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The Baxter County Historical and Genealogical Society will mark the 75th anniversary of Bull Shoals Dam at its July meeting, with two U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials as featured speakers.
The meeting is set for 6 p.m. Tuesday, July 28, in the Knox Room at the Baxter County Library. Admission is free and the public is invited.
Col. Walter T. “Tom” Allard, the Corps’ district commander, and J.T. Townsend, the district’s chief of public affairs, are scheduled to speak on the dam’s construction and its lasting effect on the region.
The Corps of Engineers built Bull Shoals Dam on the White River between June 1947 and July 1951. Congress had authorized the dam, along with a series of other White River projects, as part of a federal effort to control flooding that had repeatedly devastated the basin.
The concrete gravity dam stands 256 feet high and stretches 2,256 feet across the river on the Marion and Baxter county line, about 10 miles west of Mountain Home. When it was finished, it ranked as one of the largest concrete structures in the world and, by many accounts, the fifth-largest dam on the planet.
The project cost about $86 million and was built for flood control and hydroelectric power. It created Bull Shoals Lake, a reservoir of roughly 45,000 acres that reaches north into Missouri. President Harry Truman traveled to the area to dedicate the dam in 1952.
The dam reshaped the region in ways that outlasted the flooding it was built to stop. The cold water released from the bottom of the lake turned the White River below the dam into one of the country’s premier trout-fishing streams after the state began stocking trout in the late 1950s.
The Corps credits the dam with preventing hundreds of millions of dollars in flood damage over its lifetime. The project also gave rise to the city of Bull Shoals, which grew up around the construction and incorporated in 1954.
The society meets monthly and can be reached at 870-425-2551 or through its website, baxtercountyhistory.org.
