Pickwick Landing Dam closed its gates on February 8, 1938, and turned the Tennessee River here into Pickwick Lake, which reaches 53 miles to the base of Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The Tennessee Valley Authority got the project authorized in November 1934 and began work in March 1935. To build the dam and fill the lake, TVA bought 63,700 acres and moved 506 families and 407 graves. The lock, designed by the Corps of Engineers, lifts boats 63 feet between Pickwick and Kentucky lakes, one of the highest lifts in the world when it opened.
The name is older than the dam. Pickwick Landing was a 19th-century riverboat stop, and the community that grew up there took its name from the title character of Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. The river had drawn people here for centuries, the state parks brochure notes, from the Mississippian mound builders and other Native American peoples to the communities of Counce, White Sulphur Springs, Bruton Branch and Pickwick Landing.
The Civilian Conservation Corps built the first park on the new shoreline, which became the private Pickwick Resort and then the state park. Today the park has a lodge, cabins, campgrounds, an 18-hole golf course, a marina, a 2.8-mile trail around the lake and an aviary. State Route 128 crosses the top of the dam and connects the area to Savannah to the north, and Shiloh lies a few miles up the river.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour