The Town Aluminum Built

Before there was a Badin, there was a place on the Yadkin River called the Narrows, a rocky gorge where the whole river squeezed between two hills. For a century people looked at that falling water and saw power. It took a new technology, two bankrupt dreams and a world war to turn it into a town.

A gorge that waited a century

The Narrows had been known for its water power for more than a hundred years, the museum’s history explains. But the gorge was remote, wooded and rocky, a poor place for an old-fashioned mill wheel.

What changed was electricity. Once power could be made at a dam and sent over wires, a factory no longer had to sit on the riverbank. A dam at the Narrows could feed a plant a mile and a half away.

From the museum’s archive: The Narrows

Whitney’s Niagara of the South

The first to try was George Whitney, a Pittsburgh financier who formed the Whitney Development Company in 1899. His general manager, a British mining engineer named Egbert Hambley, knew the country and had friends among investors in the North and in England.

Together they promoted the project as the Niagara of the South: a granite dam 35 feet high and 1,100 feet long, a five-mile canal to a powerhouse below Palmer Mountain, and 27,000 horsepower to be sold as far as 100 miles away. The company bought some 30,000 acres across Rowan, Stanly, Cabarrus, Davidson and Montgomery counties. It ran gold mines near Gold Hill and cut its own stone at Granite Quarry. Hundreds of workers, Sicilian masons among them, laid the granite blocks, and streets were marked out for a town called Whitney.

Then it came apart. In 1906 the company’s gold mines flooded and never reopened. Typhoid broke out in the river camp, and Hambley himself died of it that year. By 1907 the company was in receivership, and by 1910 Whitney was bankrupt.

In January 1908, Scientific American put the great North Carolina dam on its cover. By the time the issue was printed, the museum notes, the work had already stopped. When the river runs low you can still see the granite abutments Whitney left behind.

From the museum’s archive: Old Whitney

The French and a man named Badin

The buyer, in 1912, was French. Europe’s aluminum makers had organized as L’Aluminium Français, and they wanted a foothold in an American market that one company, Alcoa, had to itself. To compete they needed cheap hydroelectric power, and a bankrupt dam site in North Carolina offered it. They formed the Southern Aluminium Company, spelled the French way, and named Adrien Badin its president.

Badin was a chemical engineer from Salindres, a town in the south of France that the museum calls the cradle of aluminum. His surveyors and engineers walked Whitney’s works and reached a quick conclusion: abandon them. A taller dam at the Narrows itself would do far more.

The company hired the Hardaway Construction Company to build the dam and a New York firm, Pierson & Goodrich, to lay out a modern town that would attract skilled workers. Construction was under way in 1913, on ground around Ebenezer Baptist Church.

It lasted about a year. When World War I began in 1914, the French engineers were called home at once. They left a dam, a plant and a town, all partly built. Back in France, Adrien Badin turned his chemical works to making munitions. He died in 1917 without ever seeing the town that carries his name. His son, Ferdinand, finally made the trip in 1976.

From the museum’s archive: Adrien Badin The Quadruplex

A state highway marker on N.C. 740 in Badin tells the same story in two sentences. The Guide has a page on marker L-95, L’Aluminium Français.

Alcoa finishes what France began

Alcoa stepped in. The company bought the unfinished project in 1915 under its president, Arthur Vining Davis, who had been in the aluminum business since the day in 1888 when he helped pour the first commercial batch in Pittsburgh. Local legend, passed along by the museum, has the deal being struck on the golf course at Pinehurst.

Alcoa kept Hardaway Construction on the job, and the Narrows Dam was finished in 1917. The museum describes it as the highest spillway dam in the world at the time and the largest dam of any kind in North Carolina, with the largest hydroelectric units then in existence in its powerhouse. The dam’s National Register listing describes it in similar words, as the world’s highest overflow-type dam when it was finished.

Narrows was the first of four dams Alcoa would build on this stretch of the Yadkin. The lake that rose behind it was first called Tallassee Lake. Everyone knows it now as Badin Lake.

From the museum’s archive: The Narrows Arthur Vining Davis The Hardaway Site

From falling water to metal

The whole point of the dam was a smelter. Making aluminum takes enormous amounts of electricity, and at Badin the powerhouse and the plant were built as one machine. Step through it.

From the museum’s archive: Narrows Dam Water Wheel

Where to see the story today

• The water wheel stands on the green at Falls Road and Boyden Street, where the museum’s walking tour begins.
• The Firehouse Museum holds a long run of photographs of the dam going up and of the work at Alcoa.
• The museum’s free tour app includes The Yadkin: A History That Runs Deep, best enjoyed from Badin Waterfront Park.
• On the Guide: Before Badin Lake and The Hardaway Site, named for the company that built the dam.