Great Stone Door

The door

On the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau three streams, Big Creek, the Collins River and Savage Creek, have cut gorges that each fall more than 800 feet in a little over five miles. The state natural-area page likens the pattern to a crow’s foot. The Stone Door sits on the rim of the Big Creek gorge, a crack about ten feet wide that runs from the top of the escarpment down into the gulf. The state gives its depth as 100 feet. The Friends of South Cumberland give 150, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia describes a crevice 150 feet long, so the measurement waits for someone with a tape.

The rim is sandstone. The plateau’s cap is Pennsylvanian conglomerate and sandstone over older Mississippian limestone, and on the escarpment below it the federal ecoregion map describes gorge talus of great broken sandstone blocks.

A road

The state says the crack was once a passageway used by Indians. The Highroad guidebook goes further and names it as the place where the Chickamauga Trace, a path from north Georgia to Kentucky, climbed onto the plateau. That is one guidebook’s claim, unconfirmed elsewhere. Today the way in is from Beersheba Springs, by Stone Door Road off Highway 56.

State land

The Stone Door was in state hands four years before the natural area around it was designated. On June 26, 1969, the state bought about 700 acres there from the J. W. Huber Corporation. That October, Herman Baggenstoss and Mack Prichard led some thirty hikers down into the gulf, and they came out around four in the morning. The Interior Department approved Savage Gulf as a National Natural Landmark in June 1971, the state natural area was designated in 1973, and in September 2022 Savage Gulf became Tennessee’s 57th state park. In 2015 the Friends of South Cumberland finished an eight-year effort to buy a forty-acre tract across Big Creek gulf from the Stone Door.