Wilson Dam turned out to be the last stop on my tour of the work sites. A few months later I got a shot at something I never expected: a rare tour inside the dam. I signed up the minute I heard about it. I’ve now been to every site from the outside. Getting inside as many as I can is the next part of the project, and this was the chance. So I pointed the car at northwest Alabama, between Florence and Muscle Shoals, and left the bike at home. A quiet ride down and back was exactly what this trip called for.

One shot I never got from the bike was the turbine. It sits behind a fence, and from the road you just can’t frame it. Now I’m on the other side of that fence. No bike to set in front of it this time. Here it is.

Look at this powerhouse. Impressive, right? And this is only part of it. There are more generators outside. Wilson came online in 1925 with eight units. They kept adding them until there were 21, the last of those in the early 1960s. At 663 megawatts, it is still TVA’s largest conventional hydro plant, enough power for more than 380,000 homes.

I liked this place from the first time I saw it, and it comes down to the style. Wilson is the only neoclassical dam in the TVA system. The arches along the spillway echo a Roman aqueduct, and the powerhouse is lined with formal pilasters. Most of the later TVA dams are plain by comparison. They were built in the Depression and the war years, when nobody was spending money on looks. Inside and out, this one still feels like they meant for it to be seen.

Wilson was built by the Army Corps of Engineers starting in 1918, finished in 1925, and handed to TVA in 1933. It is still TVA’s largest conventional hydro plant, 137 feet high and 4,541 feet across the Tennessee River. On the tour they said the architect was working on prisons around the same time, and standing in here, I can see why someone would say that.

What gets me is that you can still see how they built it. Everywhere you look, the concrete is holding the imprint of the wood forms: the grain, the board lines, even marks that bled off the forms into the pour. The wood is long gone. The record of it is not. It is like a fossil, left here so anybody who walks through a hundred years from now can still tell exactly how the place went up.

We were not allowed to take pictures of the control room but this room was not off limits and it was just outside. Imagine this 10X !!! Just amazing

And some remaining shots from the tour. Enjoy!

What a blessing to be able to tour Wilson dam! Stay tuned for more trips and hopefully more tours!