Ruralite Cafe: Published 03/20/03

By Lynn Hotaling - Associate Editor

Survey marker survives 63 years

I'd never even heard of Wilson Dam until March 2. That's when Richard and I were hiking along the headwaters of Wolf Creek and found a greenish metal marker about 3 inches in diameter embedded in a large boulder on the creek bank.

"Useful information," it read. "Please do not remove." Additional lettering on the disk indicated it had been put in place in 1940 by the Tennessee Valley Authority. For more information, it said, we should contact the "chief engineer" at Wilson Dam, Alabama.

That was enough of a clue for us to infer that Wilson Dam is a TVA facility. Imagine my surprise later that day when I picked up a Sunday newspaper and read about Wilson Dam in a story about TVA upgrades to Douglas Dam, located on the French Broad River some 25 miles east of Knoxville near Kodak, Tenn.

Turns out Wilson Dam is TVA's largest conventional hydroelectric plant, has 21 turbines and is located on the Tennessee River in northwestern Alabama.

All this piqued my curiosity enough to send me to TVA's web page to find out more - maybe even the name of Wilson Dam's "chief engineer."

While I didn't locate that piece of information, I did discover some interesting parallels between Wilson Dam and Jackson County's largest dam, Glenville's Thorpe. Both were built as the United States prepared for war, and both altered significant geological features.

The federal government built Wilson Dam to supply electricity needed to power its Muscle Shoals nitrate plants, which produce explosives. Construction of the 137-foot-high neoclassical dam that stretches 4,541 feet across the Tennessee River was begun in 1918, the year after the United States entered World War I.

Thorpe's hydroelectric project, which boasts the highest head (vertical drop) of any power plant east of the Rockies, was begun in June 1940 and came online 16 months later, in October 1941, on the eve of this nation's entry into World War II. Constructed by the Aluminum Co. of America, Thorpe's electricity went to Alcoa, Tenn., to produce the aluminum necessary to manufacture military aircraft.

Along with those of nearby Pickwick and Wheeler dams, Wilson's reservoir covers Alabama's "treacherous" Muscle Shoals, which, according to the TVA website, once blocked navigation of the Tennessee River.

Construction of Thorpe's penstock, a 3-mile system of 9-foot tunnels and 6-foot steel pipe that carries water from Lake Glenville to the powerhouse 1,207 feet below, effectively dried up the famed High Falls of the Tuckaseigee River.

When it comes to generating capacity, however, the two aren't much alike. Wilson Dam produces some 650,000 kilowatts, more than 30 times Thorpe's 21,600.

And now back to the benchmark, as the National Geodetic Survey calls the round survey disk we found several Sundays ago. TVA survey crews placed a number of such markers in Jackson County around 1940. Each is numbered and marked on topo maps, and a precise description of benchmark locations is available at the NGS website.

We found No. 1738. It's on the east side of Wolf Creek 1.3 miles southwest of Haywood Gap. According to NGS information, it lies 23 feet east of the center line of the "Haywood Gap Trail," 400 feet downstream from a large log building and not far from the intersection "of the old railroad up a hollow to the east." It's further described as being 11 miles northeast of the Argura Post Office (now the home of Newt and June Smith) and on land belonging to the Blackwood Lumber Co. That land has since become part of the U.S. Forest Service's Roy Taylor Forest.

Two additional survey disks were placed on the opposite bank of Wolf Creek in 1940, but so far we have been unable to locate either of them. Numbered 1739 and 1740, the potential longevity of each is described as "Stability: C - May hold, but of the type commonly subject to surface motion," whereas the clearly visible 1738 is listed as "Stability: A - Most reliable and expected to hold."

During a 1994 U.S. Power Squadron follow-up study, crews were unable to locate 1740, which is described as being 2.2 miles from Cathey Gap and 1.8 miles northwest of Charley Creek School on property owned by Blackwood Lumber magnate Joseph Keyes. The marker was placed in the yard of a house occupied (in 1940 - there's no sign of a house now) by Norman Moore.

The power squad also failed to find No. 1737, which was placed at Haywood Gap by the same crew and given a stability rating of "A." There is no indication the 1994 team attempted to find 1738 and 1739.

Our theory is that human activity - construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway some 40 years ago - dislodged or buried 1737, despite its high stability rating. Jackson County's worst flood in recorded history, which occurred Aug. 31, 1940, likely relocated the much less stable 1739 and 1740 only a few months after TVA surveyors attached them to large boulders on Wolf Creek's east bank.

The descriptions of these four benchmarks paint a picture of a different landscape than the one we saw several Sundays ago. All refer to the Haywood Gap Trail as if it's a major thoroughfare, three mention railroads and two describe large, seemingly permanent, structures.

However, any trail that ever existed is long gone, lost to a tangle of dog hobble, hemlock and laurel, making Wolf Creek's headwaters difficult to access. Likewise, little evidence remains of the bustling logging camps or narrow-gage railroads that once criss-crossed Canada community's ridges and valleys to haul giant chestnut logs to Blackwood's sawmill at East LaPorte.

While searching for the benchmark - a mysterious number on a map that kept us going through entwined rhododendrons - provided incentive for a series of Sunday hikes, actually finding one of the fragile metal disks still intact after six decades was nothing short of a wonder.

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