Hiwassee River

From Unicoi Gap to Hiwassee Island

The Hiwassee rises in Towns County, Georgia. The New Georgia Encyclopedia puts its headwaters on the north side of Unicoi Gap, and Wikipedia and the state of Tennessee put its first spring on the north slope of Rocky Mountain, at about 3,640 feet by Wikipedia’s figure. It runs north into North Carolina through Chatuge Lake, then northwest and west along the line between Clay and Cherokee counties, through Hiwassee and Apalachia lakes. The Unicoi Mountains stand on its north side as it leaves the state. In Tennessee it crosses Polk County, passes Delano, Calhoun and Charleston, and ends in the Tennessee River at Hiwassee Island in Meigs County, at about 682 feet. Wikipedia, citing the federal hydrography data, and the Tennessee scenic rivers program both give it 147 miles, and Wikipedia puts the basin at about 2,700 square miles.

Georgia spells it Hiawassee, as in the Towns County seat. The North Carolina Gazetteer and Wikipedia trace the name to the Cherokee ayuhwá-si, a meadow.

Three lakes in North Carolina

Every dam on the river is in North Carolina. Mission Dam is not TVA’s. The other three are. Chatuge went up in 1941 and 1942 to hold water back for flood control downstream, and only got a turbine in 1954. The New Georgia Encyclopedia gives its lake 7,050 acres, reaching back across the state line toward Hiawassee. In early 2025, by the Clay County Progress’s account as Wikipedia reports it, a TVA study found the spillway at risk: an extreme storm could lift its concrete slabs and erode it. The joints got a temporary fix and TVA is weighing a new spillway beside the old one.

Hiwassee Dam was begun in 1936 and finished in 1940, 307 feet high. Its second unit, added in 1956 by TVA’s date, is a pump turbine that can push water back uphill into the lake, and TVA says it was the first and most powerful pumped-storage unit in the world when it was built. Apalachia, just downstream, was built from 1941 to 1943 for wartime power. It sends the river through a pipeline and tunnel 8.3 miles to its powerhouse, and the channel between carries a reduced flow. On the Tennessee side the John Muir Trail follows that bypassed reach.

The scenic river

From the North Carolina line to the US 411 bridge near Delano, 23.2 miles of the Hiwassee have been a Tennessee State Scenic River since April 4, 1968. This is the reach people float and fish, on water that comes out of the Apalachia powerhouse cold, with Class I to III rapids depending on the release. The Hiwassee chapter of Trout Unlimited, working from TVA and state wildlife literature, puts annual stocking at about 84,000 rainbows and 40,000 browns and says the state-record brook trout came out of this river. Wikipedia reports that snail darters, known before the Tellico Dam fight only from the Little Tennessee, were moved here in the 1970s.

The boulders along this reach hold one of the rarest plants in the country. Ruth’s golden aster grows in soil caught in cracks in the riverside rock, phyllite on the Hiwassee, and the Fish and Wildlife Service knows it from two short stretches, one on this river and one on the Ocoee, both in Polk County. It has been listed as endangered since 1985. The Service’s 2023 review says the flows now released down the Hiwassee are generally too weak to scour out the shrubs and grass crowding it, so some sites will need clearing by hand.

Charleston and the cranes

Charleston, on the south bank, was the site of the U.S. Agency to the Cherokee Nation from 1819 to 1834. Fort Cass, established there on January 1, 1835, became the Army’s headquarters for the removal. The National Park Service puts about 7,000 Cherokee in camps spread over a twelve-by-four-mile area running south from Charleston, and the Cherokee Nation counts nine camps active in the summer of 1838, Rattlesnake Springs among them. The bridges at Calhoun and Charleston now carry US 11, and the mills there draw on the river. Wikipedia ties fog off the river and the Bowater newsprint mill to a 99-vehicle pileup on Interstate 75 in December 1990 that killed twelve people.

At the mouth, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency has managed about 6,000 acres where the Hiwassee meets the Tennessee as the Hiwassee Refuge for more than sixty years. The recovering eastern population of sandhill cranes began stopping there in the early 1990s, and thousands now spend the whole winter. A whooping crane turns up some years.