Alabama House of Representatives
The Alabama House of Representatives is the lower house of the Alabama Legislature, the state legislature of the U. S. state of Alabama. The House is composed of 105 members representing an equal number of districts, with each constituency containing at least 42,380 citizens. There are no term limits in the House; the House is one of the five lower houses of state legislatures in the United States, elected every four years. Other lower houses, including the United States House of Representatives, are elected for a two-year term; the House meets at the Alabama State House in Montgomery. All revenue-raising matters must originate in the Alabama House, just as in the Congress of the United States; the House must have a quorum to conduct business, a majority of a quorum can pass any bill except a constitutional amendment, which requires a three-fifths vote of all those elected. An appropriation to a non-government organization, such as a private college, requires a two-thirds vote of those elected.
In order to be a member of the Alabama House of Representatives, one must be a minimum of 21 years of age. The Alabama House of Representatives is composed of 105 members, chosen from an equal number of districts across the state; each member represents a district of 42,000 people, is elected to a four-year term. Members of the House at the time of their election must have been citizens of Alabama for three years, have lived in their respective districts for at least one year preceding their election; the Speaker of the House is a member of the body and is elected by his colleagues to serve as its presiding officer. Members of the House are paid a salary of ten dollars per day, plus expenses other than travel in an amount fixed by joint resolution of the legislature; the Speaker of the House presides over the House of Representatives. The Speaker is elected by the majority party caucus followed by confirmation of the full House through the passage of a House Resolution. In addition to presiding over the body, the Speaker is the chief leadership position and controls the flow of legislation and committee assignments.
Other House leaders, such as the majority and minority leaders, are elected by their respective party caucuses relative to their party's strength in the chamber. Speaker of the House: Republican Mac McCutcheon, District 25 Majority Leader: Republican Nathaniel Ledbetter, District 24 Minority Leader: Democrat Anthony Daniels, District 53 Throughout most of the state's history, the Democratic Party has held the majority in the Alabama House of Representatives except for a few brief exceptions; the Whig Party controlled the lower house in 1819 and again in 1821-23 and for the last time in 1837-1838. After the Civil War, Republicans held the majority during the Reconstruction period from 1868-1870 and again from 1872-1874; this was followed by 136 years of Democratic control ending in November, 2010. Beginning with the 2010 General Election Republicans swept to a large majority and have increased it in the succeeding elections in 2014 and 2018. Current committees include: Government of Alabama Alabama Senate Alabama Republican Party Alabama Democratic Party Alabama House of Representatives Official Site
Lauderdale County, Alabama
Lauderdale County is a county located in the northwestern corner of the U. S. state of Alabama. As of the 2010 census the population was 92,709, its county seat is Florence. Its name is in honor of Tennessee. Lauderdale is part of the Florence-Muscle Shoals, AL Metropolitan Statistical Area known as "The Shoals". Lauderdale County was named in honor of Col. James Lauderdale, born in Virginia about 1780. In the early 19th century, who moved to West Tennessee, became a major in General John Coffee's cavalry of volunteers. Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, he commanded a brigade of mounted riflemen, serving under Andrew Jackson in many battles against the Indians. According to reliable historians, Col. Lauderdale did not die in the Battle of New Orleans, but was wounded in the Battle of Talladega and died on December 23, 1814, seventeen days before Jackson's crushing defeat of the British at New Orleans. Several towns and counties in the southern states were named in his honor, though it is said that he never set foot in Lauderdale County.
Lauderdale County was established in 1818, a year. Florence, the county seat of Lauderdale County, was established in 1818. At this time a group of investors, under the name of Cypress Land Company purchased from the government 5,515 acres of land consisting of the original town site. Other towns in Lauderdale County competing for early settlers because of their proximity to the river were Savage's Spring, nine miles below Florence and Waterloo, some 20 miles downriver. Among the older settlements in the county is Center Star, located between Killen and Rogersville; this area was once claimed by both the Chickasaws and Cherokees, necessitating a cession of territory from each tribe before the settlement could be established. At one time, the remains of an old Indian village could be seen southwest of Center Star. Other old settlements included Middleton and Elgin, the latter known first as Ingram's Elgin Cross Roads. Rogersville, lying some 23 miles to the east of Florence, was named for John Rogers, an Indian trader, whose sons were fast friends of the great Sam Houston.
The late Will Rogers is said to have been a descendant of this same family. An early ferry that operated for many years was Lamb's Ferry near Rogersville. Lexington and Anderson lie to the north of the Lee Highway, the town of Lexington being a part of the territory once claimed by the Cherokee. Many of the settlers of that area came from Tennessee and the Carolinas; the first post office of record at Lexington was on the Loretto Road, north of town, in 1880. Mail at that time was brought in from Tennessee, by horseback and carts; the town of St. Florian was established in 1872 on the Jackson Highway and named by its German Catholic founders for their patron saint. Four Alabama governors were from the county - Hugh McVay, Robert M. Patton, Edward A. O'Neal and Emmett O'Neal. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 721 square miles, of which 668 square miles is land and 53 square miles is water. Key Cave National Wildlife Refuge Natchez Trace Parkway Tennessee River Elk River Wayne County, Tennessee - north Lawrence County, Tennessee - north Giles County, Tennessee - northeast Limestone County - east Lawrence County - southeast Colbert County - south Tishomingo County, Mississippi - west Hardin County, Tennessee - northwest According to the 2010 United States Census: 86.4% White 10.0% Black 0.4% Native American 0.7% Asian 0.0% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander 1.4% Two or more races 2.2% Hispanic or Latino As of the census of 2000, there were 87,966 people, 36,088 households, 25,153 families residing in the county.
The population density was 131 people per square mile. There were 40,424 housing units at an average density of 60 per square mile; the racial makeup of the county was 84.38% White or European American, 13.85% Black or African American, 0.25% Native American, 0.35% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 0.36% from other races, 0.79% from two or more races. 1.02% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. In 2005 87.8% of the county population was non-Hispanic whites. African Americans Latinos 1.2 % of the population. According to the census of 2000, the largest ancestry groups in Lauderdale County were English 41.9%, African 13.85%, Scots-Irish 9.66%, Scottish 4.11%, Irish 3.19% and Welsh 2.5% In 2000 there were 36,088 households out of which 30.40% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 55.80% were married couples living together, 10.80% had a female householder with no husband present, 30.30% were non-families. 26.40% of all households were made up of individuals and 11.00% had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older.
The average household size was 2.39 and the average family size was 2.89. In the county, the population was spread out with 23.00% under the age of 18, 10.10% from 18 to 24, 27.90% from 25 to 44, 23.90% from 45 to 64, 15.10% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 38 years. For every 100 females, there were 91.70 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 88.20 males. The median income for a household in the county was $33,354, the median income for a family was $41,438. Males had a median income of $33,943 versus $20,804 for females; the per capita income for the county was $18,626. About 10.50% of families and 14.40% of the population were below the poverty line, including 18.50% of those under age 18 and 11.30% of those age 65 or over. U. S. Highway 43 U. S. Highway 72 State Route 17 State Route 20 State Route 64 State Route 101 State Route 133 State Route 157 State
Cherokee
The Cherokee are one of the indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, they were concentrated in what is now southwestern North Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, the tips of western South Carolina and northeastern Georgia; the Cherokee language is part of the Iroquoian language group. In the 19th century, James Mooney, an American ethnographer, recorded one oral tradition that told of the tribe having migrated south in ancient times from the Great Lakes region, where other Iroquoian-speaking peoples lived. Today there are three federally recognized Cherokee tribes: the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. By the 19th century, European settlers in the United States classified the Cherokee of the Southeast as one of the "Five Civilized Tribes", because they were agrarian and lived in permanent villages and began to adopt some cultural and technological practices of the European American settlers.
The Cherokee were one of the first, if not the first, major non-European ethnic group to become U. S. citizens. Article 8 in the 1817 treaty with the Cherokee stated that Cherokees may wish to become citizens of the United States; the Cherokee Nation has more than 300,000 tribal members, making it the largest of the 567 federally recognized tribes in the United States. In addition, numerous groups claim Cherokee lineage, some of these are state-recognized. A total of more than 819,000 people are estimated to claim having Cherokee ancestry on the US census, which includes persons who are not enrolled members of any tribe. Of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes, the Cherokee Nation and the UKB have headquarters in Tahlequah, Oklahoma; the UKB are descendants of "Old Settlers", Cherokee who migrated to Arkansas and Oklahoma about 1817 prior to Indian Removal. They are related to the Cherokee who were forcibly relocated there in the 1830s under the Indian Removal Act; the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is on the Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina.
A Cherokee language name for Cherokee people is Aniyvwiyaʔi, translating as "Principal People". Tsalagi is the Cherokee word for Cherokee. Many theories, though none proven, abound about the origin of the name "Cherokee", it may have been derived from the Choctaw word Cha-la-kee, which means "people who live in the mountains", or Choctaw Chi-luk-ik-bi, meaning "people who live in the cave country". The earliest Spanish transliteration of the name, from 1755, is recorded as Tchalaquei. Another theory is; the Iroquois Five Nations based in New York have called the Cherokee Oyata'ge'ronoñ. The word Cherokee means “people of different speech.” Anthropologists and historians have two main theories of Cherokee origins. One is that the Cherokee, an Iroquoian-speaking people, are relative latecomers to Southern Appalachia, who may have migrated in late prehistoric times from northern areas around the Great Lakes, the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee nations and other Iroquoian-speaking peoples.
Another theory is. Researchers in the 19th century recorded conversations with elders who recounted an oral tradition of the Cherokee people migrating south from the Great Lakes region in ancient times, they may have moved south into Muscogee Creek territory and settled at the sites of mounds built by the Mississippian culture and earlier moundbuilders. In the 19th century, European-American settlers mistakenly attributed several Mississippian culture sites in Georgia to the Cherokee, including Moundville and Etowah Mounds. However, other evidence shows that the Cherokee did not reach this part of Georgia until the late 18th century and could not have built the mounds; the Connestee people, believed to be ancestors of the Cherokee, occupied western North Carolina circa 200 to 600 CE. Pre-contact Cherokee are considered to be part of the Pisgah Phase of Southern Appalachia, which lasted from circa 1000 to 1500. Despite the consensus among most specialists in Southeast archeology and anthropology, some scholars contend that ancestors of the Cherokee people lived in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee for a far longer period of time.
During the late Archaic and Woodland Period, Native Americans in the region began to cultivate plants such as marsh elder, pigweed and some native squash. People created new art forms such as shell gorgets, adopted new technologies, developed an elaborate cycle of religious ceremonies. During the Mississippian culture-period, local women developed a new variety of maize called eastern flint corn, it resembled modern corn and produced larger crops. The successful cultivation of corn surpluses allowed the rise of larger, more complex chiefdoms consisting of several villages and concentrated populations during this period. Corn became celebrated among numerous peoples in religious ceremonies the Green Corn Ceremony. Much of what is known about pre-18th-century Native American cultures has come from records of Spanish expeditions; the earliest ones of the mid-16th-century encountered people of the Mississippian culture, the ancestors to tribes in the Southeast such as
2010 United States Census
The 2010 United States Census is the twenty-third and most recent United States national census. National Census Day, the reference day used for the census, was April 1, 2010; the census was taken via mail-in citizen self-reporting, with enumerators serving to spot-check randomly selected neighborhoods and communities. As part of a drive to increase the count's accuracy, 635,000 temporary enumerators were hired; the population of the United States was counted as 308,745,538, a 9.7% increase from the 2000 Census. This was the first census in which all states recorded a population of over half a million, as well as the first in which all 100 largest cities recorded populations of over 200,000; as required by the United States Constitution, the U. S. census has been conducted every 10 years since 1790. The 2000 U. S. Census was the previous census completed. Participation in the U. S. Census is required by law in Title 13 of the United States Code. On January 25, 2010, Census Bureau Director Robert Groves inaugurated the 2010 Census enumeration by counting World War II veteran Clifton Jackson, a resident of Noorvik, Alaska.
More than 120 million census forms were delivered by the U. S. Post Office beginning March 15, 2010; the number of forms mailed out or hand-delivered by the Census Bureau was 134 million on April 1, 2010. Although the questionnaire used April 1, 2010 as the reference date as to where a person was living, an insert dated March 15, 2010 included the following printed in bold type: "Please complete and mail back the enclosed census form today." The 2010 Census national mail participation rate was 74%. From April through July 2010, census takers visited households that did not return a form, an operation called "non-response follow-up". In December 2010, the U. S. Census Bureau delivered population information to the U. S. President for apportionment, in March 2011, complete redistricting data was delivered to states. Identifiable information will be available in 2082; the Census Bureau did not use a long form for the 2010 Census. In several previous censuses, one in six households received this long form, which asked for detailed social and economic information.
The 2010 Census used only a short form asking ten basic questions: How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2010? Were there any additional people staying here on April 1, 2010 that you did not include in Question 1? Mark all that apply: Is this house, apartment, or mobile home – What is your telephone number? What is Person 1's name? What is Person 1's sex? What is Person 1's age and Person 1's date of birth? Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin? What is Person 1's race? Does Person 1 sometimes live or stay somewhere else? The form included space to repeat all of these questions for up to twelve residents total. In contrast to the 2000 census, an Internet response option was not offered, nor was the form available for download. Detailed socioeconomic information collected during past censuses will continue to be collected through the American Community Survey; the survey provides data about communities in the United States on a 1-year or 3-year cycle, depending on the size of the community, rather than once every 10 years.
A small percentage of the population on a rotating basis will receive the survey each year, no household will receive it more than once every five years. In June 2009, the U. S. Census Bureau announced. However, the final form did not contain a separate "same-sex married couple" option; when noting the relationship between household members, same-sex couples who are married could mark their spouses as being "Husband or wife", the same response given by opposite-sex married couples. An "unmarried partner" option was available for couples; the 2010 census cost $13 billion $42 per capita. Operational costs were $5.4 billion under the $7 billion budget. In December 2010 the Government Accountability Office noted that the cost of conducting the census has doubled each decade since 1970. In a detailed 2004 report to Congress, the GAO called on the Census Bureau to address cost and design issues, at that time, had estimated the 2010 Census cost to be $11 billion. In August 2010, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced that the census operational costs came in under budget.
Locke credited the management practices of Census Bureau director Robert Groves, citing in particular the decision to buy additional advertising in locations where responses lagged, which improved the overall response rate. The agency has begun to rely more on questioning neighbors or other reliable third parties when a person could not be reached at home, which reduced the cost of follow-up visits. Census data for about 22% of U. S. househol
Marriage
Marriage called matrimony or wedlock, is a or ritually recognised union between spouses that establishes rights and obligations between those spouses, as well as between them and any resulting biological or adopted children and affinity. The definition of marriage varies around the world not only between cultures and between religions, but throughout the history of any given culture and religion, evolving to both expand and constrict in who and what is encompassed, but it is principally an institution in which interpersonal relationships sexual, are acknowledged or sanctioned. In some cultures, marriage is recommended or considered to be compulsory before pursuing any sexual activity; when defined broadly, marriage is considered a cultural universal. A marriage ceremony is known as a wedding. Individuals may marry for several reasons, including legal, libidinal, financial and religious purposes. Whom they marry may be influenced by gender determined rules of incest, prescriptive marriage rules, parental choice and individual desire.
In some areas of the world, arranged marriage, child marriage and sometimes forced marriage, may be practiced as a cultural tradition. Conversely, such practices may be outlawed and penalized in parts of the world out of concerns of the infringement of women's rights, or the infringement of children's rights, because of international law. Around the world in developed democracies, there has been a general trend towards ensuring equal rights within marriage for women and recognizing the marriages of interfaith and same-sex couples; these trends coincide with the broader human rights movement. Marriage can be recognized by a state, an organization, a religious authority, a tribal group, a local community, or peers, it is viewed as a contract. When a marriage is performed and carried out by a government institution in accordance with the marriage laws of the jurisdiction, without religious content, it is a civil marriage. Civil marriage recognizes and creates the rights and obligations intrinsic to matrimony before the state.
When a marriage is performed with religious content under the auspices of a religious institution it is a religious marriage. Religious marriage recognizes and creates the rights and obligations intrinsic to matrimony before that religion. Religious marriage is known variously as sacramental marriage in Catholicism, nikah in Islam, nissuin in Judaism, various other names in other faith traditions, each with their own constraints as to what constitutes, who can enter into, a valid religious marriage; some countries do not recognize locally performed religious marriage on its own, require a separate civil marriage for official purposes. Conversely, civil marriage does not exist in some countries governed by a religious legal system, such as Saudi Arabia, where marriages contracted abroad might not be recognized if they were contracted contrary to Saudi interpretations of Islamic religious law. In countries governed by a mixed secular-religious legal system, such as in Lebanon and Israel, locally performed civil marriage does not exist within the country, preventing interfaith and various other marriages contradicting religious laws from being entered into in the country, civil marriages performed abroad are recognized by the state if they conflict with religious laws.
The act of marriage creates normative or legal obligations between the individuals involved, any offspring they may produce or adopt. In terms of legal recognition, most sovereign states and other jurisdictions limit marriage to opposite-sex couples and a diminishing number of these permit polygyny, child marriages, forced marriages. In modern times, a growing number of countries developed democracies, have lifted bans on and have established legal recognition for the marriages of interfaith and same-sex couples; some cultures allow the dissolution of marriage through annulment. In some areas, child marriages and polygamy may occur in spite of national laws against the practice. Since the late twentieth century, major social changes in Western countries have led to changes in the demographics of marriage, with the age of first marriage increasing, fewer people marrying, more couples choosing to cohabit rather than marry. For example, the number of marriages in Europe decreased by 30% from 1975 to 2005.
In most cultures, married women had few rights of their own, being considered, along with the family's children, the property of the husband. In Europe, the United States, other places in the developed world, beginning in the late 19th century and lasting through the 21st century, marriage has undergone gradual legal changes, aimed at improving the rights of the wife; these changes included giving wives legal identities of their own, abolishing the right of husbands to physically discipline their wives, giving wives property rights, liberalizing divorce laws, providing wives with reproductive rights of their own, requiring a wife's consent when sexual relations occur. These changes have occurred in Western countries. In the 21st century, there continue to be controversies regarding the legal status of married women, legal acceptance of or leniency towards violence within marriage, traditional marriage customs such as dowry and bride price, for
Tennessee River
The Tennessee River is the largest tributary of the Ohio River. It is 652 miles long and is located in the southeastern United States in the Tennessee Valley; the river was once popularly known as the Cherokee River, among other names, as many of the Cherokee had their territory along its banks in eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama. Its current name is derived from the Cherokee village Tanasi; the Tennessee River is formed at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad rivers in present-day Knoxville, Tennessee. From Knoxville, it flows southwest through East Tennessee into Chattanooga before crossing into Alabama, it travels through the Huntsville and Decatur area before reaching the Muscle Shoals area, forms a small part of the state's border with Mississippi, before returning to Tennessee. Its route northwesterly through Tennessee defines the boundary between two of Tennessee's Grand Divisions: Middle and West Tennessee; the Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway, a U. S. Army Corps of Engineers project providing navigation on the Tombigbee River and a link to the Port of Mobile, enters the Tennessee River near the Tennessee-Alabama-Mississippi boundary.
This waterway reduces the navigation distance from Tennessee, north Alabama, northern Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico by hundreds of miles. The final part of the Tennessee's run is north through western Kentucky, where it separates the Jackson Purchase from the rest of the state, it flows into the Ohio River at Kentucky. The river has been dammed numerous times during the 20th century since the 1930s by Tennessee Valley Authority projects; the construction of TVA's Kentucky Dam on the Tennessee River and the Corps of Engineers' Barkley Dam on the Cumberland River led to the development of associated lakes, the creation of what is called Land Between the Lakes. A navigation canal located at Grand Rivers, links Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley; the canal allows for a shorter trip for river traffic going from the Tennessee to most of the Ohio River, for traffic going down the Cumberland River toward the Mississippi. The river appears on French maps from the late 17th century with the names "Caquinampo" or "Kasqui."
Maps from the early 18th century call it "Cussate," "Hogohegee," "Callamaco," and "Acanseapi." A 1755 British map showed the Tennessee River as the "River of the Cherakees." By the late 18th century, it had come to be called "Tennessee," a name derived from the Cherokee village named Tanasi. The Tennessee River begins at mile post 652, where the French Broad River meets the Holston River, but there were several different definitions of its starting point. In the late 18th century, the mouth of the Little Tennessee River was considered to be the beginning of the Tennessee River. Through much of the 19th century, the Tennessee River was considered to start at the mouth of Clinch River. An 1889 declaration by the Tennessee General Assembly designated Kingsport as the start of the Tennessee, but the following year a federal law was enacted that fixed the start of the river at its current location. At various points since the early 19th century, Georgia has disputed its northern border with Tennessee.
In 1796, when Tennessee was admitted to the Union, the border was defined by United States Congress as located on the 35th parallel, thereby ensuring that at least a portion of the river would be located within Georgia. As a result of an erroneously conducted survey in 1818, the actual border line was set on the ground one mile south, thus placing the disputed portion of the river in Tennessee. Georgia made several unsuccessful attempts to correct what Georgia felt was an erroneous survey line "in the 1890s, 1905, 1915, 1922, 1941, 1947 and 1971 to'resolve' the dispute", according to C. Crews Townsend, Joseph McCoin, Robert F. Parsley, Alison Martin and Zachary H. Greene, writing for the Tennessee Bar Journal, a publication of the Tennessee Bar Association, appearing on May 12, 2008. In 2008, as a result of a serious drought and resulting water shortage, the Georgia General Assembly passed a resolution directing the governor to pursue its claim in the United States Supreme Court. According to a story aired on WTVC-TV in Chattanooga on March 14, 2008, a local attorney familiar with case law on border disputes, says the U.
S. Supreme Court will maintain the original borders between states and avoid stepping into border disputes, preferring the parties work out their differences; the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported on 25 March 2013 that Georgia senators approved House Resolution 4 stating that if Tennessee declines to settle with them, the dispute will be handed over to the attorney general, who will take Tennessee before the Supreme Court to settle the issue once and for all. The Atlantic Wire, in commenting on Georgia's actions stated: The Great Georgia-Tennessee Border War of 2013 Is Upon Us Historians, take note: On this day, not a day in 1732, a boundary dispute between two Southern states took a turn for the wet. In a two-page resolution passed overwhelmingly by the state senate, Georgia declared that it, not its neighbor to the north, controls part of the Tennessee River at Nickajack. Georgia doesn't want Nickajack, it wants that water.. The Tennessee River is an important part of the Great Loop, the recreational circumnavigation of Eastern North America by water.
The Tennessee River has been a major highway for riverboats through the south and today they are still found along the river in abundance. Major ports include Guntersville, Chattanooga and Yellow Creek, Muscle Shoals. Navigation has contributed greatly
Pickwick Landing Dam
Pickwick Landing Dam is a hydroelectric dam on the Tennessee River in Hardin County, in the U. S. state of Tennessee. The dam is one of nine dams on the river owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built the dam in the 1930s as part of a New Deal-era initiative to create a continuous navigation channel between the river's mouth and Knoxville, bring economic development to the area; the dam impounds the 43,100-acre Pickwick Lake and its tailwaters are part of Kentucky Lake. Pickwick Landing Dam is named for a community situated near the dam site at the time of construction; the community had been named after the title character in the Charles Dickens novel, The Pickwick Papers. Pickwick Landing Dam is located nearly 207 miles above the mouth of the Tennessee River, a few miles north of the point where the states of Tennessee and Mississippi meet; this stretch of the river is a geological boundary between the scattered hills of the Western Highland Rim to the northeast and the flatlands of West Tennessee to the northwest.
Most of the land just south of the dam and its immediate lakeshore is part of Pickwick Landing State Park, Shiloh National Military Park is located a few miles to the north. Pickwick Lake stretches nearly 53 miles to the base of Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals and includes parts of Hardin County in Tennessee and Colbert counties in Alabama, Tishomingo County in Mississippi; the area around Pickwick Landing Dam is sparsely populated, the nearest community of note being the small community of Counce, Tennessee 2 miles to the southwest. Tennessee State Highway 128 crosses the top of the dam, connecting the area to Savannah to the north. Pickwick Landing Dam is 113 feet high and 7,715 feet long, has a generating capacity of 240,200 kilowatts; the dam's spillway has 22 bays with a combined discharge of 650,000 cubic feet per second. Pickwick Lake has 496 miles of shoreline and 43,100 acres of water surface, has a flood-storage capacity of 417,700 acre feet. Pickwick Landing Dam is serviced by two locks— one measuring 110 by 1,000 feet and the other measuring 110 by 600 feet.
The locks' lift lowers vessels up to 63 feet between Pickwick and Kentucky lakes. Throughout the 19th century, a series of river rapids known as the Muscle Shoals were a major impediment to navigation along the Tennessee River and isolated the upper stretches of the river from the nation's major inland waterways; the construction of Wilson Dam by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1920s and the construction of Wheeler Dam by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s flooded a large section of the shoals, but serious obstacles still remained between Riverton and Florence in the vicinity of Tuscumbia; as Wheeler Dam neared completion in 1935, TVA knew a third dam would be necessary to connect the reservoirs at Muscle Shoals with the lower part of the river. Several private entities had investigated the possibility of building a dam at Parker's Landing, but the Corps of Engineers— which had surveyed the area in the 1920s— suggested TVA build a dam at Pickwick Landing; the Pickwick Landing project was authorized on November 19, 1934, work began in March 1935.
The construction of Pickwick Landing Dam and its accompanying reservoir required the purchase of 63,700 acres of land, 12,590 acres of which had to be cleared. 506 families, 407 graves, 70 miles of roads had to be relocated. Parts of Riverton and Waterloo, Alabama were flooded; the residents of the latter demanded TVA purchase the whole town, claiming the reservoir would destroy property values, but TVA declined, citing a study that suggested the reservoir would not have a serious or detrimental impact on the town's economy. Pickwick Landing Dam's original turbines were among the largest propeller-type turbines in the world at the time in which they were installed. Pickwick Landing Dam was completed and the gates closed on February 8, 1938, although dredge work continued until 1941; the first generator went online in August 1938. The lock was designed by the Corps of Engineers, its 63-foot lift was among the highest in the world when the lock became operational on February 19, 1938. Pickwick Landing Dam was constructed at a cost of just over $45 million.
Dams and reservoirs of the Tennessee River List of crossings of the Tennessee River "Pickwick Landing Dam". Geographic Names Information System. United States Geological Survey. Retrieved 2006-05-02. TVA: Pickwick Reservoir
