Cumberland Mountains

The Cumberland Mountains are where the plateau stops being flat. In Campbell, Scott, Anderson, Morgan and Claiborne counties the sandstone tableland breaks up into steep ridges with coal in them. Cross Mountain, whose summit goes by the Flag Pole, stands 3,534 feet on the Anderson and Campbell line, the highest mountain in Tennessee outside the Blue Ridge. On the Kentucky line the range reaches Cumberland Gap, which Thomas Walker named in 1750 for the Duke of Cumberland and Daniel Boone took about thirty men through in 1775.

Coal made the history here, and most of it is hard. The state leased its prisoners to the coal company, and in 1891 the miners at Briceville turned on the system. On July 14 about three hundred of them surrounded the stockade, took forty prisoners and their guards, marched them five miles to Coal Creek, now Lake City, and shipped them to Knoxville. They did it again in July, and on October 31 they freed the prisoners into the hills and burned the stockade. Raids followed at Oliver Springs that November and in the Grundy County mines the next summer, and in 1893 the legislature voted to end the leases when they ran out in 1896. On December 9, 1911, a roof fall in the Cross Mountain Mine, a mile west of Briceville, let out methane that a miner’s open lamp set off. Eighty-four men died, and five of the 89 inside came out alive. Two of the dead, Alonzo Wood and Eugene Ault, wrote farewells to their families on the barricade they had built.

Frozen Head is the part that got away. In 1893 the state bought more than eleven thousand acres around the mountain for Brushy Mountain prison, whose inmates mined coal there until 1966. Most of the land later became a state forest where few trees were ever cut, and the park around the 3,324-foot summit, known for its wildflowers, is by the Tennessee Encyclopedia’s account the last large tract of the Cumberland Mountains safe from surface mining.