Crab Orchard Mountains

The Crab Orchard Mountains stand up out of the plateau just west of its eastern escarpment, a detached range that streams have cut into deep gorges. For more than two centuries travelers between East and Middle Tennessee have gone through them at one place, the gap at Crab Orchard, named by early pioneers for its wild crab apples. A road was cut through the gap in the 1780s, the Walton Road stage line between Knoxville and Nashville came after it, and Interstate 40 and US 70 use the same gap now. Robert Burke opened the Crab Orchard Inn there in 1827, and it stayed open into the twentieth century.

The mountains gave their name to a building stone. Crab Orchard stone is a sandstone, mostly rose-colored with brown streaks, quarried along US 70 between Crossville and Crab Orchard. Until the late nineteenth century it went into local chimneys and foundations. Then Cumberland County built a courthouse of it, and in the 1920s it reached Nashville in the buildings of Scarritt College. In 1934 the New Deal began the Cumberland Homesteads south of Crossville, buying 29,000 acres to resettle more than 200 families, who cleared their own tracts and raised houses of the stone. The newer Country Music Hall of Fame building wears it too.

At the range’s eastern edge Fall Creek goes off the caprock at Ozone Falls, 110 feet into a rock-strewn pool, then sinks underground and comes back up a few yards downstream. The falls were McNair Falls, after a gristmill owner, until 1896. The state’s 43-acre natural area there, set aside in 1973, keeps a remnant of old-growth forest under the falls, with hemlock, white pine, magnolia, yellow birch and rosebay rhododendron, and sandstone glades with prairie plants on the bluffs above.