Norris Dam is a Tennessee Valley Authority hydorelectric and flood control structure located on the Clinch River in East Tennessee. It was the first dam constructed by the TVA, in the mid-1930s. However, it is not the oldest dam owned and operated by TVA, which subsequently purchased the assets of the former Tennessee Electric Power Company, including some dams which were built earlier. The dam is named in honor of NebraskaSenatorGeorge Norris, who was a longtime supporter of governmentally-owned power in general and TVA in particular. The town of Norris, Tennessee was a planned community initially used to house the workers involved in the construction of this dam. The reservoir is often relatively clear, especially for one of this age, due to the rocky nature of the beds of most of the tributary streams, and is considered a prime destination for fishermen. Due to the height of the dam and the relative depth and steepness of the valleys of the some of the streams impounded, parts of this lake, especially the downstream portions near the dam, are very deep for a man-made impoundment of this kind.
Norris was the first Tennessee Valley Authority hydroelectric project, begun in October 1933 and finished in March 1936 on the Clinch River in Anderson County.
It is a straight concrete gravity-type dam, 1860 feet long, 265 feet high, and 208 feet thick at the base, equipped with two 50,000-kilowatt generators located in a powerhouse on the right side of the dam face.
The dam was named for Senator George Norris of Nebraska, a progressive Republican who for eleven years had kept alive a vision of public power in the Tennessee Valley and whose stubbornness finally bore fruit during the first one hundred days of the Roosevelt administration, when the TVA was created by an act of Congress.
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