Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

After wrestling with its lack of a raison d’être for a while, the TVA decided that the only way it could justify the new dam was to change the whole character of the region in which it would be. The solution, it finally decided, was to create an entirely new town around the reservoir, a chrome-and-steel headquarters for a major branch of the Boeing Corporation which would go by the somewhat ironic name Timberlake. (Actually the TVA may have come up with the idea because the Bureau of Reclamation had thought of it first. In the 1960s, it was no secret that the Bureau, boxed out of much of its historical domain by the Corps of Engineers, was looking to expand its activities eastward, and Appalachia was the first place it planned to give things a try, building exactly the kind of sterile, reservoir-centered new towns of which Timberlake would be a first example.) It was like deciding to put a fifty-thousand-seat Superdome in the middle of Wyoming and then building a city of 150,000 people around it to justify its existence. And there was no real guarantee by Boeing that it would establish itself there; it had merely expressed interest in the idea. But that was enough to get the project moving. By 1969, Tellico Dam was well on the way to being built.