Vacant Hydro Power Plant in Fayetteville TN

Harms Mill Hydroelectric Station, Fayetteville Tennessee

Date added: October 12, 2023 Categories: Tennessee Power Plant Hydroelectric Power

View of Harms Mill, looking southeast (1989)

The Harms Mill Hydroelectric Station is the kind of hydroelectric engineering project typical at the time of its construction on the smaller rivers of the State of Tennessee. Its design is unique among its genre in the Volunteer State, especially in the presence of the rectangular design reminiscent of the textile factory that preceded it, as well as its horizontal emphasis and use of four turbines to drive one generator. It operated from 1922 to 1940 when the TVA retired it from service.

Harms Mill Hydroelectric Station is located on the Elk River, in rural south-central Tennessee in Lincoln County (population 26,483), about five miles southwest of the county seat, Fayetteville, at Elk River Mile 77.1. The site, approximately 500 feet from State Highway 15, is accessible by a one-lane, crushed stone drive.

A water-powered frame textile mill was built on the location in 1870 by the Harms Brothers, and in 1905 a seventy-five horsepower hydroelectric generator was installed with the immediate and limited objective of providing power for the operation of the textile factory. This adaptation in the textile factory would be crucial in determining the actual shape of the hydroelectric station. In 1920 the factory was purchased by the Fayetteville Light and Power Company, and a new concrete dam (with a fish ladder) and seventy-five by eighteen-foot reinforced concrete flat-roofed powerhouse (extant today) were completed by 1922 on the right (north) bank of the Elk River. The steel powerhouse roof supports are clearly visible today.

The site includes the concrete gravity dam, seven feet high and 325 feet long which features a 250-foot uncontrolled ogee overflow spillway. A unique open flume water-conducting system fed by an intake system consisting of four forebays, three of which feature two seven-foot wide slide gates, while the remaining forebay has a nine-foot wide slide gate.

TEPCO, the statewide electric power monopoly, purchased the facilities in 1929. The plant was equipped with four turbines, three of which were fifty-inch Leffel vertical shaft, single runner, Francis-types, with a fifty horsepower rating. The fourth was similar with a forty-five-inch runner that had a forty-five horsepower rating. All four turbines drove a single electrical generator through a system of wooden bevel gears and a "lay" shaft. Perhaps no better example of the heterogeneity characteristic of the second and third eras of early electrical development can be found in Tennessee. Moreover, its horizontal design, together with its remarkably whimsical turbine/generator alignment - strongly reminiscent of the textile factory that immediately preceded it, is contrary to other more commonly observed vertically emphasized examples of "hydrostyle" distinctness in Tennessee.