Unicoi Mountains

The Unicoi Mountains hold the state line south of the Smokies, between the Little Tennessee and the Hiwassee, and an old guidebook called them the least visited range in North Carolina. Two parallel crests run through Graham County, North Carolina, and Monroe County, Tennessee, with most summits between 4,000 and 5,000 feet and Huckleberry Knob, a grassy bald, the high point at 5,560 feet by the guidebooks and 5,557 by the federal survey. The Cherohala Skyway crosses the crest between Tellico Plains and Robbinsville. The name shares a root with “Unaka,” the old word for the whole chain, which one reading traces to the Cherokee for “white,” for the fog that sits in these mountains.

What the Unicois are known for is what was never cut. In the Little Santeetlah basin on the Carolina side stand some 3,800 acres of old-growth cove forest, tulip poplars more than twenty feet around and more than four hundred years old, with basswood, beech, oak, and hemlock, dedicated in 1936 as the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, eighteen years to the day after the poet was killed in France. It survived by accident and then by argument. A splash-dam scheme to float the logs to the Cheoah was never used, the lumber market collapsed in 1929, and the lumberman who owned the tract, Andrew Gennett, persuaded a Forest Service whose mandate was to buy cutover land to pay $28 an acre for standing timber instead, seven times what cutover ground cost. The surrounding Joyce Kilmer–Slickrock Wilderness, designated in 1975, protects 17,394 acres by the Forest Service’s count, and about 5,900 acres of it, by one old-growth survey, has never been logged. Across the line, the Citico Creek Wilderness holds the entire upper drainage of its creek, about 16,000 acres under the 1984 Tennessee Wilderness Act.

Everything else was cut. Babcock Lumber of Pittsburgh ran a railroad up the Tellico River from 1905, clearcut the upper basin, logged two-thirds of the Slickrock watershed until Calderwood Lake drowned its tracks, and took the Citico between 1922 and 1925, when a fire finished what the saws had left. The present Tellico River Road is the old grade, and Bald River Falls, ninety feet, drops into the river beside it. The forest on these slopes is second growth, oak and pine on the ridges, hardwoods in the coves.

The water runs to the Tennessee, and it has been dammed at every outlet: Cheoah in 1919, Santeetlah in 1928, Calderwood in 1930, all for Alcoa’s aluminum, and Tellico, whose gates closed in November 1979 over Chota and Tanasi, Overhill Cherokee towns, the second of which gave Tennessee its name, and over the site of Fort Loudoun, which the British built in 1756 and lost in 1760. The snail darter that stalled Tellico for six years was found in the Little Tennessee here in 1973; a 2025 study concluded it was never a separate species.

The old road across the range is older than the state. The Unicoi Turnpike, opened in 1819 on a Cherokee trading path with the tribe’s permission and a yearly fee that was never paid, crossed the gap at the Tennessee line where a toll keeper sat until about 1900. In 1838 the Cherokee held at Fort Butler walked it west to Coker Creek on the way to the removal camps. A two-and-a-half-mile stretch has been open for walking since 2005. The Skyway that replaced it began as a 1958 wagon train of Kiwanians, stopped for fifteen years over environmental objections, during which acid from the road cuts killed the trout in the North River, and was finished in 1996 at about a hundred million dollars. In November 2010 the Forest Service dynamited about 150 hemlocks that the woolly adelgid had killed along the Kilmer trail, chainsaws being forbidden in wilderness, thirty pounds of explosive to a tree.