If You Get Lost, Follow the Bluff

November 1, 2009

12:00 AM

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Photo by Erik Gerhardt.

Fall Creek Falls

Fall Creek Falls, plummeting 256 feet, is the namesake and centerpiece of the state park located on the Cumberland Plateau.

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R.M. Brooks Store

The R.M. Brooks Store, which once housed the Rugby post office, is run by Linda Brooks Jones and her husband Bill Jones.

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The Angel Falls area

The Angel Falls area of Big South Fork.

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Ben King

Ben King, musician/writer/chainsaw carver/Vietnam vet, is known throughout the Cumberland Plateau region for his wit and his art.

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Photo courtesy Fentress County Chamber of Commerce.

Black Bear

Black bears are among the natural inhabitants of the Cumberland Plateau.

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Photo courtesy Cumberland Tourism Association.

Cumberland Caverns

Cumberland Caverns, discovered in 1810, stretches more than 32 known miles.

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East Fork Stables

East Fork Stables offers scenic equestrian trips.

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Photo by Erik Gerhardt.

Fall Creek Falls

Fall Creek Falls, plummeting 256 feet, is the namesake and centerpiece of the state park located on the Cumberland Plateau.

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The Highland Manor Winery

The Highland Manor Winery in Jamestown has been making wine for more than two decades.

There are mysteries to discover in Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau: icyballs, waterfalls, cowardly pine trees, Mark Twain’s place of conception and a historical independent streak. Escaping the mad pace of I-75, I head for the mountains – rugged, rocky tops – while rolling west. My car climbs into Scott County, approaching Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau along Tenn. 63, the tires sensing the change in terrain.

I find a great museum here in Huntsville, with exhibits designed by students from the local high school. The most amusing tale I find is the story of Scott County itself. In 1861, during the Civil War, this county left Tennessee – when Tennessee joined the Confederacy – and formed the “Independent State of Scott.”

Such action seems fitting.

I am soon to discover there is an independent streak running across Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau, an upland shelf that includes the towns of Huntsville, Jamestown, Rugby, Allardt and Pall Mall. Arriving late on a Sunday, none of these places means anything to me. But I will come to know them – and their people – as I explore a salubrious landscape that I will never forget.

THE GREAT NATURALIST JOHN MUIR walked across this land in 1867 and wrote of its flora and fauna. A few years later, the plateau attracted Thomas Hughes, a British author who dreamed in the 1880s that the remote area that became Rugby could be a utopian society – with people helping each other, living cooperatively, class-free.

More than a century later, Rugby has remained rural and, largely, remote. The original colony’s heyday faded after a few years – and Rugby deteriorated so much that, by the 1960s, cattle roamed through handsome 19th-century homes. Today, many of the old houses have since been renovated, and residents, such as artist Butch Hodgkins, have even painstakingly built replicas to look like yesteryear’s relics.

About 80 people currently live in Rugby, says historian Barbara Stagg. “The peak population was probably no more than about 250 or 300.”

This whole story – and more – can be found in Stagg’s pictorial history book, “Historic Rugby.”

“The Cumberland Plateau,” Cheryl DeVel, a historic interpreter at Rugby, describes as “the spur that comes down from Virginia and comes out down to Chattanooga, so it parallels the Smokies.”

Reaching north into Kentucky, the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area takes in the plateau and stretches south to Rugby, lying along the Morgan-Fentress county border. Here, DeVel says, the wild beauty of the mountains first attracted Rugby’s original settlers.

“When they came here and saw this area, they fell in love with it. It’s gorgeous. And it’s still gorgeous.”

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF RUGBY, the Grey Gables Bed and Breakfast becomes my home away from home for a couple of days. The gracious innkeeper, Linda Brooks Jones, serves such delights as sausage gravy and scrambled eggs with hot pepper cheese; Jones has also authored a pair of cookbooks.

Comfortable and spacious, the Grey Gables has seen its share of famous faces, including President Jimmy Carter, who passed through in 1997 and spent the night, along with his wife and a few members of the Secret Service.

Besides this B&B, Jones and her husband Bill also operate the R.M. Brooks Store, an odds-and-ends shop that once housed the old Rugby post office. Inside, folks can play a guessing game with one of Bill Jones’s most odd collectibles – a metal contraption called an “icyball.” It was used before the advent of refrigeration, with a flame, to make ice.

Bill Jones didn’t actually know what the heavy thing was until an elderly man dropped in the store one day.

“He said, ‘When I was a little pup, we were the first family in Fentress County to have an icyball,” Jones remembers, “‘and people would get in a horse-and-buggy on a Sunday afternoon and drive 20 miles, round-trip, to get one ice cube in their lemonade – and to see it.’”

These days, whoever comes into the R.M. Brooks Store and correctly identifies the “Mystery Antique” wins a prize. I, for one, did not get all the facts right, but I guessed enough to gain a reward: some tasty horehound candy.

ROLLING INTO ALLARDT, just inside Fentress County, I meet Ben King, a gray-haired fellow wearing a fuzzy beard, blue jeans and a flannel shirt. King takes me on a tour of the Cumberland Plateau in his pickup truck.

“People here call it the ‘play-toe,’” King says. “It appears flat. But you can go a quarter of a mile, and you’ll run into a canyon or a bluff line. If you ever get lost in the woods, follow that bluff line, and it’ll bring you back out.”

On the outskirts of Allardt, an 1870s German settlement named for businessman M. H. Allardt, King and I hike about a mile to see Northup Falls, a 60-foot drop inside the Colditz Cove State Natural Area.

“Oh, people are just fascinated by waterfalls,” King says. “Over there by the edge of the falls, you cling to a coward of a pine tree and look right over. And it gives you a little butterfly thrill.”

A coward of a pine tree?

“Umm,” King says. “It threatens to turn loose at any moment, you know.”

King, himself, must be no coward. He’s a veteran of both the Vietnam War and the Nashville country music scene. The bass guitar player has also written books, including “Think About It! 30 Short Stories by Ben King.”

Continually, King chews on a Backwoods cigar. He never smokes it, just chews on it. King, as well, has a reputation. From Pall Mall to Rugby to Jamestown, I discover that practically everyone knows King – either for his wit or his skill as a chainsaw carver.

IN JAMESTOWN, THE COURTHOUSE TOWN of Fentress County, I have lunch at Gina’s Dairy Mart, a tiny diner with a couple of huge Coca-Cola signs out front. Along the way, I also learn that Jamestown is the headquarters for a rather odd East Coast phenomenon called the “World’s Longest Yard Sale,” in which folks from up and down U.S. Highway 127 sell everything under the sun for four days in August.

Jamestown stakes another claim. This is not where the famous fiction writer Samuel “Mark Twain” Clemens was born. But it is, some say with a blush, where he was conceived: His parents lived at Jamestown in the spring of 1835; Clemens was born the following November (in Missouri).

All of this I heard, quite like gossip, even before I visited the picturesque “Mark Twain Spring” at the center of Jamestown. Later, still, I found another honored son from this part of the plateau, and the story of a military figure who was once a household name.

Nearly a century ago, as a member of the U.S. Army, Sgt. Alvin C. York, captured 132 men during World War I and became an American hero. Good-natured York, ultimately, returned to his roots as a farmer at Pall Mall, a Tennessee town a few miles north of Jamestown. Here, near the Kentucky border, he established educational opportunities for local children in the mountains. York died in 1964.

I visit York’s grave at the Wolf River Cemetery. I also meet York’s 69-year-old nephew, Cletis York, who gives me a tour of his famous uncle’s home, now preserved as a state park.

“He was just a common old country boy. He loved to farm and hunt,” Cletis York says. “What makes him probably more famous is what he did after the war – what he did for the people of the area.”

RISING EARLY ON TUESDAY, I roll north to the East Rim Overlook to view a rocky gorge at the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, a sanctuary for deer, wild boar and the occasional elk.

“We’re not a windshield park,” ranger Howard Duncan tells me. “You’re not going to see Big South Fork from your vehicle. The best parts of the park take some effort to get to.”

Sprawling across two states and about 100,000 acres, Big South Fork boasts rock overhangs, rock houses and chimney rocks. Duncan and I climb through the tunnel of Echo Rock, named because it echoes the sound of a large set of rapids in the river.

“Not only do you hear that rapid as you’re coming through it,” Duncan says, “but you have that amplified effect of the echo coming back. So it makes it sound more intense than it really is.”

For a few minutes, we stop at the Lora Blevins Cabin, built in the 1920s, with a corncrib and a log barn. It’s one of a handful of homesteads protected by the park.

“The Big South Fork is an area that was used hard over the years,” Duncan says. “This was not a pristine wilderness. This was land that had been logged and farmed and timbered and coal-mined.”

Today, it’s become a playground for hikers, cyclists and also horseback riders. The Cumberland Plateau, being naturally capped in sandstone, makes a good place to ride a horse, because its sandy soil is easy on a horse’s foot.

“Horseback riders have realized that the South Fork is just about perfect horse-riding country,” Duncan says. “It has that good combination of easy trails and some challenging trails.”

I SWITCH TIME ZONES roaming back into Jamestown, from Eastern to Central – or “slow time,” as some locals say. Strangely, the result means I get an extra hour for lunch at the Hangin’ Hog BBQ, where the manager, Sarah Davis, drops off a plate of homemade potato chips just as soon as I find a booth.

After lunch, I discover the pottery of Annie Keith, who sells her art on consignment at the Big South Fork Discovery Center, just off Tenn. 127. I also stop to see Tim Richardson, the winemaker at Highland Manor Winery, a Jamestown operation that produces about 6,000 cases a year. Established in 1980, it is the oldest winery in Tennessee.

All over Rugby and Jamestown I am told: Do not miss the Mennonites. So, after sliding down a maze of backroads and crisscrossing the county lines of Putnam, Fentress and Overton, I finally find Muddy Pond, the home of a Mennonite community that operates a general store. Inside, the staff, including Susan Vencil, wears long, flowing dresses.

Vencil, who moved to the Cumberland Plateau in 1993, seemed quite content to call this area home.

Ben King, like others, shares the same sentiment.

“I talk about this place being the land that time forgot,” King says, grinning. “If you don’t have to scrounge for a living, it’s a wonderful place to live.”