Tellico River

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Tellico River
The Tellico River near Tellico Plains, Tennessee
Origin	Cherokee County, North Carolina
Mouth	Tellico Reservoir of the Little Tennessee River; Monroe County, Tennessee
Length	52.8 miles (85 km)
Basin area	285 square miles (738 km²)

The Tellico River rises in the westernmost mountains of North Carolina, but it flows mainly through Monroe County, Tennessee. It is a major tributary of the Little Tennessee River and the namesake of Tellico Reservoir, a reservoir created by Tellico Dam, which impounds the lower reaches of the Tellico River and the Little Tennessee River and was famous during the 1970s for the snail darter controversy.

The Tellico River and its main tributaries are renowned for their brown and rainbow trout fishing. Upstream from Tellico Lake, above the town of Tellico Plains, the Tellico is a premier trout stream. It meanders through a mountain gorge before reaching the broad plains downstream of Tellico Plains.

Major tributaries include the Bald River and the North River. It rises near the Tennessee-North Carolina state line, in the Cherokee National Forest. Also, in the general area is the Tellico OHV, which is a mountainside off-road park between Tellico Plains and Murphy, North Carolina. This park provides some of the most scenic and complicated off-road terrain, which is used by trucks, Jeeps, and ATVs.

Virtually the whole of the Tellico River basin was logged by the Babcock Lumber Company in the early 20th century. The present-day road up the Tellico River from Tellico Plains was built on the old Babcock logging railroad bed. After the Tellico River basin forests were cut, Babock sold the land to the United States Forest Service.

According to the USGS, variant names of the Tellico River include Delaquay River, Talequo River, Terrique River, and Tellequo River.

The word "Tellico" was the name of several Cherokee towns, the largest of which was Great Tellico, located on the Tellico River near present-day Tellico Plains, Tennessee. In Cherokee the word is more properly written "Talikwa". According to James Mooney, the meaning of the word is lost.