The Watts Bar Steam Plant is the first fuel-burning electric power plant constructed by the TVA. The first two of its four 60,000-kilowatt generating units were placed in commercial operation in February and March 1942 at a time when the products of industry and agriculture in the valley region were critical items in the war effort. These units increased the continuous energy capacity of the TVA system to approximately 830,000 kilowatts and the system peak to about 1,100,000 kilowatts. The further addition of Cherokee, Chatuge, and Nottely Dams and the down-river units raised the continuous energy of the system to 960,000 kilowatts and the peak capability to about 1,300,000 kilowatts by the fall of 1942. The third Watts Bar Steam Plant unit began operation in February 1943 and the fourth in April 1945 - important factors in keeping ahead of system demands.

This is the second of three volumes comprising the Design of TVA Projects and is one of a planned series of special reports recording the experience of TVA in carrying out the major phases of its engineering and construction program. It undertakes to explain the engineering work involved in the design of electrical installations for primary water control stations of TVA, including switch-yards constructed at the generating stations but not transmission lines and substations.

Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians In the years after World War I, Southern farm women found their world changing. A postwar plunge in farm prices stretched into a twenty-year agricultural depression and New Deal programs eventually transformed the economy. Many families left their land to make way for larger commercial farms. New industries and the intervention of big government in once insular communities marked a turning point in the struggle of upcountry women—forcing new choices and the redefinition of traditional ways of life. Melissa Walker's All We Knew Was to Farm draws on interviews, archives, and family and government records to reconstruct the conflict between rural women and bewildering and unsettling change. Some women adapted by becoming partners in farm operations, adopting the roles of consumers and homemakers, taking off-farm jobs, or leaving the land. The material lives of rural upcountry women improved dramatically by midcentury—yet in becoming middle class, Walker concludes, the women found their experiences both broadened and circumscribed.