Most of the acreage around the final lakeshore, originally seized through eminent domain, was sold to private developers to create retirement-oriented golf resort communities such as Tellico Village and Rarity Bay.

[6] However, the dam was completed and filling of the reservoir commenced in November 1979, after the project was exempted from the Endangered Species Act with the passing of the 1980 public works appropriations bill by the United States Congress and President Jimmy Carter.

[8] In 1936, TVA began studies for hydroelectric dam sites as part of its Unified Development of the Tennessee River (UDTR) plan.

However, the project was canceled on October 20, 1942, due to a lack of federal funding resulting from financial constraints imposed by US involvement in World War II.

[11] The Tellico Dam would provide a large reservoir for recreation and for freight transport to proposed industrial sites with access to the Tennessee River through a canal.

[3][12] The Timberlake project was initially supported with congressional aid and investment from the American aerospace manufacturing company, the Boeing Corporation.

For the remaining area, TVA allocated 16,500 acres (6,700 ha) for residential, recreational, and industrial development as part of the proposed Timberlake planned city project.

Public meetings commenced throughout the Little Tennessee Valley in the mid-1960s at civic spaces in Loudon, Blount, and Monroe counties to address concerns raised by citizens about the Tellico and Timberlake projects.

[16] In 1963, small clusters of Little Tennessee Valley landowners and businesspeople formed a community group known as the Fort Loudoun Association opposing the Tellico project.

One month after the contentious meeting at Greenback High School, anti-Tellico individuals formed a larger opposition group, the Association for the Preservation of the Little Tennessee River.

[5] Along the shoreline of the proposed reservoir, roughly 23,600 acres (9,600 ha) would be acquired to be cleared and graded for future residential, commercial, industrial, and recreational area development.

[21] By the time of the forced closure of construction, work on the Tellico Project was nearly 90% complete, aside from final land clearing, recreational facility preparation, and a highway system that was nearly finished.

The TVA also invested another $3.6 million for two major road projects scheduled for initial work starting after the completion and opening of the Tellico Dam structure.

Officials with the Tennessee Department of Transportation expressed doubt about the completion of the Tellico Parkway (State Route 444), one of these major road projects.

Citing the loss of prime farmland, in December 1964 the Tennessee Farm Bureau Association passed resolutions protesting the completion of Tellico Dam.

One year later, delegates from the Cherokee Nation filed a petition protesting the desecration of their ancestral lands that were proposed to be flooded for the Tellico Dam.

[1] In 1971, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) economics professor Keith Phillips criticized TVA's plans for Tellico Dam in a reappraisal of the project.

Phillips found fault with the cost and benefits evaluation conducted by the TVA, and suggested that the agency's officials on the project were technically incompetent.

[1] Finding an opportunity, Little Tennessee Valley farmers and environmentalists formed a joint activist group known as the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in 1972.

[24] On August 12, 1973, a group of students led by UTK biology professor David Etnier conducted a study for possible endangered species via snorkeling in the Little Tennessee River during construction operations on Tellico Dam.

In the Coytee Springs shoal area of the Little Tennessee, Etnier identified several snail darters, to which in a later interview with the Knoxville News Sentinel suggested he "knew nobody had ever seen it before.

District Court Judge Robert Taylor declined an injunction to order the cessation of construction work on Tellico Dam on May 25, 1976.

[30] After a long battle, Congress exempted the Tellico Dam from the Endangered Species Act by adding a rider clause to an unrelated public works bill.

[32] Some of these had been occupied by ancestors of the Cherokee for up to 1,000 years, based on the earthwork platform mounds built at their centers by people of the South Appalachian Mississippian culture.

[16] Still intent on development projects to improve the economic conditions of the Little Tennessee Valley, TVA began sales on lakefront acreage that the agency seized through eminent domain.

[42] The residential component of the failed Timberlake project was relaunched in late 1984 with the purchase of roughly 4,800 acres (1,900 ha) along the western shore of the Tellico Reservoir by Cooper Communities Inc. (CCI), a real estate firm based out of Bella Vista, Arkansas.

[44] By the late 1990s and into the 2000s, the TVA was pressured by private development groups to release additional acreage that had been seized via eminent domain along the shoreline of several reservoirs.

[45] In 2002, the TVA board of directors approved the sale of preserved land on the eastern shore of Tellico Reservoir for a $750 million golf-course community known as Rarity Pointe.

The fish was still classified as a threatened species because the Hiwassee River, where the snail darters from the Little Tennessee had been translocated, had a previous history of acid spills from freight train accidents.

[38] In the 1980s, TVA attempted the construction of a $83 million dam with an intent similar to Tellico, for tourism and economic development on the Duck River near the city of Columbia, Tennessee.