Before Center Hill Lake became one of Middle Tennessee’s best-known destinations for fishing and recreation, the creeks and rivers of DeKalb County were already drawing anglers to the water.
These photographs preserve a glimpse of Pine Creek Falls near Smithville, Tennessee, during the early 1940s. Tennessee Department of Conservation records identify photographs of Pine Creek Falls taken in April 1941, including an aerial view of the falls and images documenting fishing in the area.
The timing makes the photographs particularly interesting. They were taken less than a year before construction began on Center Hill Dam in March 1942. The project would eventually reshape recreation throughout the region, with the reservoir beginning to fill later in the decade.
But Pine Creek already had a fishing tradition of its own. State conservation records from March 1946 specifically document trout fishing in Pine Creek near Smithville, including photographs of angler James Bailey fishing the creek.
The photographs show a landscape that feels both familiar and distant: fishermen standing beneath the falls, small boats on quiet water, exposed rock ledges and the heavily wooded hills surrounding Pine Creek. More than eighty years later, they offer a record of how people were using and enjoying the waters around Smithville before the modern Center Hill Lake era had fully begun.
