Sequatchie River

Out of the ground

The Sequatchie starts as a spring. Water wells up into a blue-green pool under the limestone wall of the plateau at the Head of Sequatchie, beside the mouth of Devilstep Hollow Cave in Cumberland County, and leaves as a river. Most of it fell first on Grassy Cove, the closed basin a few miles to the northeast, where Grassy Cove Creek drops into Mill Cave and goes under Brady Mountain. People in the cove had long said the water came out at Devilstep. By the Crossville Chronicle’s account nobody tested it until 1962, when engineers from the Geological Survey and the TVA put dye and colored chips into Mill Cave and expected to see them on the far side of the mountain in about a day. They took six. Nicholas Crawford’s dye traces for the state Division of Geology, published in 1989, are the work the reference books cite.

The cave mouth is about 125 feet across. Inside are mud glyphs, petroglyphs and pictographs, twenty-two images by the count of a study funded by the National Geographic Society, among them woodpeckers, fish and a falcon-man figure. Estimates of their age run from about the year 1300 to more than a thousand years old. The cave is closed to visitors, for the art and for the bats. Adam Sherrill, a Revolutionary War veteran, settled at the spring in the 1790s. In 2007 the land conservancy now called TennGreen bought the property, and the state runs it as part of Justin P. Wilson Cumberland Trail State Park.

Down the valley

From the spring the river runs southwest down the middle of the valley for its whole Tennessee length. It enters Bledsoe County near the head of the valley, and Pikeville, the county seat, is the first town of any size. US 127 keeps it company from Pikeville to Dunlap and Tennessee 28 from Dunlap to Jasper. Below Whitwell the Little Sequatchie comes in from the plateau to the west at the community of Sequatchie. The main river reaches the Tennessee just south of the Interstate 24 bridge, on Guntersville Lake a short way below Nickajack Dam, at about 597 feet. The National Map gives it 116 miles. Federal hydrography data, quoted in the same Wikipedia article, give 182, and nobody explains the difference.

The watershed covers about 601 square miles, a third of it in Marion County and most of the rest in Bledsoe and Sequatchie. It is mostly woods. The state’s 2008 land-cover figures put deciduous forest at 55 percent and pasture and hay at 18, with row crops at three. The woods are on the plateau and Walden Ridge to either side, and the pasture is on the valley floor, where the federal ecoregion survey lists hay, soybeans, small grain, corn and tobacco. At the gauge near Whitwell the river drains 402 square miles and averaged 745 cubic feet a second between 1920 and 1983. It has run as low as 16, in September 1925, and as high as 32,500, in March 1973.

Sherpa Guides counts about sixty floatable miles between College Station and the US 64 bridge, all Class I, through farms and woodland, and names smallmouth bass, rock bass and rainbow trout as the fish people go for.

Coal and coke

For a while the valley’s money came off the ridges. A railroad reached Sequatchie County in 1888, and by the turn of the century coal companies were mining at scale, by the Tennessee Encyclopedia’s account. At Dunlap, coal dug on top of Fredonia Mountain came down an incline to five batteries of beehive ovens, 268 in all, built between 1902 and 1916, where it was baked into coke for iron furnaces. The Chattanooga Iron and Coal Corporation held 16,000 acres around Dunlap and employed 350 men. Southern States Iron and Coal bought the works in 1919 and closed them in 1922, when coal was overproduced. Sherpa Guides gives 1927 for the end. The ovens have been on the National Register since 1985, and a trail follows the incline. Railroad tracks once ran beside the river down from the Dunlap area.

Mining went on long after the ovens went cold. On December 8, 1981, a methane explosion in the No. 21 Mine near Whitwell killed thirteen men. Federal investigators found that a miner’s cigarette lighter set it off and blamed the operator for poor ventilation and for leaving men in gassy ground.

What lives in it

The state’s 2008 watershed plan counts 46 rare plants and animals in the basin, with five rare fishes, four snails and two mussels among them, and lists 130.8 stream miles as impaired, for silt and E. coli. It names the snail darter among the watershed’s listed species. That is the fish whose protection was argued to the Supreme Court over Tellico Dam, and by Wikipedia’s account, citing Etnier and Starnes, a population turned up in the lower Sequatchie in Marion County in 1980. The snail darter came off the federal list in November 2022.

Spring-fed streams in the lower valley in Marion County hold rarer things. The state says the royal snail, federally endangered, is known from two sites in the world, both in that county. The Sequatchie caddisfly was described from one of those springs and has been reported from only three others nearby.