The South Cumberland

The South Cumberland is the plateau’s southern end in Franklin, Grundy, Marion, and Sequatchie counties, Tennessee, and the name is borrowed from the state park, since no survey ever gave the whole a name of its own. The pieces have names enough. The plateau top around Sewanee, Monteagle, and Tracy City stands just under 2,000 feet; at its western edge the Collins River, Savage Creek, and Big Creek have cut three gorges, each dropping more than 800 feet in five miles and meeting like the toes of a crow’s foot, and that is Savage Gulf. The Fiery Gizzard runs south from Tracy City through a gorge where a hemlock said to be 500 years old stands at the Cave Springs rockhouse, and Foster Falls drops sixty feet at the trail’s end. The Great Stone Door is a crack ten feet wide running from the rim to the gulf floor, a hundred feet deep by the state’s figure and half again that by the park’s friends, used as a road onto the plateau before anyone wrote it down.

The rock explains the water. The cap is Pennsylvanian sandstone, and the two most-used names on this ground are formal rock units: the Sewanee Conglomerate, named by the state geologist in 1893, and the Gizzard Group, whose type section is the gorge the trail walks. Beneath the cap lies limestone, so the plateau’s streams drop over sandstone ledges and then sink. The Collins River goes underground in its own gulf; Lost Creek, below Sewanee, sinks at the Big Sink and comes out of Buggytop Cave as Crow Creek; the Walls of Jericho on the Alabama line are a limestone bowl two hundred feet deep that a creek has carved. Head of the Crow, a 4,258-acre state park announced for Franklin County, takes its name from where the water surfaces.

In the Savage Creek gorge stand some five hundred acres of old-growth mixed mesophytic forest, the stand that Elsie Quarterman described in 1972 and that the Interior Department named a National Natural Landmark in 1971. It survived because of a quarrel. Sam Werner’s lumber company, one of Tennessee’s largest, owned 15,000 acres on this plateau and cut most of it from the 1890s, but by the county historian’s account his railroad could not cross the disputed titles that lay between the mill and the gulf. His heirs sold to the state in 1973 and 1974. A 1979 survey counted 680 plant species in about ten square miles of the gulf, close to a third of the state’s native flora.

The towns on top are a strange company. Beersheba Springs, a resort from 1833, was bought in 1854 by John Armfield, the Alexandria slave trader, who built the hotel with enslaved labor and rented cottages to the bishops who were then founding the University of the South. Sewanee, founded by ten Episcopal dioceses and opened in 1868, sits on 13,000 acres given in part by the Sewanee Mining Company, whose successor, the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, leased the state’s convicts and worked them at the Lone Rock mine until 1896, even after free miners burned the stockade in August 1892. The convict dead, perhaps hundreds, lie in a cemetery no one has yet found. Swiss families settled Gruetli in 1869; the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly opened in 1883 on the Chautauqua pattern; and at Summerfield, between Monteagle and Tracy City, the Highlander Folk School trained union organizers from 1932 and civil rights workers from 1953, Rosa Parks among them, until the state padlocked it in 1959 and auctioned the land.

The first tract of the park was some 211 acres, by the marker’s figure, that Tracy City’s businesses bought in 1935 to lure a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. Savage Gulf became Tennessee’s 57th state park in 2022, and the paper companies that, by the county history’s account, converted the plateau’s hardwoods to pine in the decades before have been selling, some of it to the state and some to developers who can close before the state can bid.