Fort Loudoun Dam is a hydroelectric dam on the Tennessee River in Loudon County, Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. The dam is operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built the dam in the early 1940s as part of a unified plan to provide electricity and flood control in the Tennessee Valley and create a continuous navigable river channel from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Paducah, Kentucky. It is the uppermost of nine TVA dams on the Tennessee River.
The dam impounds the Fort Loudoun Lake and its tailwaters are part of Watts Bar Lake. The generating capacity of Fort Loudoun Dam is enhanced by the Tellico Reservoir, from which water is diverted via canal to Fort Loudoun Lake. It and associated infrastructure were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.
Fort Loudoun Dam is named after Fort Loudoun, an 18th-century British colonial fort built during the French and Indian War. The fort— which was located about south of the dam site— was named for John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun, commander of British forces in North America during this period.
Location
Fort Loudoun Dam is located at just over upstream from the mouth of the Tennessee River and nearly downstream from the river's source at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad at Knoxville. The river's natural confluence with the Little Tennessee River is located approximately downstream, although the Tellico Reservoir, which covers most of the lower Little Tennessee, is connected to Fort Loudoun Lake via canal which empties into the lake upstream from the dam. Lenoir City is located immediately north of Fort Loudoun Dam. The reservoir includes parts of Loudon, Blount, and Knox counties.
Fort Loudoun Dam was built across three small islands (known as the "Belle Canton Islands"), although the construction of the dam and the later construction of Tellico Dam required a drastic modification of the landscape. The northern and eastern parts of these islands are now submerged, whereas the southern and western parts were combined with part of the original mainland and part of Bussell Island (at the mouth of the Little Tennessee) to form one large island. This new island is separated from the mainland by the Tellico canal to the south and the main Tennessee River channel to the north.
From 1963 until the bridge's closure in July 2017, Lamar Alexander Parkway (part of U.S. Route 321) crossed the J. Carmichael Greer Bridge atop Fort Loudoun Dam and connected the area to Interstate 75 and Interstate 40 to the north and to Maryville and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the south. US-321 intersects U.S. Route 11 just over a mile north of the dam in Lenoir City. Interstate 140 and several federal and state highways cross Fort Loudoun Lake further upstream. A new bridge south-east of the dam was completed in the summer of 2017 and now carries Parkway traffic across the river.
Capacity and dimensions
thumb|Fort Loudoun Lock and Dam. View is upriver to the northwest.
Fort Loudoun Dam is high and stretches across the Tennessee River. The reservoir has of shoreline, of water surface, and a flood storage capacity of . The dam is equipped with a lock that raises and lowers boats about between Fort Loudoun Lake (upstream) and Watts Bar Lake (downstream). There are four hydroelectric generators at the dam with a combined generation capacity of 155.6 megawatts of electricity.