Lillard's Mill Hydroelectric Station, Milltown Tennessee
The Lillard's Mill Hydroelectric Station is the kind of smaller-scale, private-sector venture capitalist hydroelectric engineering projects typical of the time of its construction on the smaller rivers in Tennessee. The Lillard's Mill Hydroelectric Station is an example of a change in the business of trading goods, services, and commodities, and the gradual introduction of electrical power into everyday life. Aside from being the major source of electricity for Lewisburg, ten miles to the South, it also provided electricity to Milltown, the designation for a local cotton mill town, long since razed. Because the site is located in a rural setting, it no doubt provided rural electrification service long before the initiation of the TVA's program in the 1940s.
Constructed in 1927-1928 the design of Lillard's Mill is comparable with two other extant sites, all designed and built in the 1920s by the same two Nashville industrial engineering and construction firms, for the same public utilities firm. While it has undergone some physical change inasmuch as the superstructure of the powerhouse was razed, the dam and powerhouse foundation stand as a material representation of the growing twentieth-century demand, consumption, and production of electrical power in Marshall County.
Site Description
The Lillard's Mill Hydroelectric Station is located at the unincorporated community of Milltown on the Duck River, just off McClean Road, in rural north-eastern Marshall County (population 19,690), about ten miles north of the county seat, Lewisburg, Tennessee. The abandoned site serves today as a recreation area, utilized most often by sports fishermen.
Lillard's Mill is the third of the Southern Cities Corporation's hydroelectric facilities built on the Duck River, and was constructed in 1927-1928. Like its sisters in Columbia and Shelbyville, the Lillard's Mill site was constructed by Foster & Creighton, as designed by Freeland, Roberts & Company, both Nashville firms. It is a concrete reinforced structure standing fifty feet from the river. The superstructure "is of skeleton, [sic] reinforced concrete with brick panels and brick veneer. The building is approximately forty-six feet by thirty feet by twenty feet to roofline with brick parapet walls. The roof is of [sic] four inch reinforced concrete slabs supported on reinforced concrete beams." Its interior was painted much like the station in Columbia (white with green wainscot up to window sill level, floors painted with grey concrete paint). Two Leffel forty-eight-inch, single-runner type turbines drove the twin Westinghouse 500 kVA units with direct-connected exciters. As with the Columbia station, Woodward-type governors were utilized.
The dam is 164 feet in length, and runs in both directions from the powerhouse. Only sixteen feet of the dam is not utilized as spillway. From the abutment on the west bank of the Duck River is a core wall with an earth embankment, which runs about eighty feet. "Also from the wing wall down to the river for approximately fifty feet there is a timber crib rack filled wing to protect the bank." Like the Columbia site, there is also a "V" shaped trash boom on the upstream side of the powerhouse, protecting the intake forebay from accumulating floating river debris. According to one source, Lillard's Mill Hydroelectric Station, like its sisters in Columbia and in Shelbyville, was one of the more modern of all its contemporaries because of its utilization of Westinghouse electrical generators. The site's physical appearance has changed since its construction in the late 1920s in that the brick superstructure that would have housed the generating equipment, is no longer extant. The dam, spillway, "V" shaped trash boom, walkway, dam footings, fishladder and steel-reinforced concrete powerhouse foundation are all still extant.
View of Lillard's Mill Hydroelectric Site on the Duck River, showing relationship of walkway, powerhouse foundation, fishladder (to the left of the foundation), spillway, and dam footings. Looking upstream, or southwest (1989)
Spillway section of Lillard's Mill hydroelectric site, showing dam footing and powerhouse foundation with loading platform still intact. Looking Southwest (1989)
Lillard's Mill concrete dam footing on north side of Duck River, showing relationship to dam spillway, "V"-shaped trash boom, forebays, and powerhouse foundation. Looking southeast (1989)
Lillard's Mill powerhouse foundation, showing loading platform, and spillway. Looking southwest (1989)
