Courhouse Squares, Waterfalls, and Rising Elevations: Cumberland Plateau Country

Wilson County Fairgrounds is home to Fiddler's Grove, a collection of forty old buildings reconstructed on the site. We left our motel this morning, drove through the campus of Cumberland University and found our way to the Grove. Lebanon is the headquarters for Cracker Barrel and one of the buildings looks like a smaller prototype for the modern Cracker Barrel restaurants that now dot the interstates. We enjoyed rambling around the buildings which included just about every thing needed for a town from church, school, bank, post office, jail, and many more.






Today highway 70 took us through beautiful rolling farm land. We saw hay fields with their rolls of fresh hay. We also saw a farmer with A very old Farmall tractor. It is election year in Tennessee, and campaign signs compete with wild flowers for space on the roadsides.

We saw red clay again for the first time since leaving Alabama. Evidently red clay grows kudzu well because we passed mile after mile of huge kudzu statues. At the entry to Smithville, a billboard showing the graduates of the class of 2010 welcomed visitors to their town. We thought that was a nice gesture.

By noon as we rolled into Sparta,(home of Benny Martin, famous fiddler, and Lester Flatt, half of the famous Flatt & Scruggs duo) our elevation was over a thousand feet above sea level. We found the chamber of commerce to get information on how to get to some of the waterfalls in the area. We found a very helpful person and left with maps and suggestions about which ones we should visit. Since we were next door to Mom's Sandwich Shop, we ducked in there for a Reuben and a pastrami for lunch. We shared a table with Kevin, a young roofer who also had suggestions about our waterfall hunt. We enjoyed chatting about traveling as we downed our food.

Our first Waterfall was about twenty miles southwest of Sparta. After we took the driving tour of old houses, we went to Rock Island State Park and saw Great Falls which were really beautiful. Next we headed up to Burgess Falls State Natural Area where we saw a series of falls as we hiked about a mile up by the creek. The views were breathtaking.
Had I been a few years younger, we would have gone down to the creek and gotten in the water. Fortunately the hike up was entirely shaded which made the trek a little easier. Another path along a graveled walkway took us back to the parking area. The heatwave continues. We passed a beautiful butterfly garden, but I think it was too hot for the butterflies to be out.

We wound around the mountains, continuing to climb until we rejoined Hwy 70 north to go to our stopping place for the evening, The Garden Inn in Monterey. By the time we got here, we were well over fifteen hundred feet above sea level. After check-in. We gazed out over a vast range of mountains listening to low classical music. as the sun began to set this first day of summer, the temperature dropped, the fireflies came out, a bullfrog joined the last birdsong, and a slight breeze stirred the air. We sat on the deep deck, eating chocolate marble cheesecake, and enjoyed watching the moon take on color as the last pink eased from the Tennessee sky.