24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Norris, TN

Norris is a city in Anderson County, Tennessee, in the Knoxville metropolitan area, built as a model planned community by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933 to house workers building Norris Dam on the Clinch River.

The city is named in honor of George W. Norris, a senator from Nebraska who was a long-term supporter of the TVA.

TVA chairman Arthur Morgan envisioned Norris as a model of cooperative, egalitarian living, and TVA staff designed the city loosely on the English garden city movement of the 1890s, with winding roads following the contours of the terrain, houses that did not always face the street, a central common green, and a belt of rural land reserved around the town.

Norris represents the first use of greenbelt design principles in a self-contained town in the United States; its houses, built from local wood and stone in twelve basic designs, each with a porch and fireplace, were among the first all-electric homes.

Norris was the first town in Tennessee to have a complete system of dial telephones, and the Norris Creamery was the first milk-producing plant in the world to be powered solely by electricity.

During the 1930s, TVA officials excluded Black families from Norris, effectively making it a sundown town, a policy the NAACP protested repeatedly in 1934, 1935, and 1938.

In 1948 the U.S. Congress directed that the city be sold at public auction; it was purchased for $2.1 million by a Philadelphia investment group headed by Henry D. Epstein, which sold individual homes to their residents, and Norris was officially incorporated in 1949.

In 1975 the town, including 340 buildings and an area of about 4,000 acres, was added to the National Register of Historic Places as an historic district, designated the Norris District.

The 2020 census counted 1,599 people in Norris, up from 1,491 in the 2010 census.

The 2020 census counted 704 households and 330 families in Norris, with 768 housing units, of which 8.3 percent were vacant.