Memory Place

It was a whithered, sinewy, very old tree, unusual because it stood naked and defiant long after most trees would have toppled, no more than forty feet high but a good two feet across, trunk and branches intact. A tremendous cedar, I wondered? But what caught my eye were the axe marks about two feet up. I was a hundred yards above the Guild Trail on the very northern nose of Lookout Mountain. Probably two dozen people a day passed nearby on the trail, but virtually no human beings ever come up the steep slope I was on. Who had started to cut down this tree, then thought better of it? How long ago?

This is the conundrum of Lookout Mountain: nearly every inch of soil has been walked upon and often manipulated by men going back over centuries, and discerning the work of neighborhood kids from civil war soldiers is not easy for the casual observer. A half mile from this very spot, archaeologists had argued whether a collection of walls and "rifle pits" were made by the Confederacy or prehistoric Indians (the last word seems to be the Confederacy).

Brady and I had parked at the rear of the upper Ruby Falls lot and started our walk at the Eagles Nest, the old quarry that had been turned from an eyesore into one of the centerpieces of Adolph Och's vision of the Hanging Gardens of Lookout only to fall back into ghostly neglect in modern times. The two concrete eagles, created by Spefano Giuliano in 1931, still stand on the upper corners of the quarry walls (although one of them is completely headless and the other is not much better off); stairs still lead up from Scenic Highway. We poked around what used to be a pool with a fountain in the center of the quarry, examined an old stone wall that probably once held back the soil for the variety of exotic plants that were brought in.



Just to the north were the ruins of a pedestal that once held a bust of Shakespeare, the first (and last, from what I can tell) of a series of statues intended to inspire visitors to this place. There is no pedestal there now, only a careless jumble of rocks. The bard departed this place long ago.

Winding up through the woods we climbed over the Hardy Trail (once of the bed of a railroad up the mountain) and into the woods on the other side. A hundred feet from the trail we found the Old Federal (aka Andrew Jackson) Road, which dates back to 1805 and may have been the first wagon trail through the Cherokee nation. In those days the Tennessee river forced travelers up onto the side of Lookout to get past Moccasin Bend on a relatively flat bench of land between bluffs and rocky slopes above and below. Two hundred years later that once major thoroughfare is just a faint impression through the woods, forgotten and reclaimed by nature. We followed the old path around the nose, over a cleared powerline, and down to the point that it crossed the old railroad bed heading steeply down the mountain.

Not long after pondering the axed tree, I saw what I thought was at least a dozen white-tail deer. It turned out to be just five, but that was enough for me. I had seen deer on the more isolated western slopes but never this far north.

We walked back on the Federal Road until it dumped us back into the Ruby Falls parking lot just a few feet from the truck.

Return to John Wilson Park

Another cold February afternoon found Brady and I back on the slopes of Lookout. We parked at the bottom of the old driveway off Cummings Highway that once led to the Adult Scenic Motel, and walked up the drive to explore some of the old home sites on the hillside sandwiched between the busy modern highway and the much older, now closed Old Wauhatchie Pike just above.

Returning to the truck, we started up the marked trail that winds up to the Wauhatchie Pike Greenway, which we found in bad need of maintenance. At one point the trail was so overgrown that I lost the way. We had walked right by this trail on the Greenway just a couple of weeks before and never seen it, and wouldn't have seen it this time if we hadn't come up it first. Of course, this is just the kind of trail that Brady and I like to hike, feeling our way along as if we are retracing the faded footsteps of history. This would be an easy trail to repair since it is so close to the road; a few hours with the clippers and shovels, some timber for steps and waterbars, and this trail would be a thing of beauty and convenience.

We noted that someone had been bulldozing back the English Ivy at the start of the Greenway to expose two drains--probably a good idea since this area had been flooded last time we visited. There is an old ivy-covered road at this point that climbs diagonally up the northern trestle on the Guild Trail. But my attention was captured by the sight of heavy equipment and piles of gravel up on the old Cravens Road, just to the south. We'd seen a lot of survey stakes up there three weeks ago, and now it looked a major construction project! Since the old Cravens Road up from Wauhatchie Pike was part of the Federal Road, dating back to 1805, I wasn't happy to see it disturbed. (After looking at my map collection last week I realized that if I ever had any doubt about whether this was the Federal (aka Jackson) Road, I was mistaken. At least three different maps showed this was definitely the route: up from Old Wauhatchie, under the northern trestle, then across the slope towards Ruby Falls.)


Up we went, toward an idling truck at the top of the hill. Inside was a friendly fellow who told us he was guarding the equipment for the pipleline company, and all the brouhaha was not construction but simply maintenance on the pipeline. They had laid gravel up the old roadbed to the trestle, and scraped clean some of the adjoining roads, but it appeared no lasting harm would be done. The man was friendly but said he was trying not to fall asleep since other guards had been robbed recently (fortunately, not at this particular location). He made sure we saw the gun on his front seat, but agreed that it was fine with him if we continued looking around the area.



So for the first time in my 22 years of tromping around Lookout I took the paved road to the left and marveled at a long stretch of concrete where something (maybe just a house with a big parking area) had been once. The entire slope of the mountain from here over to the Incline #1 above Chattam had long ago been filled with houses built on terraces. We followed the road along a stone wall visible under the browned kudzu for a hundred yards, trying to imagine it. The first big gully was a whopper, a big swag of ground cleared by the power of kudzu. There were more walls above, but the main road continued down the gully and then back up the other side (connecting with another overgrown road up from a house on Wauhatchie), eventually emerging in another kudzu-filled gully above Church Street and Chattam, the site of Incline #1. If the road Brady and I had explored above the Guild trail near the Incline two weeks ago predated the 1886 railroad bed, then this was almost surely the lower portion of that route. Parts of it still showed old pavement. I stood just below the northern end of the trestle in a spot old photographs from around the 1890s showed a house perched on the hillside; this road would have been its driveway.


Brady and I had gotten separated but both of us were carrying the one essential of modern hiking (the cell phone) so we were soon reunited back at the idling truck of the pipeline guard, who sure enough had fallen asleep. Near the intersection of Cravens and Wauhatchie Pike I noticed what looked like an old millstone that had apparently been used as a yard decoration for a house now long gone. We walked back through John Wilson Park, amazed as always at the juxtaposition of history and nature that seems so inescapable on Lookout Mountain.

More Old Roads and Memories

Brady had already put in a few miles on foot when I picked him up today, so he was pleased when I suggested we do an easy hike up the Guild Trail. It doesn't get any easier than walking up the gentle grade of an old railroad bed.

A half mile up the trail from the parking lot on Ochs Highway in St. Elmo, we came to "the big trestle," 220 feet long and 35 feet high. Lots of history here! Looking down at the gully full of brown kudzu, we could see the Chattam plant below, along with the old Zion church that's being renovated into (this is just my guess) a posh private residence. A raised hump down the gully marked the path of the original Incline railway, opened in 1887. Uphill, on the right side of the gully, was an old road that sucked Brady right off the graveled trail into the woods. According to the trusty trail guide, "this old road, probably constructed by land speculators around the turn of the century, leads about a half mile uphill to connect with Lower Cravens Terrace Road near Scenic Highway." Jeepers, the author sounded pretty sure about that theory. I think I based the idea on the fact that the road seemed to pass over the top of the broad gauge railroad (circa 1886), indicating that it was built later, but who knows at this point. In fact, I began to wonder if the road wasn't there simply to help with the construction and maintenance of the incline.

We followed the road up the hill and indeed it seemed to cross directly over the bed of the old incline, which unlike below was very distinct, a flat broad path bulldozing straight up the hill. I was photographing the incline when Brady yelled that he was on an old road leading off to the north. We followed this path to an intersection with Lower Cravens Terrace, just as the trusty trail guide had described. Maybe that guy did know what he was talking about, after all.

Brady was expressing a desire to walk on pavement, but I knew there were more old roads in the vicinity, so we continued downhill and to the north towards the bottom end of Lower Cravens Terrace. There was an old road, all right, a paved one (underneath the leaves). There's your pavement, I told Brady. Lower Cravens Terrace was in the past a rather "unique" neighborhood, and we found traces of this such as a city street lamp that had been attached to a tree instead of a pole. The road actually led downhill to the last house on Lower Cravens, lined on each side by wood waiting to be split, a hundred yards of wood, a lifetime supply for any wood stove. Just downhill from this area was our friend the Guild trail and the other trestle, not far from the Ruby Falls parking lot. This trestle is also very historical, for according to the trail guide, the remains of a road passing beneath are likely one build by Robert Cravens in the 1850's and the Old Federal Road, which dates back to 1805. We'd seen signs of surveying, mostly just flagging tape, all along the Guild Trail, but here the signs became particularly evident. Apparently the property lines correspond to some of the old roads. I found numerous stakes that read "N Row Cravens" and "S Row Jo Conn Guild" and the like.

The Cravens Road (and, I think, the Federal Road) passed underneath the trestle and then straight downhill a couple of hundred yards to Old Wauhatchie Pike, not far the barrier that marks the southern end of the Greenway. In fact, Brady and I had been down there just a couple of weeks before and had wondered about another old road, completely covered in English Ivy, that comes up to the area of that very same trestle. At one time the lower slope was a complete neighborhood covered with with homes and roads, now all covered with vines and leaves.

It wasn't until I got home and pulled out the trail guide again that I discovered that between the two trestles is another old road crossing the railbed. Says the trailbook: "Uphill, this road leads to the lower end of lower Cravens Terrace Road; below, it leads to Cravens Road off Old Wauhatchie Pike. This may be an alternate route constructed by Robert Cravens up the mountain to his home."

Sounds like Brady and I need to go back another time when we have more energy (but before the poison ivy covers the woods) and take another look!