Muscle Shoals, AL: TVA Training Facility and Repair Shops

Training: (Satellite)

Power Service Shop #1: (Satellite)

Power Service Shop #2: (Satellite)

Transmission: (Satellite)

Hydro: (Satellite)

This complex used to make ammonium nitrate for WWI: (HAER)

Tennessee Valley Authority posted four photos with the comment:

Union craftsmen built and placed the final steel frame for the expansion of our Power Service Shop in Muscle Shoals, AL!!👇🛠️

The expansion will house a massive, state-of-the-art Vertical Turning Lathe with a 200-ton capacity, allowing us to save time and money by bringing the maintenance and repair of huge power-generating equipment in-house.

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I wondered if the big generating equipment could be shipped to this shop by barge. I studied a satellite image, but I did not see a barge dock. Then I wondered if the shops were rail served. I found some tracks near some of the buildings, but the L&N route that runs west of the complex is abandoned because the bridge across the Tennessee River is now a trail. So I got a topo map to checkout the rail service. They had a "US RAILWAY" industrial spur to both L&N and Southern. But that spur no longer has tracks. But this topo map taught me that the government used to have nitrate plants here.

This nitrate complex was built during WWI to use electricity from the Wilson Dam to produce explosives. When the TVA was formed, spent soils were one of the problems that plagued the Tennessee River Valley. So the TVA reactivated the plants to make fertilizer instead of explosives. In addition to nitrogen fertilizer, "two aged electric carbide furnaces were converted to phosphate smelters" at Nitrate Plant #2. [tva_heritage]

1957/58 Florence Quad @ 24,000

HAER ALA,17-MUSHO,1-
1. Perspective view looking southeast at the Cyanamide (L-N) Oven Building. - United States Nitrate Plant No. 2, Reservation Road, Muscle Shoals, Colbert County, AL Photos from Survey HAER AL-46
Significance: Built as a war measure for the production of ammonium nitrate, a key component in high explosives, United States Nitrate Plant No. 2 became one of the largest plants of its kind with a capacity to produce 110,000 tons of ammonium nitrate per year. The plant and its adjoining industrial town were hurriedly constructed in a nine month period between February and November of 1918 with little regard to cost. After two brief periods of production, one toward the end of 1918, the other in the February of 1919, the 348 acre manufacturing site lay idle for the next fourteen years while Congress and private industry wrangled over bids that had less to do with the nitrate plant than they did with the hydro-power of the adjoining Wilson Dam. As a chemical plant for the production of ammonium nitrate, U.S.N.P. No. 2 was actually a series of discreet plants, each producing an intermediate product in a lengthy and mechanically complex industrial process. On an unprecedented scale, U.S.N.P. No. 2 assembled state of the art technologies for the production of calcium carbide, liquid air, cyanamide, ammonia gas, nitric acid, and ammonium nitrate.

 

HAER ALA,17-MUSHO,1-
17. General view looking northeast from atop a Storage Tank, looking at the Catalyzer Buildings. Note circular foundation for Ammonia Storage Tank and the Liquid Air Building in the upper right corner of photo.

 

msnha
"In 1921, Henry Ford, the automotive guru, proposed $5 million dollars to buy the town of Muscle Shoals and Wilson Dam, which was being constructed at the time. Ford wanted to build a 75 mile-wide city that would become like the city up north. He was severely opposed by delegates from around the South and Midwest, including Sen. George Norris, of Nebraska, and ran into many delays in his quest to buy Muscle Shoals. Ford finally dropped his proposal in 1924."
The passage of the "Shoals Bill" in 1934 to keep the Wilson Dam under government control is what created the TVA.

The US nitrate plants would explain why there is still some fertilizer work done here.

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