8. Davy Crockett Birthplace State Park
The frontier hero wasn’t “born on a mountaintop in Tennessee,” as the song would have it, but at no less beautiful a spot, where Limestone Creek meets the Nolichucky River. Today’s park features a replica of the log cabin where Davy Crockett — bear hunter, congressman, and Alamo martyr — first saw daylight in 1786. In honoring Crockett, the little cabin serves also as a tribute to the hardiness and flint of that first generation of settlers born west of the Appalachians.
9. Jonesborough
Jonesborough looks like the town that time forgot — in fact, it was once the capital of a state all but forgotten by history. In 1784, when North Carolina gave the federal government all its lands west of the Appalachians, the local yeomen, left without a government, met at Jonesborough to organize the state of Franklin. Never recognized by Congress, Franklin struggled along for less than five years and ultimately became part of the new state of Tennessee. Jonesborough is Tennessee’s oldest town, and it certainly looks the part — not through neglect, but because of its conscientious program of historic preservation. You can take a walking tour of the downtown historic district — a living scrapbook of American architectural styles, studded with gems such as step-gabled brick houses, venerable Victorian homes, and an old inn that once provided board for a young law student named Andrew Jackson. In 1788 the hot-tempered Jackson faced another lawyer in a duel here — a tale that might provide grist for a participant in the National Storytelling Festival, held in Jonesborough each October.
10. Elizabethton
At Sycamore Shoals State Historic Area near Elizabethton, you can visit reconstructed Fort Watauga, one of the first white settlements to be found west of the thirteen British colonies. Here, in 1775, the future of westward expansion was sealed when speculators bought 20 million acres of land from the Cherokee Indians.
At Elizabethton’s John and Landon Carter Mansion, built in the 1770s, visitors can stroll around the grounds and tour the home’s elegant interior, much of it original. Nearby, at the Doe River, you can visit an old covered bridge — a cool, dark tunnel into the 1880s — that is still open to traffic.
11. Cherokee National Forest
Stretching along most of Tennessee’s eastern border — interrupted only by Great Smoky Mountains National Park — Cherokee National Forest is laced with enticing trails. In autumn huge numbers of nut-bearing trees release a slow-motion hail of black walnuts, butternuts, beechnuts, hickory nuts, pecans, and acorns to the forest floor, where wild boar — rarely seen — vie with bear and squirrels for nature’s feast. The national forest covers 633,000 acres in ten counties of east Tennessee and is home to a wide variety of wildlife and wildflowers. Mountain trout fill its cold streams, and footpaths garnished with tiny white and yellow flowers lead to a myriad of hidden waterfalls as they crisscross the ancient Appalachian Trail that traverses the forest’s high ridges. Stop at ranger stations for hiking, kayaking, biking, and fly-fishing information.
12. Watauga Lake
Jutting away from Rte. 321 at the hamlet of Hampton, the drive follows Rte. 19E to Roan Mountain State Park. You can drive to the 6,285-foot summit, where Catawba rhododendrons form a 600-acre natural garden. In late June, during the Roan Mountain Rhododendron Festival, the road to the top is like a storybook path to a crimson-and-purple sea of blossoms.
Once you return to earth, backtrack to Rte. 321 and head east to Watauga Lake. In the 1940s the entire town of Butler had to move when the Tennessee Valley Authority built 331-foot-high Watauga Dam, creating the 16-mile-long lake. Watauga, bordered by forests and campsites and filled with bass, serves as the gateway to the Doe Valley, where century-old homesteads are surrounded by rich family farms. Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina huddle around this serenely uncrowded corner of the Appalachians, where the drive terminates at the aptly named community of Mountain City.
Republished from:
Most Scenic Drives in America
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