Writers' Impressions of the Tennessee River
The Tennessee River system begins on the worn
magnificent crest of the southern Appalachians,
among the earth's oldest mountains, and the
Tennessee River shapes its valley into the form
of a boomerang, bowing it to its sweep through
seven states. Near Knoxville the streams still
fresh from the mountains are linked and thence the
master stream spreads the valley most richly
southward, swims past Chattanooga and bends
down into Alabama to roar like blown smoke
through the floodgates of Wilson Dam, to slide
becalmed along the crop-cleansed fields of
Shiloh, to march due north across the high
diminished plains of Tennessee and through
Kentucky spreading marshes towards valley's end
where finally at the toes of Paducah, in one
wide glassy golden swarm the water stoops
forward and continually dies into the Ohio...
-- Knoxville-born novelist James Agee, then a
23-year-old business writer for Fortune
Magazine, describing the river in a 1933 article
about TVA.
-------------------------------------------------------------
No man can say what is the source of the
Tennessee. It draws its waters from all points
of the compass within an area extending over
the southwestern end of the valley of Virginia
and the lofty, impenetrable mountains of East
Tennessee, western North Carolina and northern
Georgia...
No other great American river, after pointing
its course for 350 miles in one general direction
changes its mind, veers around and flows for
200 miles in the opposite direction.
...It is as irregular, as various, as rebellious as
the huge valley region that it drains.
-- "Fugitive" poet Donald Davidson (1893-1968)