Tennessee Tales and Travails

11/13/12:  We've been in the tiny town of Harriman, Tennessee for three weeks since our engine blew on nearby Interstate 40.  Our replacement engine for the Tracker finally arrived on Friday, and is being installed.  We hope to be home on Monday, November 19  - YAY!!!

As for Harriman, the surrounding countryside is stunning - rolling hills covered in forests of hardwoods and other deciduous trees dressed in every autumnal shade from dusty green through fiery red; rivers, streams, and creeks wander everywhere; the huge Watts Bar Lake is a few miles away and the Great Smoky Mountains are nearby.

But all in all there isn't much happening around here unless you are a hunter, fisherman or spend your life hiking the hills, and fall is definitely not this area's main season for outdoor tourism.

There are other disadvantages to life in Harriman, "The Town that Temperance Built": you can't buy a bottle of booze on Sundays, the closest movie theater is 28 miles away, no bowling alley, no local political organizations, no active college scene -the only students I saw at the attractive local junior college were a handful practicing basketball in the gym, no wine at the local Italian restaurant, which has wine glasses but serves only beer.  A four-lane highway runs through the center of town and there are a bunch of other highways and a freeway intersecting close by, but time has pretty much left Harriman in the dust.  The historic downtown is two-thirds boarded-up storefronts; the largest local industry seems to be the dozen fast food places; the main businesses are related to automobiles or their repair, and to second-hand stores or pawn shops.  There appear to be more churches than there are people.  Things are not exactly hopping around here.  Maybe in the summer, but not now.



Coal is still used to fire this cement factory outside of Kingston, TN

We've been entertaining ourselves by exploring local history and any local attraction. The hills, here at the edge of the Cumberland Plateau (the largest remaining forested plateau in the continental U.S.) were mined for their iron, coal, and limestone in the 1890's and into the twentieth century.  There is still a nearby cement factory and trainloads of coal roll through here day and night, so they're mining limestone and coal somewhere.  We are in the Appalachians after all.

Harriman was founded in 1891 as a town of temperance and industry where "no manufacture, storage or sales of intoxicating liquor or beverages" would take place.  Not quite the place any of you would visualize for Conrad and me!

The old residential district was planned and developed by one company, the East Tennessee Land Company.  Called Cornstalk Heights because of the many cornfields originally in view from this residential ridge above the Little Emory River, its streets were planted with the red and yellow maple trees that still sporadically shade them.  Over 100 buildings in town are on the National Register of Historic Places, which sounds more promising than it actually is.  Although the Cornstalk Heights homes, when they were built, were allegedly characterized by "unusual comfort, good taste and evident fixity of home life," from the outside many are rundown, and most are decidedly understated and bereft of the gingerbread and decorative facades that I think of as Victorian architecture. Harriman's staid guardians of temperance undoubtedly didn't place much value on fussy Victoriana.  The interiors sound intriguing: panelled with native oak and walnut, and floored with pine planks, all milled by the old local Emory Street Mills.  Hardware, nails and tacks were purchased from neighborhood factories and many of the homes were furnished with oak furniture built in the Harriman Furniture Factory.  Unfortunately I haven't been in any of the homes, and fortunately we will be gone by the time of the annual Christmas Home Tours.

In the 1890's, the town included several blocks of a planned red brick downtown constructed from locally manufactured brick, and also an industrial section of 29 manufacturing companies on Emory Street.  Sadly, the brick business district is largely empty and the Emory Street manufacturing companies have disappeared.  It doesn't look like anyone is making much money in town these days.


Temperance Building in Harriman

Carnegie Library in Harriman

The impressive old Temperance Building, with its brick Norman turrets, limestone trim, and slate roof, still stands on the main street.  When it was built it was touted as "the finest private office building in the state," and once housed the short-lived American Temperance University.  Now it is a local museum that is seldom open, and the most exciting news is that a team of ghost hunters found evidence of spirit life there. 




Around the corner from the Temperance Building is a true local jewel: the public library, a Carnegie building constructed in the Greek Revival style over 100 years ago from a grant by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation.  It is pretty cool inside with its original oak bookcases, light fixtures, arched interior doorways flanked by Corinthian oak columns topped with gilt capitals, and a fireplace with a painting of Andrew Carnegie hanging above its mantel.  Barbara, the librarian, has become a pal.


Oak columns and portrait of Andrew Carnegie above fireplace

I've also been to the Rocky Top General Store, described as bringing new meaning to the term "unusual," but it doesn't (although the cricket dip mix on sale is quite unusual).  Some of the problem is that everything in the area is over-hyped in the local tourist brochures, and then a disappointment when you get there.

We've driven often to the next town of Kingston, which sits beside Watts Bar Lake with its 700 miles of shoreline.  We took a long drive around parts of the lake and it is truly beautiful country, but the marina businesses are mostly closed for the season along with any lakeside restaurants.  Kingston has more retail businesses then Harriman, and is better-heeled, but still nothing to write home about.  When we seek out a business mentioned in the local tourist PR, we frequently find it no longer exists, and when it does, there may be more employees than patrons.  In Kingston, we have eaten at Redbones on the River with its view of the lake and okay food; at Copeland's "60's inspired diner," which didn't serve milkshakes; and at Gibson Girls Southern Goodies, which boasts of family recipes, but Conrad's soup was unseasoned canned tomatoes with rice and hamburger meat added, while my attempt at a high tea was underwhelming.

In the other direction from Harriman, the town of Rockwood has a two-block old brick downtown with Junior's, a decent down-home cooking spot that says it takes credit cards but their machine wasn't working either time I was there; the Live and Let Live drugstore with its small, unimpressive  soda fountain complete with its original 1880's green marble counter serving only ice cream items; and a pathetic "antique mall."  Rockwood has its own list of historic homes that we drove by yesterday, some quite lovely.

One day we drove 46 miles to the much publicized "historic Rugby village."  Deeming it a "fraud," Conrad didn't even get out of the car to see the four "historic" buildings (they claim to have ten buildings; we didn't find them).  But I visited the small museum and watched the video about this Utopian village founded to entice the second sons of British gentry, most of whom didn't really want to pursue any form of backbreaking farm life and instead spent more time building lawn tennis courts and digging out swimming holes in the river and then enjoying them, rather than farming.  I admit to being blown away by the Thomas Hughes Library, a small 1882 building housing its original 7,000 volume library in floor to ceiling book cases.  And, it was a nice drive.

Steam engine on our Chattanooga choo-choo ride

Our most successful ventures have been trips to Chattanooga and Nashville.  We drove two-and-a-half hours to Chattanooga to ride a steam train "Autumn Leaf Special" round trip to Sommerville, Georgia.  The 1950's passenger cars were pulled by an authentic steam engine with lots of whistle blowing and billowing steam.  A husband and wife team runs the steam engine - she shovels the coal, he drives the engine,   En route, we passed through one of the oldest railroad tunnels in Tennessee hollowed out of the rock of Missionary Ridge, by Civil War battlefields, and through farmland and towns full of fall foliage.

Practice before crew regatta on Tennessee River in Chattanooga

A day earlier, looking for a place to eat lunch in Chattanooga, we stumbled upon a regatta scene on the banks of the Tennessee River.  Over a hundred high school and college rowing teams from as far away as Texas and Florida were setting up and practicing for the weekend races.  The sun was shining on teenagers in their school colors and regatta gear carrying racing shells and sculls to the water or setting them up on racks .  The couple next to us on the outdoor patio of the restaurant had flown in from Austin, Texas; their son, a high school senior, had arrived with his teammates after an 18-hour bus trip -                                                                                                       ah, youth!


Incline Railway from the bottom of Lookout Mountain

In Chattanooga, we also rode up and down Lookout Mountain, a famed Civil War spot, on the mile-long Incline Railway, billed as "the world's steepest passenger railway."  Constructed in 1895 as a way for residents atop Lookout Mountain conveniently to get from their homes to Chattanooga and back, the trolley-style cars are on a single track, except where they pass each other in the middle, and powered by a counter-weight cable system where the bottom car starts up as the top car starts down.  At the top, the incline is 72.7%, and the view is all the way to the Great Smoky Mountains, a hundred miles away.

Last Friday we drove two-and-a-half hours from Harriman in another direction to Nashville to see a performance of the Grand Ole Opry.  That afternoon we visited the Lane Motor Museum, an eclectic collection of European cars (primarily Eastern European), and micro-cars.  All those tiny cars were a kick!

We aren't country music fans, but the performance that evening was tons of fun.  The show was in the old Ryman Theater where the Grand Ole Opry debuted in 1925.  The balcony is emblazoned with "1889" in gold, so we assume that's when the theater was built.  Unbeknowst to us, Friday night performances are still aired on the radio the way the originals were, so we were treated to an old-fashioned radio show along with the performing artists.  There were outstanding bluegrass groups with amazing fiddle, Dobro, mandolin and guitar playing, along with country singers like Vince Gill and Kathy Mattea, and the singing/comedy act of the legendary 89-year old, 4'8" tall "Little Jimmy" Dickens decked out in a glitzy cowboy outfit and giant cowboy hat.  But now it is all about getting home, and we can hardly wait!