Damming the Ouachita
During the summer of 2015, it was announced that Hugh McDonald would retire after 16 years at the helm of Entergy Arkansas, the state’s largest electricity provider. It also was announced that Rick Riley would succeed McDonald at what once was known as Arkansas Power & Light Co.
Riley obtained his bachelor’s degree from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and later earned a master’s degree from Tulane University in New Orleans. Riley isn’t a native Arkansan, but he loves history. Long before he came to Arkansas, he was fascinated with AP& L’s colorful past. Soon after Riley began work in the state this spring, I received a call from a friend at Entergy. The message was along these lines: “Our new CEO has read some of what you’ve written about AP& L through the years and would like to get together to discuss the history of the company.”
Riley, a gifted conversationalist, brought with him something he had found at the Entergy Arkansas offices. It was a 25- cent token given to AP& L employees for food, drinks and entertainment if they attended an employee day at the company’s new Remmel Dam. Construction on the dam began in May 1923 and was completed in December 1924. The planning had begun years earlier when former riverboat captain Flave Carpenter from Arkadelphia met with AP& L founder Harvey Couch in 1916 to push for the dam, which would provide hydroelectric power.
Couch, already a telephone utility and railroad magnate, founded AP& L in 1913. A year later, he purchased a 22- mile- long electric transmission line that ran from Arkadelphia to Malvern. It only operated at night, but it was the first electric transmission line in the state. He signed an agreement with the owner of Arkansas Land & Lumber Co. to acquire excess sawdust that would be burned to power a pair of 550- kilowatt generators.
Carpenter, a Georgia native, had moved with his family to Arkansas in 1857 at age 6. His father owned a steamboat that ran from Arkadelphia to New Orleans, and Carpenter learned how to pilot the boat. “After the railroad arrived in Arkadelphia in the 1870s, river transportation declined in importance, and Carpenter went to work as a deputy U. S. marshal,” writes Wendy Richter of Ouachita Baptist University. “He rode many miles on horseback through the Ouachita Mountains around Arkadelphia, Malvern and Hot Springs, searching for illegal stills and arresting moonshiners. While doing this work, he encountered several locations along the Ouachita that he believed would make excellent sites for power- producing dams. Carpenter did not have the financial resources to turn those visions into reality, but he convinced Couch of the sites’ suitability for hydroelectric dams.”
Carpenter showed Couch several possible sites for a dam, and Couch commissioned engineering firms to begin drawing plans. Couch had lined up investors from New York but needed a federal license from John Weeks, the U. S. secretary of war. In his hotel lobby at Washington, Couch ran into Col. Harmon Remmel, a friend of Weeks. Remmel, a New York native, had moved with his brother to Newport in 1876 to form Remmel Brothers Lumber Co. He moved to Little Rock in 1886 to serve as the Arkansas general manager of Mutual Life Insurance Co. of New York and in 1913 succeeded Powell Clayton as leader of the Arkansas Republican Party. Remmel set up a meeting between Weeks and Couch. Weeks, in turn, scheduled a licensing hearing for the following week, and Couch was granted his license for the first major dam on the Ouachita River. Couch named it Remmel Dam as a way of thanking the man who set up the Washington meeting. He named the 1,940- acre lake created by the dam Lake Catherine in honor of his daughter. The dam was added to the National Register of Historic Places in September 1992.
Ten miles upstream from Remmel Dam, Couch named his second dam on the river after the old steamboat captain. Carpenter Dam formed 7,200- acre Lake Hamilton, which was named for AP& L counsel C. Hamilton Moses, a Ouachita graduate from Hampton who became general counsel to all of Couch’s business enterprises in 1919. After Couch’s death in 1941, Moses became the AP& L president and served in that position until 1952. Carpenter Dam also was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in September 1992.
Work began on Carpenter Dam in February 1929 and was completed in December 1931. Guy Lancaster writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture: “Gravel was mined from the river bank while wood was taken from the future lake bed area. In the end, more than 156,000 cubic yards of concrete were used for a dam that measures 115 feet high and 1,165 feet long. The construction of Carpenter Dam was powered by Remmel Dam, and a work camp, at one time housing 1,000 people, was established adjacent to the construction site. … The dam was built to provide electricity to the AP& L system during hours of peak energy consumption. As such, it’s credited with helping AP& L survive the Great Depression, the full impact of which Arkansas was experiencing as the dam was being completed.”
Meanwhile, Carpenter, the man who had talked Couch into building the two dams, went on to operate a 1,000- acre farm south of Arkadelphia and a large ranch in Nebraska. He also operated an ice plant and owned a number of downtown buildings in Arkadelphia. He died in August 1933 at his home at age 82, having lived long enough to see the dam named after him become a reality.