October 1995

Watauga River Dam at Shulls Mills

This is on the upper end of the Watauga River, the same river that goes past Elizabethton and Johnson City, except this dam is just downriver from Shulls Mills. This dam is hard to see in the summer, but fall affords a much better view. The railroad ran on the opposite bank, not too much higher than the dam. The dam was here during the time that the Linville River Railway served the Boone Fork Lumber Company at Shulls Mills. Not sure when it was built, but it supplied hydroelectric power to the lumber mill and the company town in the teens and 20s. Boone Fork Lumber closed about 1930. Frequent heavy rains in the area combined with the deforested hillsides would have caused wild fluctuations in the river level. The most devastating one was the hurricane and subsequent flood in 1940 that wiped out large sections of the ET&WNC in this area and caused the abandonment of the railroad from Cranberry all the way to Boone. This dam survived, but its hydoelectric equipment was destroyed, knocking out power to Shulls Mills, by then just a small community rather than the large company town that it had once been. Two large holes blasted in the dam allow the normal river flow to get through without building up behind it. It's a popular swimming spot for the locals. I'd like to see it one time when the river is really high.