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Dillsboro Dam will soon be history
Last week’s news that Duke Energy will begin demolishing the Dillsboro Dam this week means the 82-year-old concrete structure will soon become a part of county history. Though tiny by today’s commercial power production standards, the Dillsboro facility was huge with regard to early growth and development in both Sylva and Dillsboro.
The current 12-foot-high rock and masonry dam, constructed in 1927, is at least the third dam to impound the river and divert water through turbines and power electric generators. When Nantahala Power and Light (now Duke Energy) purchased the Dillsboro Dam and powerhouse from Dillsboro and Sylva Electric Co. in 1957, the small power plant provided power to some 2,000 customers; however, given the electrical appetites of today’s modern households, its 225-kw capacity would likely be able to power only 20 to 30 homes.
Early industrialist and entrepreneur C.J. Harris built Jackson County’s first public power plant in 1909, locating the dam and generator for his Dillsboro and Sylva Electric Light Co. on the Tuck-asei-gee River near its confluence with Scotts Creek. The plant first provided electricity to power the Harris-Rees Tannery in Sylva and illuminate the streets of both towns. The glow of street lights was first seen in Sylva on March 14, 1911, according to The Jackson County Journal, a weekly paper published at the time.
Harris’s first wooden dam gave way in 1913 and a new dam was in place by the following year. Construction of the present dam followed in 1927, and the generating facility was upgraded in 1930 with the addition of a German-made 300-horsepower vertical turbine, according to “The History of Jackson County.”
A document Dan Hooper of Sylva loaned The Herald back in 1989 sheds more light on the power company’s early operations. Dan showed us a contract his grandfather, D.G. Bryson, had signed with D&S Electric in 1918 to obtain electricity at his Beta home, which was located near the present intersection of Cope Creek Road and U.S. 23-74.
According to that contract, the power company agreed to furnish electricity to each house on Bryson’s “extension line” for the sum of $2 per month, based on six lights per house, until the extension line was paid for and then to continue to furnish Bryson with power at the same rates in effect in Dillsboro and Sylva.
The dam’s demolition may end one chapter of local history, but it will restore another part of Dillsboro’s past – the free-flowing river that’s been missing for almost a century.
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