Lookout Valley

Lookout Valley is the long trough under Lookout Mountain’s west face, with Sand Mountain making the other wall. Georgia’s 1976 survey describes the valley floor as Chickamauga Limestone of Ordovician age, lying at 800 to 1,000 feet, while the mountains on both sides keep caps of Pennsylvanian Rockcastle Sandstone above an escarpment that drops 1,000 to 1,200 feet to it. Trenton, the Dade County seat, sits in the valley.

Dade County spent most of its history shut in by those walls. Until 1939 the only way to drive into it was through Alabama or Tennessee, which is where the old name, the State of Dade, comes from. The story that Dade seceded on its own in 1860 is often told and, by the New Georgia Encyclopedia’s account, a myth. The road from the rest of Georgia came when the state bought the land for Cloudland Canyon State Park in 1939 and built a highway through to US 41. Coal and coke paid the county’s way: the mines opened before the Civil War, reopened in the 1880s on convict labor leased from the state, tapered off in the late 1970s, and had stopped by the late 1980s.

The Tennessee end of the valley saw a battle fought at midnight. In October 1863 Union troops seized Brown’s Ferry to open a supply line to their army besieged in Chattanooga, and John Geary’s division of about 1,500 men was left at Wauhatchie Station to guard the railroad. Confederates attacked them in the dark of October 28 and 29. The Union lost 78 killed, Geary’s son among them, 327 wounded and 15 missing, but the line held and the supplies came through.