page_title: Elizabethton, Tennessee
section_title: The City of Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority
hierarchical_section_title: Elizabethton, Tennessee / History / The City of Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority
caption_attribution_description: Herbert Clark Hoover listening to a radio Deutsch: Hoover hört Radio
context_page_description: Elizabethton is a city in, and the county seat of Carter County, Tennessee, United States. Elizabethton is the historical site of the first independent American government located west of both the Eastern Continental Divide and the original Thirteen Colonies.
  The city is also the historical site of the Transylvania Purchase, a major muster site during the American Revolutionary War for both the Battle of Musgrove Mill and the Battle of Kings Mountain. It was within the secessionist North Carolina "State of Franklin" territory.
  The population of Elizabethton was enumerated at 14,176 during the 2010 census.
context_section_description: Elizabethton was first served by relatively inexpensive hydroelectric power during the early 1910s, leading to the popular "The City of Power" moniker. The Horseshoe section of the Watauga River (within the Tennessee Valley Authority reservation behind the TVA Wilbur Dam) is the site of the first hydroelectric dam constructed in Tennessee (beginning in 1909), going online with power production and distribution in 1912.
  The 1928 Republican U.S. presidential candidate Herbert C. Hoover made his only southern campaign stop at Elizabethton and delivered his nationally broadcast October 6, 1928, election "stump speech" before 50,000 people gathered at the base of Lynn Mountain in Harmon Field (now at the mini-park and the Elizabethton/Carter County Chamber of Commerce building location on U.S. 321) during Elizabethton's Second Annual Industrial Celebration.
  During the Elizabethton speech, Hoover "...alluded to a matter of growing concern, the status of the Federal Government's involvement in the [hydrogeneration] production of [electric] power, specifically the Muscle Shoals (Alabama) issue: "There are local instances where the Government must enter the business field as a by-product to some great major purpose such as an improvement in navigation, flood control, irrigation, scientific research or national defense."
  It was the succession of Republican presidents in the White House at the time leading up to the Great Depression—first President Coolidge in 1928, followed by President Hoover later in 1931—choosing to veto the federal legislation passed by the U.S. Congress that would have created a water power development agency of the federal government.
  It was U.S. Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska who sponsored the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933, water power development legislation which was finally enacted during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that created the Tennessee Valley Authority. Norris was later an important proponent of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936.
  Following the end of World War II, the TVA Watauga Dam and Reservoir were completed 3 miles (5 km) upstream of the Wilbur Dam in 1948.
  The TVA Wilbur Dam has four hydroelectric generating turbines with a production capacity of 10,700 kilowatts of electricity while the TVA Watauga hydroelectric facility upstream has two generating units with a net dependable capacity (the amount of power a hydrogenerating impounded reservoir can produce on an average day, minus the electricity used by the dam itself) of 66 megawatts.
caption: U.S. President
  Herbert C. Hoover
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