Clinch Mountain

Clinch Mountain is one ridge, about 150 miles of it, and almost nothing gets through. It starts at Kitts Point, where Knox, Union and Grainger counties meet near Blaine, Tennessee, and runs northeast into Virginia to end at Garden Mountain by Burke’s Garden. The Clinch River basin lies on its north side and the Holston’s on its south.

There is one true gap in the whole length. Moccasin Gap, between Weber City and Gate City in Virginia, carries the railroad and US 23 today, and it carried the Wilderness Road before that: from the Long Island of the Holston, the road went north through Moccasin Gap on its way to Cumberland Gap. Everywhere else the roads go over the top. At Bean Gap, US 25E climbs between Tazewell and Bean Station, and when the highway was rebuilt as four lanes in the 1980s the crossing was cut 200 feet lower.

The mountain carries further in music than on the map. The Carter Family recorded “My Clinch Mountain Home” in 1928, and the fiddle tune “Clinch Mountain Backstep” is credited to Ralph Stanley. On the Grainger County side, Tate Springs drew visitors to its mineral water in the late nineteenth century and is mostly gone now. A seventy-five-mile ridgeline trail, the Trail of the Lonesome Pine, was planned along the crest and dropped in 1981 after Grainger County landowners objected.