Holston River — South Holston Tailwater

About

Holston River, Tennessee — 1770s Watauga Association. The story begins long before the turbines. In pre-contact times the Holston River was part of the Overhill Cherokee homeland in eastern Tennessee, and the Cherokee called it Hogoheegee. The valley served as a critical travel corridor between the Cherokee Middle Towns in North Carolina and the Overhill Towns along the Little Tennessee River. That corridor drew the first Euro-American settlers west of the Appalachians: the Watauga Association, established between 1770 and 1772 in the upper Holston watershed, was the first self-governing Euro-American community in Tennessee.

The Holston settlements of 1772 to 1774 became the principal Euro-American footholds west of the mountains. From them marched the 'Overmountain Men' of the Holston, Watauga, and Nolichucky settlements, who defeated the British Major Patrick Ferguson at the Battle of Kings Mountain, South Carolina, on October 7, 1780. The turbulent decades that followed saw the failed State of Franklin between 1784 and 1788, the fourth attempted state west of the Appalachians, and the 1791 Treaty of Holston, signed by Governor William Blount and the Cherokee to establish the Cherokee boundary. The Holston itself runs 136 miles, from the confluence of its North Fork and South Fork at Kingsport to its meeting with the French Broad River at Knoxville, where the two form the Tennessee River, and it drains 3,800 square miles.

The watershed was worked hard in the industrial age. From the 1830s through the 1920s the forests were logged to supply the regional timber industry of the 1850s to 1910s and the railroad expansion of the 1860s to 1910s, with local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations as the major operators. The old-growth stands were exhausted by 1910; state forestry conservation began in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale logging. Hydrology got its first serious study over the same span, through USGS surveys in the 1870s to 1890s, gauging stations in the 1880s to 1910s, and state streamflow assessments in the 1910s to 1930s.

Then came the dam. TVA completed South Holston Dam in 1950 as part of the Tennessee Valley flood control and hydroelectric system, and the cold tailwater releases inadvertently created what is now considered one of the top tailwater trout fisheries in the eastern United States. The river receives roughly 80,000 stocked trout annually and supports a self-sustaining wild brown trout population. The one flaw was oxygen, and the 1991 labyrinth weir resolved it, restoring dissolved oxygen to water pulled from the reservoir's depths.

Today the tailwater is designated a TVA Tailwater and TWRA Trophy Trout Water. The single section runs from South Holston Dam to Bluff City, 14 miles of Class I water with riffles and world-class fly fishing that draws anglers from around the world to wade its current. History still runs downstream here, a hydroelectric project quietly reimagined as a living river where the hum of a turbine and the rise of a wild trout belong to the same story.