1895
The Gray Goose Saloon
In 1895, a whiskey shop called the “Gray Goose” - set up two or three years earlier by John Franklin […]
History
The railroads, springs, covered bridges, and caverns of west Blount County, and the families who lived beside them.
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All History, in Order
1900-1929
The First Mountain Brook Was in Blount County
There’s a Mountain Brook Store in Blount County today, a small country store that has nothing to do with the […]
1901-1905
Oil Fever at Reid’s Gap
A well drilled at Reid’s Gap around 1891 had sat plugged and abandoned for a decade - the original prospectors […]
1908
The 1908 Tornado at Reid’s Gap
On April 24, 1908, an F4 tornado tore a 105-mile path from near Dora in Walker County northeast to Sylvania […]
1910-1916
Mont Eyrie Orchards & the Fight With the Railroad
Beginning around 1903, Edward J. Bryan assembled roughly 2,600 acres around Reid’s Gap into Mont Eyrie Orchards - “an apt […]
1916-1933
The Bee Line Highway & Prohibition Moonshine
The push for a highway along this route didn’t start with the rail-bed conversion - it started two years earlier, […]
1933
How the Joy Bridge Became the Swann Bridge
Most everyone in Blount County knows Swann Bridge is worth talking about - three hundred and twenty-four feet of Town […]
1937-1940
Bangor Cave: America’s Only Underground Nightclub
Bangor Cave, about four miles northeast of Blount Springs, was once billed as “the only underground nightclub in America.” The […]
1954-Present
Rickwood Caverns State Park
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
I-65 and the Roads of Smoke Rise
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: A Highway 160 Landmark Since 1958
Logan’s General Store opened on Highway 160 in 1958, the same year aerial photographs still show the land that would […]
1967
The Unsolved Burning of the Standridge Bridge
It happened on a Thursday night in November 1967, on a bend in the Locust Fork east of Hayden that […]
1968
The Founding of Smoke Rise
Before it was a subdivision, it was farmland and forest, visible in a 1958 aerial photo of the ridge east […]
Present-day research
Tracing It With LIDAR
Much of what’s known about Reid’s Gap and the roads that predate Smoke Rise comes from LIDAR - laser-based elevation […]