The Clinch River flows southwestward for from its source in southwestern Virginia through the hills of northeastern Tennessee before emptying into the Tennessee River at Kingston. Melton Hill Dam is located upstream from the mouth of the Clinch, stretching across the Roane-Loudon county line. Melton Hill's tailwaters are part of Watts Bar Lake, a main Tennessee River channel impoundment that extends across the lower of the Clinch. Melton Hill is the newer of two dams on the lower Clinch, the other being Norris Dam, located upstream from Melton Hill.
Capacity
Melton Hill is a concrete gravity-type dam with an electric power generation capacity of 79 megawatts. The dam is 103 feet high and stretches 1,020 feet across the Clinch River. The dam is equipped with a 3-bay spillway that has a total discharge of 118,000 cubic feet per second. Melton Hill Lake provides nearly 193 miles of shoreline and 5,470 acres of water surface for navigation and recreation, and includes parts of Loudon, Roane, Anderson, and Knox counties. The reservoir stretches up the Clinch from the dam to the base of Norris Dam, and is navigable for from Melton Hill Dam to Clinton. Melton Hill is the only TVA dam on a tributary stream with a navigation lock. The lock is x, and lowers and raises vessels between Melton Hill Lake and Watts Bar Lake and vice versa.
Background and construction
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recognized the dam potential of the Melton Hill site as early as the 1920s, and the Tennessee Valley Authority began investigating the site as part of its lower Clinch Valley surveys in the late 1930s. TVA first proposed the Melton Hill project in 1957, and after several years of lobbying, Congress agreed to fund the dam's construction. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the funding bill into law on September 2, 1960, and TVA began building the dam on September 6, 1960. The construction of Melton Hill Dam and its reservoir required the purchase of of land, of which— mostly situated along the river's west bank immediately upstream from the dam site— were in possession of the Atomic Energy Commission. The commission agreed to give this land to TVA in exchange for lands further downstream along Watts Bar Lake. The AEC also agreed to pay for the reconstruction of Oak Ridge's raw water intake after TVA accused them of building it without their approval, in violation of the TVA Act. 89 families and of roads were relocated. The project's most problematic relocation issue involved an experimental farm operated by the Agricultural Research Laboratory, a joint initiative of the AEC and the University of Tennessee. To replace the farm, TVA purchased and paid for the re-seeding of an plot nearby above reservoir operating levels. Melton Hill Dam was completed and its gates closed on May 1, 1963. Its first generator went online July 3, 1964, and its second generator went online November 11, 1964. The dam's lock was designed by the Army Corps of Engineers, which based the design on the Corps' Old Hickory Dam lock in Middle Tennessee. The Melton Hill lock is bigger than the typical 60x360-foot locks used by TVA's Tennessee River dams, allowing Melton Hill to accommodate several barges simultaneously. The lock was placed in service June 10, 1963.
