Returning to "The City of Power"

        U.S. President
    Herbert C. Hoover                                        "The City of Power" electric sign that was erected

over the old Broad Street Bridge (circa 1912-1913).

The City of Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority

Elizabethton was first serviced 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 (found within the Tennessee Valley Authority reservation behind the TVA Wilbur Dam) is the site of first hydroelectric dam constructed in Tennessee (beginning in 1909), going online with power production and distribution in 1912.

The 1928 Republican Presidential candidate Herbert C. Hoover made his only southern campaign stop at Elizabethton and delivered his nationally broadcasted October 6 election "stump speech" delivered before 50,000 people gathered at the base of Lynn Mountain in Harmon Field (now at the mini-park area beside the Elizabethton/Carter County Chamber of Commerce building located on U.S. 321).

Ironically, it was the succession of Republican presidents in the White House at the time — first President Coolidge in 1928, and then later 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 three miles (5 km) upstream of the Wilbur Dam in 1948.