History

Railroad depots, mineral springs, and the caverns underneath it all — the research archive behind the name.

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Bangor 1 Blount Springs 13 Hayden 3 Nectar 2 Ricetown 1 Smoke Rise 12

1908

On April 24, 1908, an F4 tornado tore a 105-mile path from near Dora in Walker County northeast to Sylvania […]

1910-1916

Beginning around 1903, Edward J. Bryan assembled roughly 2,600 acres around Reid’s Gap into Mont Eyrie Orchards - “an apt […]

1916-1933

The push for a highway along this route didn’t start with the rail-bed conversion - it started two years earlier, […]

1933

Most everyone in Blount County knows Swann Bridge is worth talking about - three hundred and twenty-four feet of Town […]

1937-1940

Bangor Cave, about four miles northeast of Blount Springs, was once billed as “the only underground nightclub in America.” The […]

1954-Present

Discovered by a Boy Scout troop in the 1950s, opened as a state park in 1974, and reconnected to a much older railroad story in 2026.

1958-1967

Construction on Interstate 65 began in 1958, and the highway opened through this stretch of Blount County on April 1, […]

1958-Present

Logan’s General Store opened on Highway 160 in 1958, the same year aerial photographs still show the land that would […]

1967

It happened on a Thursday night in November 1967, on a bend in the Locust Fork east of Hayden that […]

1968

Before it was a subdivision, it was farmland and forest, visible in a 1958 aerial photo of the ridge east […]

Present-day research

Much of what’s known about Reid’s Gap and the roads that predate Smoke Rise comes from LIDAR - laser-based elevation […]