you next ish!

References

• (KM) Volume II “Keepsake Memories” of Marion Co., Tennessee by Nonie Webb

• Hales Bar Lock & Dam History, by Nonie Webb

• Wikipedia as always.

Thanks for joining me, where I’m one of today’s lucky 10,000! I hope you enjoyed it. Here’s all the beehiiv stuff that is required to be here.

— Lou

1  Yeah this is very confusing, but from here forward the only Josephus Conn Guild is going to be the one we’re talking about in reference to the dam.

2  The first popular known demonstration of hydroelectric power I could find with a quick search was in Northumberland, England, in 1878. The first hydroelectric generation of power that served private customers was in Wisconsin, 1882, though several plants were being built at this point. This was contemporaneous (less than a month later) than Edison’s Pearl Street Station started steam-generated commercial power service. I didn’t enumerate them but multiple hits on web searches say there were hundreds of hydroelectric power plants by the early 1900s, which tracks.

3  Some really really really rich guy. The smart kind of rich guy, in that he apparently was happy with amassing massive sums of money and then shutting up. Have you heard of him? I haven’t. Apparently he had the right mix of (1) incredible wealth and power and (2) staying out of the spotlight of history.

4  Yeah I put that he’s rich in the footnote and in the article. That’s just how rich he was. I say was because, well, as people before me have said: biology is undefeated. If you die rich, you still die. Grave robbers will confirm that the Egyptian Pharaohs didn’t get to take it with them.

5  I believe I owe my apologies to Upton Sinclair.

6  Hey, at least this name tells you what it does. It’s a far deal better than the names we put on our bills.

7  There was at least one merger and one name change.