Off to the southeast of Deals Gap, a few miles down Highway 28, stands one of the most quietly astonishing things in these mountains: Fontana Dam. You can't quite see it from the Dragon, but you're right next to a genuine giant, and its story is a whopper.
Fontana is a TVA dam, and at four hundred and eighty feet tall it is the highest dam in the entire eastern United States — a wall of concrete taller than a forty-story building, holding back a lake in the middle of the Smoky Mountains. But it's not the size that gets me. It's why they built it, and when.
They built it in a screaming hurry between nineteen forty-two and forty-four — the depths of World War Two. Thousands of workers, round the clock, in a boomtown that sprang up overnight in the wilderness. And the power that dam made went to two places that won the war: the aluminum plants down at Alcoa, turning out the metal for warplanes, and a secret city over in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they were doing something nobody could know about. That something was the Manhattan Project — the building of the atomic bomb. The electricity from this dam, out here in the loneliest corner of the mountains, helped split the atom.
So think about that as you ride. This gorgeous, empty-feeling country was, for a few desperate years, one of the secret engines of the whole war. A giant in the wilderness, humming in the dark, building the thing that ended it all. And now it just makes clean power and holds a pretty lake, keeping its enormous secret quietly, the way these mountains keep everything.
Photo: Acroterion · CC BY-SA 4.0
