Hales Bar Dam - Construction

Construction

Along with Muscle Shoals and the Elk River Shoals further downstream, the Tennessee River Gorge had long been one of the major impediments to river navigation in the upper Tennessee Valley. While various 19th-century canal projects had minor success in extending navigation across the shoals, the Tennessee River Gorge remained largely untamed. In 1898, several Chattanooga business interests formed the Tennessee River Improvement Association to lobby for efforts to extend year-round navigation to Chattanooga, and around 1900, Major Dan C. Kingman of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers drafted a design for a dam that would flood the Tennessee River Gorge and remove the swift current and various hazards that had long prevented large-scale navigation through this stretch of the river. In 1904, Kingman's friend, Josephus Conn Guild, offered to build the dam with private funding in exchange for the rights to the dam's hydroelectric power. Congress passed the enabling legislation on April 27, 1904, and with funding from Chattanooga entrepreneur Charles E. James and New York financier Anthony Brady, Guild formed the Chattanooga and Tennessee River Power Company to oversee the project.

Work on Hales Bar Dam began in October 1905. Two self-contained communities, Guild (now Haletown) and Ladds, were built to house the thousands of construction workers needed to build the dam. The dam was originally slated for completion in 1909, but numerous difficulties brought about primarily by the soft bedrock upon which the dam was built continuously stalled construction, and by 1910, only the lock and powerhouse had been completed. Engineers finally began to make progress after employing the use of pressure grouting and concrete caissons— the first use of either in a major dam construction project— and Hales Bar Dam was finished on November 11, 1913. Leaks began to appear almost immediately after completion, however. In 1919, engineers attempted to minimize the leakage by pumping hot asphalt into the dam's foundation. This was temporarily successful, but by 1931, a study showed the dam was leaking at a rate of 1,000 cubic feet per second (28 m3/s).