Lookout Mountain

Lookout Mountain begins at the Tennessee River above Chattanooga and runs southwest to Gadsden, Alabama, eighty-four miles by the Georgia encyclopedia’s count, three of them in Tennessee, thirty-one in Georgia, fifty in Alabama. The atlas takes the first thirty-four. It is a plateau arm rather than a peak, a trough of sandstone-capped rock held up by what it is made of, and its surface stands near 2,000 feet with rims a few hundred feet higher and escarpments dropping a thousand to twelve hundred feet to the valleys on either side. The high point, in Walker County, Georgia, is 2,389 or 2,393 feet depending on who measured.

Everything in this landscape hangs off one drawing. In 1894 the geologist C. W. Hayes mapped Lookout as a syncline, a downfold of the rock, whose axis splits at the head of Johnson’s Crook: the western limb runs on as Lookout, the eastern becomes Pigeon Mountain, and the fork between them is McLemore Cove, a fifteen-mile triangle of farms on dolomite that has been worked since the 1820s. Pigeon Mountain is a spur of Lookout in Hayes’s words, ten miles long, and it is mostly state wildlife land now, 20,657 acres of the Crockford–Pigeon Mountain WMA. Lookout Valley, on the west, is the opposite fold, an upwarp eroded down to its limestone core, two miles wide with Trenton in it. Across the valley rises Sand Mountain, a broader and flatter plateau, nearly all Alabama; its high surface, at what the Alabama encyclopedia calls Fox Mountain, stands at 1,960 feet, and apart from a corner of Dade County and its Tennessee tip at Raccoon Mountain it lies outside this atlas.

The limestone under the sandstone is full of holes. Ellison’s Cave in Pigeon Mountain goes down 1,063 feet and runs more than twelve miles, and its Fantastic Pit, a single free drop of 586 feet, is the deepest or second-deepest in the lower forty-eight depending on the list consulted. Pettyjohn’s Cave, on the same mountain, runs some six miles by the published survey figure. Rocktown, on Pigeon’s crest, is a field of sandstone boulders thirty and forty feet high that have crept off the shales beneath them, and Rock City on Lookout is the same process with a gift shop. One salamander, Plethodon petraeus, lives on the east slope of Pigeon Mountain, in the rock crevices and cave mouths of a strip some seventeen kilometers long, and nowhere else on earth. A marsh on the mountaintop holds pollen that a 1975 core dated to 19,500 years ago, when, as the palynologist read it, the summit stood bare.

The mountain’s modern history is a history of selling the view. The War Department bought the point in 1898, by the Tennessee encyclopedia’s date, for the military park that commemorates the November 1863 fight in the fog. The standard histories credit Quartermaster General Meigs with naming it the Battle Above the Clouds and have Grant, in his memoirs, calling it all poetry. The Incline Railway opened in 1895 at a grade of 72.7 percent. Garnet Carter patented miniature golf in 1927 and his wife Frieda opened Rock City in 1932; by 1969 a sign painter hired for the purpose had put “See Rock City” on more than nine hundred barn roofs in nineteen states, by the Tennessean’s count. Leo Lambert found Ruby Falls in 1928 while drilling an elevator shaft and named it for his wife. The castle of a hotel that opened in June 1928, sixteen months before the crash, is Covenant College now.

Below the brow the history is harder. Joseph E. Brown, the wartime governor, worked leased convicts in his Dade Coal Company mines at Cole City from 1874 until his death in 1894, and a legislative committee, under him or the man he sold to, found the men being starved. Dade County had no road to the rest of Georgia until 1939, when the state bought the land for Cloudland Canyon and built one, and the county’s famous secession of 1860, celebrated with a presidential telegram on its “return” in 1945, never happened.