Appalachian History Series – South Holston Dam: A Mountain River Re-shaped for Power, Flood Control, and a New Lake
On a misty morning below South Holston Dam, the South Fork Holston River looks more like a cold spring creek than the tail of a major reservoir. Water slips over the concrete steps of the Osceola Island weir, picking up oxygen as it goes, and brown trout fin in the slicks while anglers wait for the next pulse from the powerhouse upstream. It is a peaceful scene that hides what it took to turn this corner of the upper Holston Valley into a carefully managed ladder of concrete, earth, and water.
South Holston Dam is one of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s big tributary projects, an earth and rockfill wall nearly 285 feet high and about 1,600 feet long, built to tame floods, generate power, and store water at the eastern edge of the Tennessee River system. Construction began in the early 1940s, paused during World War II, and resumed in the late 1940s before the gates were closed in November 1950 and its single hydro unit went on line in early 1951.
Today the reservoir behind it stretches about twenty four miles up the South Fork into Virginia, with a water surface of roughly seventy five hundred acres, its shoreline touching both Sullivan County, Tennessee, and Washington County, Virginia.
From troubled floods and wartime shortages to hydraulic model studies and modern land use plans, the story of South Holston Dam is written in federal reports, survey maps, oral histories, and the memories of people who watched their farms disappear under a new lake.
Planning a high country reservoir on the Holston
Long before the Tennessee Valley Authority took an interest in the upper Holston, private power companies had studied the South Fork Holston River and its tributaries for potential dam sites. In the 1920s the Holston River Power Company mapped a chain of possible projects, including one at what would later become the South Holston site. None of those early schemes reached construction, but they sketched out the basic idea: a high storage reservoir in the Blue Ridge foothills feeding downstream power plants.
After TVA was created in 1933 and given responsibility for the Tennessee River watershed, engineers began to look seriously at the South Fork Holston as part of a basin wide flood control system. A devastating flood in 1940 tore through Bluff City and Kingsport, showing how quickly the Holston could rise and how much the Tennessee main stem depended on its tributaries. Technical Report No. 14, the massive 1958 volume The Upper Holston Projects, lays out how TVA settled on a group of four new dams in this basin: Watauga, South Holston, Boone, and Fort Patrick Henry. South Holston and Watauga would become the big storage reservoirs in the mountains, with Boone and Fort Patrick Henry turning that regulated flow into additional power closer to Kingsport.
Congress authorized the upper Holston projects in December 1941. Work on South Holston began in February 1942, only to be shut down that fall when the War Production Board decided that scarce materials needed to go into more urgent wartime construction. TVA secured the partially built site and put the project on hold. Construction crews did not return in force until the summer of 1947, by which time Watauga Dam was nearing completion upstream.
Designing an earth and rock wall at the edge of the mountains
South Holston is a classic TVA earth and rockfill dam, its rolled earth core flanked by rock shoulders, all keyed into the valley walls and underlain by a grout curtain that cuts off seepage through the bedrock. The 1958 Upper Holston report devotes hundreds of pages and drawings to its foundations, borrow pits, and embankment sections, along with photographs of quarry blasts that provided more than three million cubic yards of rock.
The main dam rises roughly 285 feet above the riverbed and stretches about 1,600 feet across the valley. A separate saddle dam, forty feet high and about 3,400 feet long, closes a low gap at Painter Spring several miles away to keep the reservoir from spilling out of its basin.
Unlike many TVA dams with gated spillways, South Holston relies on a fixed crest “morning glory” spillway, a circular overflow structure that drops water into a tunnel and discharges into a stilling basin below the dam. Early hydraulic model work for that system appears in a 1954 National Bureau of Standards survey of hydraulic research, which notes a scale model study of South Holston’s surge tank and flow behavior.
Even with that modeling, engineers were cautious. TVA added the Bent Branch auxiliary spillway south of the main dam to provide extra capacity if an extreme flood ever pushed the reservoir above the morning glory crest. Later Nuclear Regulatory Commission calculations on “dam rating curves” for South Holston translated all of that infrastructure into elevation–discharge tables, part of a system wide look at how water would move through the Holston and Tennessee Valley dams under various flood scenarios.
Behind the dam, South Holston Lake can store about 765,000 acre feet of water in total, with more than a quarter of that volume reserved for flood control. It draws on a drainage area of about 703 square miles, much of it steep mountain country that can shed water quickly during tropical remnants and winter rain on snow events.
Moving farms, roads, and graves out of the flood zone
Technical Report No. 14 does not gloss over what it took to clear ground for this new lake. TVA acquired roughly 12,860 acres for the South Holston project, of which about 3,875 acres had to be cleared of timber and structures. The reservoir footprint reached across the state line and through a patchwork of farms, bottomland fields, and small communities. In the process TVA relocated about 342 families and moved at least 559 graves to new cemeteries on higher ground.
Those numbers sit behind more personal records. At the National Archives at Atlanta, TVA’s cemetery relocation files and land purchase case folders trace individual farms and churchyards parcel by parcel. Oral history collections at Appalachian State University’s W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection and at the TVA Retiree Association preserve interviews with people who remembered watching surveyors come, signing away land, and then returning years later to fish over the submerged sites of old homeplaces.
Roads and bridges had to be reshaped as well. Thirty miles of highways and local roads were moved out of the flood zone, and four new bridges were built to keep traffic moving once the lake filled. Old alignments, visible on historic topographic maps, now end abruptly at the water’s edge. For motorists crossing the modern dam road, the scale of that shift is easy to miss, but for local families in the late 1940s this was a complete rearrangement of daily life.
Closing the gates and bringing South Holston on line
By the fall of 1950 the embankment, spillways, and powerhouse were far enough along for TVA to begin storing water. On October 21 TVA closed the valve gate at South Holston, and on November 20, 1950, the main gate closed and the lake began to rise in earnest, a date repeated in TVA histories, local newspaper coverage, and later social media posts commemorating “this day in 1950.”
The Elizabethton Star on the Tennessee side of the line reported that “storage of water in the reservoir was started November 20, 1950” and warned that fishing and boat access would soon shut down on the filling pool. Early USGS streamflow records for the South Fork Holston below South Holston Dam in the 1951 water year show how quickly the river’s hydrograph changed once the project came into service: instead of natural winter peaks and summer lows, flows began to reflect controlled releases from the powerhouse and spillways.
On February 13, 1951, South Holston’s turbine and generator formally entered service, adding another hydro unit to TVA’s tributary system. The federal Audit Report of the Tennessee Valley Authority for the fiscal year 1951 notes South Holston among the plants that had recently come on line and folds its output into the Authority’s broader power program.
Over the next decade South Holston played its part in both routine regulation and major floods. A 1958 USGS report on the floods of January and February 1957 in the Southeast includes South Holston’s reservoir levels and contents, showing how much water the project held back while the Tennessee system weathered that event.
Part of a chain on the South Fork Holston
South Holston does not stand alone. It is the uppermost of three TVA dams on the South Fork Holston River. Watauga Dam, on the Watauga River above its confluence with the South Fork, feeds regulated flow into the system. Then South Holston stores and releases water in the high valley above Bristol. Boone Dam, near Johnson City, sits downstream and uses that regulated flow to generate more power before passing it on toward Fort Patrick Henry Dam inside Kingsport.
Together these projects make the South Fork Holston one of the most heavily managed river reaches in the southern Appalachians. Operating charts in Technical Report No. 14 show how Watauga and South Holston were designed to complement one another, with South Holston providing additional seasonal flood storage and late summer flow support. That extra storage matters far downstream, where the Holston joins the French Broad River to form the Tennessee near Knoxville.
Federal regulations eventually recognized the importance of the new lake in navigation and safety rules. A 1961 Coast Guard listing of navigable waters simply names “South Holston Lake” as part of the nation’s navigable system, a small line in the Federal Register that shows how quickly this artificial reservoir became a fixed feature in federal law.
The Osceola Island weir and a rebuilt tailwater
For forty years the reach of river below South Holston Dam lived with cold, sometimes low oxygen releases from the powerhouse and surging flows tied to peaking generation. In 1991 TVA added a new structure about a mile and a half downstream: a labyrinth weir wrapped around Osceola Island.
TVA’s feature story “Weir Science” explains how this low stepped dam re regulates flows when the generator is not running and aerates water spilling over its concrete teeth. Deep releases from the reservoir are cold and often oxygen poor. As water cascades over the weir, it breaks into sheets and droplets that pick up oxygen from the air, improving conditions for aquatic insects and fish.
The result has been one of the most celebrated trout tailwaters in the Southeast. State agencies and TVA now manage the South Holston tailwater as a wild brown trout fishery with protective length limits for larger fish. Flows from the weir give the river a more stable base discharge between generation pulses, so anglers can wade gravel bars, walk the Osceola Island loop, and fish under the shadow of Holston Mountain without the sudden on or off surges that once defined the reach.
Managing shoreline and recreation on a federal lake
Around the lake itself, TVA’s South Holston Reservoir Land Management Plan and the broader Northeastern Tributary Reservoirs environmental impact statement lay out how public lands around the reservoir are zoned and managed. South Holston has about 7,600 acres of TVA land in eighty separate parcels, with designations that range from project operations zones at the dam and power plant to natural resource conservation, developed recreation areas, and shoreline access.
Those designations support a mix of uses that are obvious on a summer weekend. Campgrounds and day use areas along the lakeshore host boat ramps, swim beaches, and picnic sites. National forest lands on both the Tennessee and Virginia sides add trails and back roads that lead to overlooks high above the blue water. Tourism guides and local planning documents describe South Holston as a key recreational resource for the Bristol area, with roughly 7,550 acres of impounded water drawing anglers, scuba divers, and lake house owners.
Below the dam, TVA has built a network of short trails and access points that make the tailwater a local park as much as a power plant outfall. Paths like the Tailwater Trail and Osceola Island Loop trace the riverbank, while anglers slip into the current between the concrete piers of the weir.
What lies beneath: memory, archives, and the underwater landscape
South Holston’s surface is a playground, but for families who left farms and churchyards in the flood zone, the lake can also be a reminder of what disappeared. Oral history projects around the region include memories of houses burned or torn down before the water rose, of last walks through family cemeteries, and of returning by boat to look down through clear water at the outlines of former roads or house foundations when the reservoir is low.
Much of that story is still written in federal records. Record Group 142 at the National Archives at Atlanta holds TVA project histories, progress reports, drawings, and photographs for South Holston, including construction scenes that match the images published in Technical Report No. 14. Cemetery relocation files, land acquisition case files, and maps of parcel boundaries allow genealogists and local historians to trace exactly which farms were inundated and where families moved.
Hydrologists and engineers see South Holston through a different set of documents: dam rating curves in NRC files, flood operational guides, USGS flow records, and later ecological studies. A University of Tennessee thesis on mussel growth in the Holston system, for example, uses Boone, South Holston, and Fort Patrick Henry as case studies in how flow regulation and cold clear releases have changed downstream habitat.
Why South Holston Dam still matters
Nearly three quarters of a century after closure, South Holston Dam has become part of the everyday landscape around Bristol. Local route guides treat a drive across the crest as a routine scenic detour. County plans talk about the reservoir in the same breath as roads and industrial parks. Tourism sites sell it as a place to watch the leaves change in fall or to drift a dry fly over a pod of rising trout.
Yet the structure itself is still doing quiet work in the background. Its flood storage helps blunt winter and spring surges. Its single hydro unit adds renewable power to the TVA grid. Its coordination with Watauga, Boone, and Fort Patrick Henry helps smooth out flows all the way down to the main Tennessee River. Safety regulators continue to revisit its performance through updated dam rating curves and probable maximum flood studies, making sure this mid century project can keep meeting modern standards.
For Appalachian historians, South Holston Dam offers several layers of story at once. It is an artifact of New Deal and wartime planning, a monument to mid century engineering, a landscape of loss for mountain communities whose bottomlands now lie under deep water, and a modern recreation hub where locals walk dogs, ride bikes, and cast flies beneath Holston Mountain. Watching the river slide over the Osceola Island weir on a quiet day, it can be hard to imagine the bare valley and blasting quarries of the 1940s, but the records that built this project are still there for anyone willing to follow them into the archives.
Sources & Further Reading
Tennessee Valley Authority. The Upper Holston Projects: Watauga, South Holston, Boone, and Fort Patrick Henry: A Comprehensive Report on the Planning, Design, Construction, Initial Operations, and Costs of Four Hydro Projects in the Holston Basin at the Eastern Tip of Tennessee. Technical Report No. 14. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958. https://littlemsandsailing.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/the-upper-holston-project.pdf. Online Books Page
United States Government. Audit Report of Tennessee Valley Authority for the Fiscal Year 1951. 82nd Cong., 1st sess., H. Doc. 306. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-11597_00_00-003-0306-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-11597_00_00-003-0306-0000.pdf. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Tennessee Valley Authority. “South Holston.” Hydroelectric plant fact sheet. Knoxville, TN: TVA, n.d. https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/hydroelectric/south-holston. Tennessee Valley Authority
Tennessee Valley Authority. South Holston Reservoir Land Management Plan. Knoxville, TN: TVA, c. 2011, with later updates. https://tva.com/environment/environmental-stewardship/land-management/reservoir-land-management-plans/south-holston-reservoir-land-management-plan. Lake Info
Tennessee Valley Authority. “South Holston Reservoir.” Reservoir information page. Knoxville, TN: TVA, n.d. https://lakeinfo.tva.gov/web/sites/sholston.htm. Lake Info
Tennessee Valley Authority. “‘Weir’ Science.” Built for the People feature. Knoxville, TN: TVA, n.d. https://www.tva.com/about-tva/our-history/built-for-the-people/weir-science. Tennessee Valley Authority
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Dam Rating Curves, South Holston.” Calculation package ML100840219, 2009. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1008/ML100840219.pdf. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. TVA Hydroelectric System. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, accession ML18023A195, 2015. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1802/ML18023A195.pdf.
U.S. Geological Survey. Surface Water Supply of the United States, 1951, Part 3B: Ohio River Basin Except Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. Water-Supply Paper 1206. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954. https://pubs.usgs.gov/wsp/1206/report.pdf.
National Bureau of Standards. Hydraulic Research in the United States. Miscellaneous Publication 201. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1954. https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/MP/nbsmiscellaneouspub201.pdf.
National Archives at Atlanta. “Record Group 142: Tennessee Valley Authority – Project Histories and Reports, 1933–1972.” Project histories, progress reports, drawings, and photographs for TVA dams including South Holston. Morrow, GA: National Archives at Atlanta. Finding aid: https://www.archives.gov/atlanta/finding-aids/science.
National Archives at Atlanta. “Record Group 142: Oral History Records; Cemetery Relocation Files; Historic Photograph Collection.” Records documenting TVA projects, including South Holston Dam. Morrow, GA: National Archives at Atlanta. Finding aid: https://www.archives.gov/atlanta/finding-aids/science.
University of Tennessee Libraries. “The South Holston Dam in Tennessee.” Images of East Tennessee – Voices from the Valley. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Libraries, n.d. https://digital.lib.utk.edu/collections/islandora/object/volvoices:12097.
“Notice of Proposed Release of Lands at South Holston Dam.” Federal Register 27, no. 232 (November 29, 1962): 12203–4. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1962-11-29/pdf/FR-1962-11-29.pdf.
“TVA Expects Power From South Holston Dam by ’51.” Bristol Herald Courier (Bristol, VA–TN), May 8, 1947. Example page: https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/585276267/.
Additional coverage of South Holston and Watauga projects. Bristol Herald Courier (Bristol, VA–TN), late 1940s. Example page with dam coverage: https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/585244662/.
“Storage of Water in South Holston Reservoir Started November 20, 1950.” Coverage in Elizabethton Star (Elizabethton, TN), November–December 1950, including notices of fishing and access closures. Example pages: https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/585972595/ and https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/585284166/.
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky. Tennessee Valley Authority Retiree Association Oral History Project. Selected interviews touching on South Holston Dam, including “Interview with Charles Saylor, July 14, 2020.” https://nunncenter.net/ohms-spokedb/render.php?cachefile=2020oh0541_tvara0035_ohm.xml.
Appalachian Oral History Project Records. W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Appalachian State University. Boone, NC. Oral histories with residents affected by TVA reservoir projects, including interviews cited in scholarship on the South Holston flood zone. Collection overview: https://collections.library.appstate.edu/appalachian-oral-history-project.
Tennessee Valley Authority, Library. Congressional Hearings, Reports, and Documents Relating to TVA, 1933–1950. Knoxville, TN: TVA Library, 1951. Google Books record: https://books.google.com/books?id=B9wcRpybSqYC.
“South Holston Dam.” Wikipedia. Last modified 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Holston_Dam. Wikipedia
“South Holston Lake.” Wikipedia. Last modified 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Holston_Lake. Wikipedia
Discover Bristol. “South Holston Lake, River & Dam.” Bristol, TN–VA: Discover Bristol, n.d. https://discoverbristol.org/attractions/south-holston-lake-river-and-dam/. Discover Bristol
Backroads & Burgers. “South Holston Lake and Dam: Stepping Back in Time.” Backroads & Burgers, n.d. https://backroadsandburgers.com/south-holston-lake-and-dam-stepping-back-in-time/.
Washington County, Tennessee. Comprehensive Plan, Chapter 4: Natural and Cultural Resources. Jonesborough, TN: Washington County, c. 2013. https://mcclibrary.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/codecontent/11680/417521/Chapter%204%20-%20Natural%20and%20Cultural%20Resources.pdf.
“The Holston River.” ArcGIS StoryMap, 2023. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/8cf674687efe431fa04b519640007da5.
“Dams of the Deep South.” ArcGIS StoryMap, 2020. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a9ef5262e76846dfa1074cbd9b064f04.
McDonald, Michael J. “Tennessee Valley Authority Records.” Agricultural History 58, no. 2 (April 1984): 127–37. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3742990.
Slater, A. G. “Freshwater Mussel Growth in the Holston River.” M.S. thesis, University of Tennessee, 2016. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/4743. Facebook
Story, B. Appalachian Modernism: TVA and the Politics of Landscape. Ph.D. diss., University of Tennessee, 2019. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/5115.
Owen, C. R. “The TVA, Electric Power, and the Environment, 1939–1969.” Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2013. https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/bitstream/handle/1803/14498/Owen.revised.pdf.
Eastman Hiking & Canoeing Club. “South Holston Dam.” TEHCC Wiki, January 7, 2023. https://tehcc.org/wiki/South_Holston_Dam. The Education Hub
“Kentucky Examiner: ‘Water Wonders: South Holston Lake TN/VA.’” By Clayton Hensley. Knoxville Examiner, October 4, 2009. Cited in “South Holston Lake” article with local travel and history context. Wikipedia
National Performance of Dams Program. “South Holston Dam – National Inventory of Dams Record.” Stanford University, n.d. Summary record as cited in “South Holston Dam” Wikipedia entry. https://npdp.stanford.edu (search “South Holston Dam”). Wikipedia
Author Note: I have not had the chance to see South Holston Dam in person myself, so this story leans on the records, maps, and memories preserved in the archives and in other people’s photographs.