The Great Valley

The Great Valley is the low country between the mountains. From the Coosa at Rome, Georgia, it runs northeast through Chattanooga to Knoxville, a belt of limestone, dolomite, and shale folded and faulted into long parallel ridges and valleys, with the Blue Ridge standing on its eastern edge along a fault-line escarpment and the Cumberland Plateau rising about 750 feet above it on the west. The floor stands at 700 to 800 feet in Georgia and near a thousand around Knoxville. Georgia’s 1976 physiographic map names a Great Valley District and gives it this escarpment as a boundary; the government’s ecologists call the whole belt the Great Valley of East Tennessee; the atlas uses one name for both, which no single survey does.

This is the only part of the territory where the forest grows on limestone at low elevation over a wide area, and that is what makes it strange. The springs are big: most of Georgia’s large springs issue in this province or on Pine Mountain. The ground opens into caves, among them Craighead Caverns at Sweetwater, where, by the cave’s own history, a thirteen-year-old found an underground lake in 1905 and cave guides found the bones of an ice-age jaguar in 1939. Near Cave Spring, in Floyd County, two dozen openings in the woods, most of them smaller than a couple of acres, hold prairie on clay that cracks like pavement in summer, with Midwestern plants a long way from home and a whorled sunflower that was thought extinct for a century until, as the Atlanta paper told it, a Rome botanist found it there in 1994. On Lavender Mountain above Rome stands one of the last longleaf pine stands in the Ridge and Valley, near what is usually given as the species’ northern limit, and three miles away Marshall Forest, Georgia’s first National Natural Landmark, keeps something under a hundred acres of old growth inside the city. The geologists who mapped this valley in the 1890s noted as a matter of course that everyone burned the woods every autumn.

The water has been the valley’s wealth and its loss. The Conasauga comes down out of the Cohuttas with somewhere between seventy-five and ninety fish species, depending on who counts, and runs past Dalton, where the carpet industry draws up to a third of its summer flow and has returned it with perfluorinated chemicals. The Mobile basin that the Coosa feeds once held more than a hundred snail species found nowhere else; by the Fish and Wildlife Service’s 1998 reckoning, of fifteen rocksnails known from the Coosa one survives, after ten dams in fifty-two years. On the Tennessee side, Chickamauga Dam closed its gates in January 1940 over 61,350 acres and, by TVA’s own count, 903 families.

The valley was the capital of the Cherokee Nation. New Echota, laid out at the head of the Oostanaula in 1825, printed the Cherokee Phoenix; the Vann House at Spring Place was the showplace of the nation; the council met at Red Clay, just over the Tennessee line, after Georgia outlawed its meetings. The treaty that ceded everything was signed at New Echota in December 1835 by a minority, and in June 1838 the people were held in camps across twelve miles of the Hiwassee valley below Charleston and sent west from Ross’s Landing, the ferry that became Chattanooga. Before the Cherokee, the Mississippian town at Etowah raised a mound sixty-three feet high, and the paramount chiefdom of Coosa that de Soto walked through in 1540 had its capital on the Coosawattee.

The rest followed the rail line. The Western and Atlantic reached Chattanooga in 1850; Andrews’s raiders stole the General along it in 1862; a fifteen-year-old’s tufted bedspread in Dalton in 1895 became, by 1997, an eight-billion-dollar carpet industry. In Dayton a schoolteacher was tried in July 1925 for teaching evolution, and the lawyer who prosecuted him died there five days after the verdict.