Tennessee Valley

Belton Dam went up on the Leon River beginning in July 1949, and the Army Corps of Engineers began holding water on March 8, 1954. The Handbook of Texas gives the reservoir 887,000 acre-feet of flood-control storage. In January 1956 the government leased the facilities to the Bell County Water Control and Improvement District, which supplies Fort Hood, Killeen and other areas. Tennessee Valley, five miles northwest of Belton, had a school with seventy-two pupils in 1896 and a commercial pecan orchard in the 1920s. The lake covered the site.

What the plaque says

Tennessee Valley Though pioneer settlement of this area may have begun as early as 1844, it was named when eight families from Tennessee arrived in 1851 in search of affordable fertile land. Sheltered between the Sparta Mountains and a curve in the Leon River, the fields yielded grains, cotton, nuts, and peaches. Tennessee Valley was a thriving community for almost 100 years, its beauty marred only by the violent floodwaters of the Leon River. The construction of the Belton dam and creation of Belton Lake in 1954 deluged Tennessee Valley and two other communities, which were sacrificed to protect the areas surrounding the Leon River. (1998) Incising: Polly Peaks-Elmore, Applicant

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 7.4 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Mother Neff State Park — 15 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• First Presbyterian Church — 2.2 mi
• First Baptist Church of Temple — 2.6 mi
• A Memorial to Civil War Education in Texas — 3.0 mi
• Jeff Hamilton — 3.0 mi