Frozen Head

A prison at the foot

The state of Tennessee bought this mountain land in 1893 for a prison. Brushy Mountain State Prison went up at the foot of the range, and its inmates mined coal there until 1966, by Carroll Van West’s account in the Tennessee Encyclopedia. The forest above was set aside as Morgan County State Forest and nominally managed for hardwood timber, though Van West says few trees were ever cut. That light hand is the reason to come. The state’s natural-areas office calls Frozen Head one of the least disturbed tracts left in Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains, a big unbroken forest with a good share of mature timber, and a good example of what the country looked like before settlement.

Which mountains

Frozen Head belongs to the Cumberland Mountains, the coal-bearing, deeply cut northeastern part of the Cumberland Plateau. That’s where the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation puts it, and the 1998 federal ecoregion map of Tennessee captions a photograph of Frozen Head the same way. The Tennessee Encyclopedia agrees. Frozen Head and its neighbor Big Fodderstack also get filed under the Crab Orchard Mountains, but the only source for that is an uncited Wikipedia article. Counting Frozen Head, fourteen peaks in the natural area top 3,000 feet. The name, the state says, comes from how often those tops wear snow or ice in winter.

The hollows

The deep hollows carry mixed mesophytic forest, the plateau’s version of the cove hardwoods: hemlock, white pine, tuliptree, sugar and red maple, yellowwood, yellow birch, beech, basswood, magnolia and black cherry among them, by the state’s list. Higher on the slopes the forest turns to white oak with tuliptree, and on the dry ridgetops scarlet oak, chestnut oak and shortleaf pine take over. Cerulean warblers nest here. The 1998 ecoregion map counts 120 species of spring wildflowers in the natural area, and the state says the show rivals the Smokies.

Going

There are nearly 60 miles of trail, many of them built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, and the state park lies on the low ground below 1,600 feet. On the summit, the park’s lookout tower gives a full circle over the Cumberland Mountains and Flat Fork Valley. Come in spring for the wildflowers. Come in winter and you’ll see where the name comes from.