Powersite Dam went into service in 1913 on the White River near Forsyth, Missouri, the first hydroelectric dam in Missouri. Designed in 1911 by Nils F. Ambursen as the largest concrete buttress dam of its kind, the dam is still privately owned by the Empire District Electric Company.
Powersite was hardly a visual embodiment of modernism like the later high dams out West. It more resembled a big milldam. Its forebay was little more than a pool in the White River. As it was a run-of-the river dam, Lake Taneycomo’s shoreline fluctuated very little.
The narrow, twenty mile-long lake it created became regarded as part of nature, indistinguishable from the free-flowing river it replaced. A March 12, 1913 article in the Springfield Republican, “Lake Taneycomo Is Name Bestowed By Branson Club,” compared the lake to the more famous Lake Como in the Alps. The new lake “nestled among the bluffs of the beautiful Ozarks” was part of the White River, “which no more picturesque stream can be found.” The Branson Club created the name from Taney County Missouri.
Until Table Rock’s discharge of frigid water turned it into a trout environment, Taneycomo was popular with swimmers and bass fishermen. Rockaway Beach flourished as a summer resort from the 1920s through the ’50s, until Table Rock drastically changed the lake’s water temperature.
Some local promoters got it in their heads that the price of electricity near the plants would be so low that factories would automatically spring up. A headline in the Springfield Republican (November 18, 1911) proclaimed “Cotton Mills Will Come To White River: Dam Proposition Is to Furnish Power for Big Industries From New England.” None of this happened. Electric rates were not less close to the dam. Cotton production did not swell.
Adapted from James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River
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