Place Stories

Tenn-Tom Waterway

the biggest public woks project nobody has ever heard of

Tennessee, Mississippi & Alabama

January, 2019

The 234 mile Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, known as the Tenn-Tom, is the largest U.S. public works project that nobody has ever heard of. It’s part of the 470 mile water route that connects the Tennessee River to the Tombigbee River and ultimately to Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It lops off as much as 800 miles off the lower Mississippi route through New Orleans.

Before railroads and interstate highways, waterways and steamboats were the only the only way to transport bulk items. Spain had a habit of periodically closing the city of New Orleans to American farm products from the rapidly filling Ohio Valley, an affront that Thomas Jefferson and a young ambitious nation didn't take well. When an equally ambitious Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in France, he set his eyes on renewing the French Empire in America, wrangling the Louisiana Territory from the Spain in 1800. But things didn't go well trying to put down the Haitian Revolution and by 1803, he had turned to an even more ambitious goal. When Jefferson asked about buying New Orleans, Napoleon saw an opportunity to dump a headache and fund his effort to conquer Europe. The rest, as they say, is history.

This brief historical excursion through the Louisiana Purchase is to emphasize the importance of waterways in the 18th and 19th centuries - an abstraction as foreign to our generation as the idea of diesel belching semi-trailers will probably be to our great-grandchildren. As Mississippi and Alabama approached statehood in 1817 and 1819, it was only natural that the newly minted politicians looked to connect their new states by waterway to the existing states of Kentucky and Tennessee. That connection took shape over a century in a disjointed series of river, harbor, TVA and Corps of Engineers projects authorized from 1884 to 1946 with the most ambitious section, the Tenn-Tom Waterway, finally completed in 1982.

The Tom Bevill Visitor Center in Mississippi, next to the lock of the same name, offers a well done history of the project as well as the steamboat era which inspired it. The Mobile and Tombigbee Rivers were plied extensively by steamboats in the early 1800s, at least in the rainy season, November through March, and by Native Americans for eons before that. The original small single side wheelers were replaced later in the century by stern wheelers, typically 175 feet long by 30-35 feet wide drawing about 6 feet of water fully loaded. Steam boilers providing 700-800 horsepower propelled them at about 10 miles per hour, faster downriver, slower upriver. With a crew of 30 they could carry 1,500 bales of cotton and 80 passengers.

Railroads began their inexorable process of running steamboats out of business in the 1850s. Farmers’ and cotton growers’ anger roiled over the price gouging which naturally followed, especially during the 1873-1893 ‘Long Depression’, prompting the Corps of Engineers first improvements on the Tombigbee. Low cost snagging, clearing, cutting overhead trees and removing debris was proposed in 1875 but not funded until 1878 – some things in government haven’t changed much.

Between 1895 and 1915, three locks and dams (part of a system of 17 eventually constructed by hand between Mobile and Birmingham) were built to provide a minimum 6 foot deep channel. It was too little, too late. By the 1890s river towns were dying and by the 1920s railroads had deposited steamboats into history's dustbin. But an emerging tug and barge business prompted the Corps to replace those early locks with the Demopolis Lock and Dam in 1955 and Coffeeville Lock and Dam in 1960, still in use today.

The northern entrance to the potential waterway was anticipated in the development of the Tennessee River by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1930s. The TVA was part of the alphabet soup of organizations including the WPA, CCC, PWA, CWA, FERA put together by Franklin Roosevelt to spend America out of the Great Depression and which changed the role of federal government in ways we’re still fighting over today. The strategic placement of the Pickwick Lock & Dam, completed in 1938, flooded the nearby Yellow River by design as it was the most feasible for a future connection to the Tombigbee.

Tom Bevill Center

U.S. Snagboat Montgomey

Tom Bevill Visitor Center

L.T. is visible as a speck under the boom

That final connection, the Tenn-Tom itself, was authorized in 1946 but construction didn’t start until funds were authorized in 1971, generally recognized as part of Richard Nixon’s southern strategy to turn the South Republican after Democratic President Lyndon Johnson had embraced the Civil Rights movement.

Depending on your perspective, the Tenn-Tom is either the biggest boondoggle in American history with the obligatory naming of dams, locks, bridges and wilderness areas for the politicians who pushed for it, or an engineering miracle. The reality is that it is an impressive engineering feat: in total it moved a third more material – dirt – than the construction of the Panama Canal. As a through route to the Gulf, significant barge tonnage never materialized except in 1988 when a drought closed the lower Mississippi. Today, local barge traffic is common though certainly not what was anticipated, much less promised. As a through route, the Tenn-Tom is mostly used by the annual migration of yacht snow birders going south in the fall and returning north in the spring and by Great Loopers who find it shorter and easier than the lower Mississippi.

The Army Corps of Engineers built the Tenn-Tom and divides it into three sections: The Divide, Canal and River Sections.The 39 mile Divide Section connects Pickwick Lake in the Tennessee Valley to Big Springs Lake in the Tombigbee Valley, all at the same water level - like two big bathtubs in the same room that some kid with engineering dreams might connect with a big pipe. The Corps would probably cringe at this description, but this 24 mile cut, from mile 444 to 420, looks like a big, well-manicured ditch. It’s tiered back to a half mile width at the top with scores of "Dredge Material Placement Areas" that evoke images of buried Mayan cities occasionally glimpsed through the trees . At water level it’s 280 feet wide with a 9 foot deep channel. It took 8 years to move 1½ times as much dirt as the 120 mile Panama Canal. The Divide section is straight as an arrow, which gives pleasure boaters ample time for anxiety to set in after sighting the occasional tow barge approaching them. At mile 427.5 there’s a lonely memorial to the razed town of Holcut, a reminder of the sacrifices made for these monumental projects.

Yikes, it leaks!

Looking back at the Jamie Whitten Lock

The whopper 84 foot deep Jamie Whitten Lock at mile 411.9 marks the southern end of the Divide Section. Being lowered in that lock feels like a slow, dark and wet descent into hell. It doesn’t help that it leaks more than any of the other locks. Interestingly, Whitten Lock has no dam or overflow mechanism. It depends on Pickwick Lock & Dam, some 40 miles away on the Tennessee River to control its water level.

The Tenn-Tom was the first large project constructed after the National Environment Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969. The terrain is flatter than the Tennessee Valley but original plans for the 46 mile long Canal Section probably envisioned large dam(s) like those of the TVA era. Instead, to accommodate the NEPA, the Corps built a lower profile canal, 5 locks and a 50 mile levee along the route’s west side with the dug material to separate it from, and protect, the headwaters of the Tombigbee River.

The Canal Section looks very much like the Divide Section just below each lock, straight and narrow. Above the locks, ‘pools’ formed by the levee on the west side and levees or natural embankments on the east, provide enough depth for navigation. The pools submerge the canal under them. In places the pools look like lakes but boating outside the canal channel can end abruptly and embarrassingly in shallow water.

From a satellite view, the little streams of the Tombigbee River watershed to the west of the Canal look like a bowl of wet spaghetti noodles. The Wilkens Pool funnels any extra water into that bowl at mile 376.7. The Corps still owns the land, so it is an undeveloped, impressive and continuing mitigation of the Tenn-Tom construction. Government can get it right if it wants or is forced to.

The Tombigbee finally flows into the waterway at the end of the levee, mile 366.3, marking the southern end of the Canal Section. I explored up the Tombigbee for 2-3 miles in 9-10 feet of water. The nearby town of Amory, MS was the northern limit of steamboats during the steamboat era. The 149 mile River Section flows between Amory and Demopolis, AL. In this section the Corps built four locks to deepen the channel and dug about 20 cutoffs to shorten the winding Tombigbee by about 30 miles. On a chart, the River Section looks much like the Tombigbee headwaters spaghetti, but with bigger noodles as tributaries flow in and the Tombigbee repeatedly crisscrossing the straightened waterway.

Demopolis, at mile 217, is the southern end of both the River Section and Tenn-Tom project. It’s also where the Black Warrior River – with its own locks and history, joins the Tombigbee and the two take the name Black Warrior-Tombigbee Waterway. From here south to Mobile, the river is largely in its natural, lazy, winding state, with only the 1950s era Demopolis and Coffeeville Lock and Dams to guarantee year round navigation. It has some very inviting beaches and a stop at Bobby’s Fish Camp is a must if only because it’s the only fuel in that long section. The rustic feel and home cooked meals at Bobby’s match the the feel of the Tombigbee well.

The Alabama River – the third river, along with the Tombigbee and Black Warrior to get the 17 hand built locks from 1895 to 1915 - joins at mile 45 and the waterway becomes the Mobile River. Seems unfair that Tombigbee, a fun, tongue twisting name from the Choctaws, loses its identity just when it’s about to flow into Mobile Bay.

The Mobile River becomes more of a delta as it approaches Mobile, Alabama. The 470 mile waterway begins/ends at mile 0 where the Art Deco styled Bankhead Tunnel (U.S. Hwy 90), finished in 1940, goes under the Mobile harbor. A spectacular new bridge finished in 1991 now carries an alternative Hwy 90 across the waterway at mile 3. An even more impressive, or at least bigger, bridge over the harbor is in the works to replace the congested I-90 tunnel.

The waterway is not a stroll through the Antebellum South. The small towns that remain are struggling; museums and historic places are not easy to get to. Local knowledge is necessary to find good restaurants – though you’d be hard pressed to beat the southern food and hospitality at Huck’s Place in Columbus, MS or SVH Bistro in Demopolis, AL. Most boaters are eager to just get through it to the warmth of Florida.

The Tenn-Tom deserves better. I’ve tried to organize often confusing and sometimes incorrect information into a readable narrative with some historic perspective for those who might want to look at it closer. I also tip my hat to the Corps of Engineers, maybe the best government entity at fulfilling its mission efficiently and in the Tenn-Tom’s case, on budget, though it seems a bit desperate to take credit for bird boxes.

Salt Springs