Tellico River

Off the Unicois

The Tellico rises on the North Carolina side of the state line, near McDaniel Bald in Cherokee County, at about 4,200 feet by the federal names database. Its headwaters lie in the Nantahala National Forest. It crosses into Tennessee and the Cherokee National Forest, takes the Bald River from the left and the North River from the right, and comes out of the mountains at Tellico Plains, a flat the river and its tributaries made. Below the town it turns north through rural Monroe County and goes slack in Tellico Lake. It joins the Little Tennessee at Vonore, now under the lake, at about 814 feet. Wikipedia gives it 52.8 miles and a 285 square mile basin. The gage at Tellico Plains averaged 284 cubic feet a second between 1926 and 1981.

Henry Timberlake wrote it “Tellequo” on the map of his 1761 and 1762 journey to the Overhill Cherokee. Several Cherokee towns carried the name, the largest of them Great Tellico, near the present Tellico Plains. James Mooney gave the proper form as Talikwa and said that its meaning had been lost.

The old grade

Babcock Lumber of Pittsburgh formed the Tellico River Lumber Company at Tellico Plains in 1905 and laid a railroad up the river, with a high trestle over the Bald River near its falls. The upper basin was clearcut, Bald River and North River included, and by 1933 most of the land had gone to the Forest Service. The road up the Tellico from the ranger station is the railroad bed. Six miles along it, by the Forest Service’s directions, Bald River Falls comes down on the right. The Forest Service gives the drop as ninety feet, and other accounts put it anywhere from eighty to a hundred. You can see it from the road without getting out.

Brook trout, sediment and acid

The forest came back, and the trout water with it, though not without help. The Forest Service calls the upper Bald River and its tributaries a Tennessee stronghold for brook trout, the one trout native to these mountains. Across the line, the North Carolina headwaters held an off-road vehicle area with almost forty miles of designated trail. The Forest Service estimated that more than 25,000 tons of sediment had washed off those trails into the Tellico’s tributaries, and in October 2009, two years after conservation groups sued, it closed most of the area. The Southern Environmental Law Center called the watershed “one of the last, best strongholds” for brook trout.

The North River had a different trouble. Highway construction in its drainage in the 1970s cut into the Anakeesta Formation, a pyritic rock, and the runoff came off acid and heavy with metals. The Federal Highway Administration began covering the exposed fill with soil blankets and dosing the runoff with sodium hydroxide in 1977. Fish surveys and bioassays in 1978 and 1979 showed early improvement, and then rainbow trout placed in the streams could not survive about six months after the blankets went down, by the account of Eric Morgan and his co-authors in 1983.

The main river is a stocked fishery. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency’s Tellico Hatchery stocks it, and fishing there needs a daily Tellico–Citico permit, with some days closed. In 2024 the agency stocked weekly from late February through July, though a bridge replacement on the Bald River and damage from an August 2023 flood kept the trucks to the river above the North River.

Fish that came back downstream

The best natural history on the river may be at its lower end. In 2001 the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed putting four small fish into the Tellico above the backwaters of the lake: the duskytail darter and smoky madtom, both endangered, and the yellowfin madtom and spotfin chub, both threatened. There were no confirmed records of any of them in the Tellico. The Service’s reasoning was that before the Little Tennessee was dammed nothing separated the Tellico from Citico and Abrams creeks, where these fish had held on, so they had very likely lived there too. The smoky madtom had once been known only from Citico Creek, and the Service put its whole population at 500 to 1,000 fish.

Conservation Fisheries, a Knoxville nonprofit, began raising the two madtoms and the darter in 2002, using eggs taken from nests in Citico Creek, and the young went into the Tellico as a nonessential experimental population, a status that keeps the fish protected without binding the river’s other users. The Service now reports that the fish are reproducing there on their own.

Under the lake

Tellico Lake belongs to the Little Tennessee. TVA closed the dam’s gates on November 29, 1979, after six years of argument over the snail darter, and the lake covers 15,560 acres at full pool by TVA’s figure. The dam makes no electricity. It sends water through a canal to Fort Loudoun Lake. The rebuilt Fort Loudoun, which the Cherokee besieged and took in 1760, stands on an island near where the Tellico used to meet the larger river.