A Land Threaded with Memory
by Gerald Smith
- [photo: Gerald Smith]
As early as 1670, explorers from the east had crossed Tennessee and reached the Chickasaw Bluffs at Memphis. That journey was one of the most daring and exciting in Tennessee history. They saw the Tennessee of full Native American culture — a land that was mostly forested but with many large towns and villages along the rivers and creeks. Here and there they would have even seen some land under cultivation. Early expeditions lived off the land as they traveled and game, including buffalo and elk, was plentiful. Within a half century, other explorers would follow; the fur traders and Long Hunters came to Tennessee and set up their hunting camps. By 1750 perhaps 50,000 deer hides were being shipped out of Tennessee eastward to Charleston, SC. Some of these hides went to New Orleans, and we know that French trappers were living in the Nashville area about this time.
By 1790 there was already a strong flow of settlers coming into Tennessee. Most came from North Carolina, but many came down the Great Valley from Pennsylvania and Virginia and arrived in northeast Tennessee around Jonesboro. Some followed the tributaries of the French Broad, Clinch, and Tennessee Rivers, a journey which would take them to Chattanooga and on across the state to the Land Between the Lakes. Others made their way westward along the Cumberland River and the Tennessee–Kentucky border as they journeyed toward Nashville. By 1796 when Tennessee acquired statehood there were more than 100,000 thousand people here. Over the next five decades, this population would double with each census, filling every corner of the land.
Tennessee has perhaps as rich and diverse a cultural inheritance in its people as it does in the variety of its land.
Not all of these new Tennesseans were farmers. Many were, of course, but there were also blacksmiths, stonemasons, wagon makers, store keepers, former soldiers, gunsmiths, and many others. An early skill much in demand was that of the surveyor who laid out the lines of land claims and plotted the routes of roads. Farms were quickly established although the clearing of the land took a long time. A perennial need for all our settlers was a reliable supply of hardware — nails, horseshoes, hinges, wagon wheel rims, braces, and rods. Along side farming across Tennessee, an early iron industry emerged. More than a hundred foundries and associated industries such as naileries emerged. The iron industry required prodigious amounts of wood to fire furnaces — typically one acre of hardwood trees per day — and these furnaces as much as the farmers helped to open up the forest cover. Eventually much of this cleared land would become farms while iron production was concentrated in fewer locations and shifted to coal as the primary fuel.
Tennessee has perhaps as rich and diverse a cultural inheritance in its people as it does in the variety of its land. The farming methods, house and barn styles, farm lot patterns, corner joints in log cabins, chimney construction, roof shape, and window placement in our houses all reflect the diversity of our French, English, Spanish, African, Swedish, German ancestors in Tennessee. One only has to drive along and notice the many shapes of roofs or barns to see this diversity.
In time, the character of Tennessee land began to change — echoing in some ways the diversity present from the beginning. Tennessee has never been only a land of farmers although farms visually dominate the rural landscape even today. Today, however, there are many fewer farmers and many more people who pursue other occupations moving into the rural areas. A kind of re-pioneering of the land is taking place as new roads are made and as formerly remote areas become housing developments. Global industries have moved into the small towns and countryside of Tennessee, and our Interstate highways link all parts of the state together in a national web of commerce and trade. These roads have also brought many new "pioneers" to Tennessee — folks from the northeast, midwest, and west who have passed through, discovered the great treasures of this land, and have moved here — much as did their ancestors two hundred years ago.
- [photo: Gerald Smith]
Change has brought some losses. The old barns are too small for modern farm equipment and many have been taken down to make way for new structures. The old log cabins, remarkably, seem to survive best of all, perhaps because they are usually in the most isolated locations. Tennessee is unique among the states in having nearly 18,000 rural cemeteries, more than twice the number of the next ranking state. These cemeteries are the memory in stone and land of the rich cultural inheritance of Tennessee. Most of these thousands of cemeteries are overgrown and some all but lost to forest. Often what we see is a grove of trees surrounded by plowed fields; these groves usually hide a cemetery. Some cemeteries sit as quiet islands of memory in the medians our great highways.
Tennessee is still a great land for exploration much as it was for adventurers in 1670. A drive on any road opens up at every view or turn some glimpse of Tennessee's past — a log barn along Interstate 24, a German forebay barn, cantilever barns in east Tennessee, pyramid roof houses across the state, massive stone houses built from stout Tennessee limestone, the ancient grazing pattern on the land dating from Tennessee's days as the leading producer of sheep. Other views are subtle — the gentle turns of an early road along a stream, the stones of an old wall now receding into the earth, apple and pear trees and daffodils in the spring reminding us of the old homesites around us. It is a land threaded with memory, history, and promise.
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