The Cumberland Plateau & Mountains

A short history of the Cumberland

Through the Gap. For centuries, Native peoples followed the Warriors’ Path through a natural notch in the mountains. In 1775, Daniel Boone and a crew of axmen marked the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap, and over the next decades a few hundred thousand settlers walked or rode it west. ^[S2]

Coal, timber and rails. In the late 1800s, railroads and coal mines opened up the plateau. Towns like Oliver Springs, Coal Creek (now Rocky Top) and Wartburg grew with mining and logging. ^[S1]

Utopias and homesteads. English author Thomas Hughes founded Rugby in Morgan County in 1880 as a planned community for younger sons of English gentry; many of its Victorian buildings still stand. In the 1930s the New Deal built the Cumberland Homesteads near Crossville, giving struggling families stone houses and farmland. ^[S7][S6]

Sergeant York. Alvin C. York, born in Pall Mall in Fentress County, became one of the most decorated U.S. soldiers of World War I and came home to build a school and a gristmill; his home and mill are now a state historic park. ^[S8]

Protected rivers. Congress set aside the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in 1974 and named the Obed a Wild and Scenic River in 1976, protecting the plateau’s best gorges. ^[S3][S4]

Go deeper on our East Tennessee history hub and the museums & history sites list.

Where “Cumberland” came from

In 1750, Virginia explorer Dr. Thomas Walker crossed the mountains and named the river he found the Cumberland, after Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, a son of King George II. The name spread to the gap, the mountains, the plateau and later a county. Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road made “Cumberland Gap” famous a generation later. ^[S2][S1]