Recreation

The Appalachian Trail is a continuous marked footpath extending 2,140 miles through fourteen states from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Katahdin, Maine. The route crosses eight national forests, eight units of the national park system, and sixty state parks and wildlife…

Beersheba Springs, a historic resort village in north Grundy County, began attracting visitors after Mrs. Beersheba Porter Cain of McMinnville discovered a large chalybeate spring in 1833 and suggested that the water, with its high iron content, contained medicinal properties.…

Big Cypress Tree State Natural Area lies in the floodplain of the Middle Fork of the Obion River between the towns of Sharon and Greenfield in Weakley County. Its 330 acres contains bottomland hardwood forests and a variety of animal…

Big Hill Pond State Park is located at the junction of the Tuscumbia River and the Hatchie State Scenic River in southwest McNairy County. Containing over 4,200 acres and featuring scenic wetlands, timberland, hardwood bottom land, the park centers on…

The Big Ridge State Park contains 3,642 acres of reclaimed land and is headquartered in Union County about twelve miles east of Norris. Developed in tandem with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) project at Norris Dam, park construction began October…

The Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area of the Cumberland River drains an area of 1,382 square miles in Tennessee's Scott, Fentress, Pickett, and Morgan Counties and in Kentucky's Wayne and McCreary Counties. It threads through 106,000 acres…

This small state park contains 164 acres focused on the Bledsoe Creek embayment of Old Hickory Lake. Nearby the old Cumberland River port town of Cairo and close to such significant early settlement historic sites as Bledsoe's Lick, Cragfont, Wynnewood,…

Bon Aqua Springs Resort, once the largest health spa and summer retreat in Middle Tennessee, was known as the “Queen of the Southern Spas” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the western Highland Rim, the Hickman County…

The Booker T. Washington State Park is located on Chickamauga Reservoir northeast of downtown Chattanooga. The park, established as a state recreation area in 1938, was the state's second African American recreation area, preceded only by T. O. Fuller State…

Located along the Falling Water River in Putnam and White Counties, the Burgess Falls State Natural Area contains 155 acres. Burgess Falls is one of the most dramatic in the state and has been a location for movie and television…

Cades Cove, a fertile elliptical valley surrounded on all sides by the Great Smoky Mountains, had already been long inhabited by the Cherokees, who called it Tsiyahi, or "otter place," when John Oliver, his wife, and young child arrived there…

During the Great Depression, the federal government worked to adapt the nation's marginal farmlands to better use. To that end, Congress first appropriated $20 million for reclamation and later approved another $50 million. The State of Tennessee applied for a…

The Cherokee National Forest, Tennessee’s largest wildlife management area and single largest tract of public land, is the only national forest in the state. Its origin dates back to the Weeks Act of 1911, which gave the federal government the…

Chickasaw State Park is named for the Chickasaw Indians who once inhabited West Tennessee and North Mississippi. It includes approximately 1,400 acres. It is located in West Tennessee along the border of Hardeman and Chester Counties and was one of…

Located in Fentress County east of the historic town of Allardt, the Colditz Cove State Natural Area is one of the state's most recently designated natural areas. The state acquired the area's approximately seventy acres from a donation of the…

Cove Lake State Park was developed in the late 1930s as a third joint recreational demonstration effort by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the National Park Service. It was centered along an arm of…

Few areas in the United States symbolize the American pioneer spirit more than Cumberland Gap. Crossing the gap meant encountering America's first western frontier and symbolically severing European ties. Between 1760 and 1850 more than 300,000 people walked, rode, or…

The 1,720 acres of Cumberland Mountain State Park once served as the outdoor recreational center for the massive Cumberland Homesteads project of the Resettlement Administration (RA). From 1935 to 1938 Company 3464 of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built a…

Established in June 1998, Cumberland Trail State Park is the state's first and only linear park, running for 230 miles through ten Tennessee counties and connecting the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park to Signal Mountain in Chattanooga. The park will…

The traditional dances of clogging and buckdancing are popular forms of percussive dancing that originated in the southern Appalachian mountains. Though the eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish settlers brought with them the clog, a step dance characterized by a very erect…