Cumberland Plateau

The Cumberland Plateau is a table, and the drama is in what the water has cut out of it. From the Cumberland Mountains on the Kentucky line to the Georgia corner below Chattanooga, a cap of Pennsylvanian sandstone lies nearly flat at 1,200 to 2,000 feet, and the streams that cross it have sawn down through the cap into the limestone beneath, leaving cliffs, rockhouses, waterfalls, and the deep gorges the plateau calls gulfs. The east face drops in one abrupt escarpment to the Tennessee Valley, about a thousand feet. The west edge is ragged with gulfs. In the middle the Sequatchie Valley, opened along an anticline and five miles wide, splits the southern plateau lengthwise for seventy-five miles in Tennessee alone, by Luther’s reckoning.

The plateau is a physiographic section with its own name in Fenneman’s scheme and its own ecoregion numbers in the government’s. Doghobble’s entry is narrower than either. It takes the plateau within Tennessee and northwest Georgia only, folds in the Cumberland Mountains, which the geographers count separately, and reaches south to Lookout and Pigeon mountains, which the ecologists file as a different unit again. The plateau runs on north into Kentucky and south into Alabama; this atlas stops at the line.

What lives here is sorted by water. The tableland carries dry oak and pine, shortleaf and Virginia pine with post oak and chestnut oak on the thin soils over rock, and Hinkle’s survey found hickory so scarce in the canopy that he argued the plateau should never have been called oak-hickory country at all. The ravines carry the other forest, the mixed mesophytic of hemlock, white pine, basswood, tulip poplar, beech, and yellow birch over rosebay rhododendron, with the plateau’s own small communities on the sandstone cliffs and rockhouses and on the river cobble bars, where Cumberland rosemary, a plant the recovery plan finds on five plateau rivers and nowhere else, needs the floods to clear its ground. Of Tennessee’s 11,756 known caves, a 2023 survey put sixty-one percent on the plateau and its escarpments, and only two percent on the plateau’s top. The caves are in the edges.

The plateau was the last part of Tennessee settled and remains thinly settled. Thomas Walker’s route through Cumberland Gap opened it in 1750, Revolutionary veterans took up land grants on it, and the English novelist Thomas Hughes planted the colony of Rugby on it in 1880, which typhoid thinned the next summer. Coal organized the north end: the convict-lease war at Coal Creek in 1891 and 1892, the Fraterville explosion of May 19, 1902, whose death toll one source prints as 216 while another says only that 184 men and boys went in. The New Deal built its one Tennessee homestead colony at Crossville in 1934, about 251 houses, most of them Crab Orchard stone.

The living issues are the same as the old ones, with the ownership changed. By 2005 conservationists were calling a paper company the biggest landowner on the plateau, and it was converting hardwood to pine plantation until an agreement that year ended the practice and a 2006 sale put 12,500 acres in state hands. The Cumberland Trail, planned at three hundred miles from Cumberland Gap to Signal Point, is the thread the state is using to stitch what it has bought. The Obed and its creeks, protected since 1976, run free in gorges five hundred feet deep.