River · United States
Tennessee River
The Tennessee River is the longest tributary of the Ohio River in the USA. It begins at Knoxville, swings in a big bend through four states and flows into the Ohio at Paducah in Kentucky.
Picture credit: Dailynetworks (Public domain) · AppalachianCentrist (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Nyttend (Public domain) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Tennessee River?
The river starts here: Confluence of the Holston and French Broad rivers at Knoxville, Tennessee.
It ends in the Ohio River at Paducah, Kentucky.
Countries on the river: the United States.
The story behind it
The Tennessee River is named after Tanasi, an old Cherokee village. It starts where two rivers, the Holston and the French Broad, meet at Knoxville. From there it flows south-west past Chattanooga, where it comes very close to the border of Georgia. Then it crosses Alabama, passing cities such as Huntsville and Decatur, touches Mississippi and turns north, flowing back through Tennessee into Kentucky. From the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority built nine dams on the river. Now it is a chain of long lakes. Locks work like water lifts: in about 45 minutes a boat is raised or lowered to the next lake, without any pumps. The biggest lake, Kentucky Lake, is the largest reservoir in the eastern USA. About 102 kinds of mussels live in the river and its side rivers. Long ago, people made buttons from their shiny shells, until plastic buttons took over.
Questions children ask
How long is the Tennessee River?
The Tennessee River is about 1 049 kilometres long. Together with its headstream, the French Broad River, the whole river course is about 1 425 kilometres long.
Which states does the Tennessee River flow through?
It flows through four US states: Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Kentucky. It even crosses the state of Tennessee twice, once heading south and once heading north.
How do boats get past the dams?
Next to the dams there are nine main locks that lift or lower boats from one lake to the next. The water flows in and out by gravity alone, and each trip through a lock takes about 45 minutes.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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