Tellico Village, Tennessee

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tellico Village is a planned community on the western shore of Tellico Reservoir in Loudon County, Tennessee, United States, about 30 miles (48 km) southwest of Knoxville. The community has an area of about 5,000 acres (20 km²) and an unofficially estimated population of more than 6,750 residents in about 3,375 occupied residences.^[1]

Tellico Village is not incorporated. Governmental functions are managed by the Tellico Village Property Owners Association. ^[2] The postal addresses for the community are Loudon and Vonore, Tennessee.

Tellico Village exists because of the actions of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which decided to dam up the Little Tennessee River at its confluence with the Tennessee River. Tellico Dam was completed in November 1979 after a long battle, which famously involved the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and a small fish called the snail darter (see snail darter controversy). As part of the dam project, the TVA acquired additional land above the high water line of the reservoir (Tellico Lake), much of it taken by eminent domain. Part of this additional land was later sold to Cooper Communities, Inc., which established Tellico Village in 1986.

The community has three golf courses and a yacht and country club. The names of the golf courses, like the names of the streets and neighborhoods (each neighborhood within Tellico Village has its own name) are derived from American Indian words and names, mostly Cherokee. These include Toqua, meaning "fish," and Tanasi, which was the name of a town that was the capital of the Cherokee Nation between 1721 and 1730. "Tanasi" is also the word from which the name "Tennessee" was derived.^[3]

The fact that the dam opponents nearly stopped the dam makes the Tellico controversy an especially important episode in U.S. environmental history. The case involved the U.S. Supreme Court, several presidential administrations (most notably the Carter Administration), and the U.S. Congress.

[edit] Notes

^ TellicoVillage.org website
^ Tellico Village Property Owners Association
^ Street name translations provided by Cooper Land Development and an undated letter from Dr. Duane King, Assistant Director of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution.

[edit] Further reading

William Bruce Wheeler and Michael J. McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam 1936-1979: A Bureaucratic Crisis in Post-Industrial America (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1986),
Margaret Lynn Brown, The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2000).