C.H. Corn Hydroelectric Plant and Lake Talquin in Tallahassee, Florida

The Jackson Bluff Dam is an earthen dam about 60 feet high on the Ochlockonee River that holds back Lake Talquin, and the Corn hydroelectric station was the City of Tallahassee powerhouse at the dam.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission environmental assessment for the license surrender lists the project works, and a Federal Register notice places the project in Leon, Liberty and Gadsden counties. The City of Tallahassee Utilities called the facility the C. H. Corn Hydroelectric Station in its 2019 Ten-Year Site Plan, a filing with the Florida Public Service Commission notes, while the federal record names it the Jackson Bluff Hydroelectric Project, No. 2891.

Source: FERC environmental assessment, Project No. 2891-017. Staff noted there that the dam and powerhouse near Tallahassee are over 50 years old and so are eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

The dam was built in 1927 and the powerhouse in 1929 by private power companies, and the City of Tallahassee took over the project under a new federal license on July 14, 1982.

The FERC assessment traces the chain. The original Jackson Bluff Project, then No. 682, was licensed to the West Florida Power Corporation on February 23, 1927, for 50 years; the dam was built in 1927 and the powerhouse followed in 1929. A December 27, 1935 order moved the project to the Florida Power Corporation, which surrendered that license on June 26, 1970, and donated approximately 20,000 acres of land, as well as the dam and powerhouse, to the State of Florida for recreation and other public uses at Lake Talquin. The City of Tallahassee received the new license in 1982, and the existing units were installed in 1986.

Florida State Parks tells the same story from the state side. Its Lake Talquin State Park history says the Ochlockonee River was impounded at Jackson Bluff in 1927 to produce hydroelectric power, that Florida Power Corp. donated the land for the park in 1970, including the property where the dam sits and most of what is now Lake Talquin State Forest, and that the Florida Park Service operated the dam for a short time. The park overview states that the State of Florida assumed ownership of the dam and lake in 1970. The lake's name comes from Tallahassee and Quincy.

The plant averaged about 17 GWh a year, less than 1 percent of the energy Tallahassee needed, and the city judged that its value did not justify its cost.

The City of Tallahassee Utilities explained the decision in a 2019 Ten-Year Site Plan data response to the Florida PSC. Because the units ran on the river's flow, dependent on rainfall, reservoir and downstream conditions, the city counted them as energy only, not as dependable capacity for planning, while the cost of staffing, operating and maintaining the plant and the transmission to deliver its power was considerable. The primary motive for the surrender, the city wrote, was to reduce cost and risk.

The formal steps are in the federal record. A Federal Register notice of July 3, 2017 shows the City of Tallahassee filed on June 5, 2017 to surrender the license, citing a lower cost of competing renewable resources and the cost of obtaining a new license; the license was due to expire on June 30, 2022. A December 18, 2018 notice announced the FERC staff assessment, which described decommissioning the generating capability both electrically and hydraulically, with no changes to the dam or buildings, and concluded the surrender would not significantly affect the environment. The city's 2019 plan, quoted in the PSC filing, reported that all decommissioning was complete and that FERC accepted the surrender on March 13, 2019.

For scale, the city lists its gas-fired Arvah B. Hopkins plant on Geddie Road, 7 miles west of Tallahassee, at up to 504 megawatts. The Sam O. Purdom page gives two figures for that Wakulla County plant, 242 MW in its summary and up to 301 megawatts in its text, and does not reconcile them.

Since the surrender, water leaves Lake Talquin through the spillway gates rather than the powerhouse, and management of the dam falls to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

The 2017 Jackson Bluff surrender notice states that no ground disturbance was planned, that project features would stay in place, and that, to maintain lake levels, releases would go through the spillway gates and not through the powerhouse. The FERC assessment adds that upon surrender, management of the dam and its facilities would fall to the Florida DEP.

Under the license the project ran in an instantaneous run-of-river mode, with the reservoir held within one foot of its normal pool of 68.5 feet above mean sea level, the same assessment records. Lake Talquin is part of Lake Talquin State Park and is managed by the Florida DEP mainly for public recreation, and the operating rule matched a sublease the city first signed with the Florida Department of Natural Resources in 1982. The state built a buffer zone around the lake from 68.5 to 70.0 feet, which also marks the project boundary.

Lake Talquin is a deep, stump-filled reservoir in Leon and Gadsden counties that the FWC calls nationally known for black crappie.

The FWC fishing site page gives Lake Talquin an average depth of 15 feet and a maximum of 40, with very little vegetation but lots of tree stumps and logs, and says the best black crappie (speckled perch) fishing is January through April. All crappie under 10 inches in total length must be released immediately. On the day of this check, the page counted 71 Lunker Club and 28 Trophy Club bass submitted from the lake through the TrophyCatch program.

Official figures for the lake's size differ. The FWC calls it an 8,800 acre reservoir, the FERC assessment gives about 10,200 acres and about 14.5 miles at normal pool, and the Florida State Parks history describes a 14.5-mile-long, 12,000-acre lake. The FERC assessment calls water quality generally good but notes that Lake Talquin is listed as impaired for dissolved oxygen and nutrients (Florida DEP, 2016) and for chlorophyll-a (Leon County, 2018).

The lake sits inside a large basin. The Northwest Florida Water Management District puts the Ochlockonee River and Bay watershed at approximately 2,476 square miles, from the red hills of southern Georgia through the Big Bend, taking in lakes Jackson and Iamonia north of Tallahassee as well as the Lake Talquin reservoir, and its SWIM plan supersedes the Lake Jackson Management Plan last approved in 1997.

Most of the Lake Talquin shoreline is state land, chiefly Lake Talquin State Forest and Lake Talquin State Park.

The FDACS forest page lists Lake Talquin State Forest at 20,577 acres in Gadsden, Leon and Liberty counties, managed by the Florida Forest Service since 1977; the FERC assessment gave 19,347 acres. FDACS notes that much of the timber was removed under a long-term contract in the mid-1970s, before state ownership, and that the Ochlockonee River and Lake Talquin give the forest two Outstanding Florida Waters. The forest office is at 865 Geddie Road, Tallahassee, (850) 681-5953; day use runs sunrise to sunset, with a $2 day pass or a $45 annual pass for all state forests. Its tracts and recreation areas include Bear Creek, Bloxham, Fort Braden, High Bluff and Lines. The state park itself covers 526 acres, including deep ravine systems with seepage streams.

Below the dam, federal agencies weighed in on the surrender. The FERC assessment records that the Department of the Interior named the threatened Gulf sturgeon and four freshwater mussels, the purple bankclimber, shinyrayed pocketbook, Ochlockonee moccasinshell and oval pigtoe, as species that project operation could affect, with particular concern for the only remaining documented population of the Ochlockonee moccasinshell, found downstream of the dam. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in June 2018 that its concerns had been addressed, and FERC staff concluded the surrender would have no effect on the listed species.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the FERC environmental assessment, both Federal Register notices, the City's 2019 PSC filing, the Hopkins and Purdom pages on talgov.com, and the FWC, FDACS, Florida State Parks and Northwest Florida Water Management District pages for Lake Talquin.