Old Photos of Norris and the Surrounding Area

In 1949 when I was four and half years old my family moved from Oak Ridge, Tennessee to Norris, a small planned community fifteen miles northeast of Oak Ridge. Norris was designed and developed by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933 to house the workers building Norris Dam (the first TVA dam) named in honor of Nebraska Senator George W. Norris, a long-time supporter of TVA.

The design of the town was loosely based on the English garden city movement of the 1890s with the city’s winding, rolling roads following the contours of the east Tennessee terrain. The self-contained town represents one of the first uses of greenbelt design principles in the United States. It was built around a central common green and was surrounded by a green belt of rural land. The houses were built using local wood and stone and were some of the first all-electric homes in the country. Norris was the first town in Tennessee to have a complete system of dial telephones. The Norris Creamery was the first milk-producing plant in the world to be powered solely by electricity.

If you click the photo below it will take you to Eddie Stair's Facebook Photo Album where you may continue to click and see many more historic photos of Norris and the surrounding area: