There are a lot of stories about how Fiery Gizzard got its name. According to historian Russ Manning, on the day in the mid-19th century when the Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company opened its iron-smelting furnace in the wooded Grundy County ravine, “a white hot stream of molten iron ran from the billowing smoke and steam,” and an excited onlooker dubbed the furnace the “Fiery Gizzard.” Other sources say that the area got its name when Davy Crockett burned his tongue on a sizzling-hot turkey gizzard—or when an Indian chief tossed a turkey gizzard into a campfire to attract the attention of white settlers during peace talks. On the other hand, Tennessee State Naturalist Mack Pritchard jokes that “Fiery Gizzard” may well refer to the sort of liquor that, reportedly, is still brewed in the Grundy County woods.
Today, Fiery Gizzard’s 15-mile-long ravine, approximately 90 miles east of Nashville off I-24, is one of the crown jewels in the Tennessee countryside. It boasts one of the nation’s most diverse forests, complete with plunging waterfalls and stunning overlooks. The 13-mile Fiery Gizzard Trail starts at the north end of the “gulf” in Grundy Forest State Natural Area and runs through a gorge, between sheer limestone walls that rise hundreds of feet into the air. It veers upward to the Cumberland Plateau at Raven’s Point, a rock ledge with such a spectacular view across the gulf that your heart wants to burst. The trail continues south along the gulf’s edge, eventually ending at Foster Falls. One million people visited Fiery Gizzard and Foster Falls last year. Backpacker Magazine readers have voted Fiery Gizzard one of the 10 best hiking trails in the nation.
Fiery Gizzard might well be one of Tennessee’s most spectacular state parks—except that it is not a park at all. Almost all of the area is privately owned. In a region where jobs are in short supply and incomes are low, Fiery Gizzard could prove to be a gold mine—either for developers or lumber companies. Despite the protests of environmentalists, a new dam will go into operation in coming months to provide a much-needed source of clean water for Tracy City residents. By the close of the century, Fiery Gizzard, with its breataking vistas, may be just a legend—like Davy Crockett or the iron-smelting furnace.
Tracy City, the northern gateway to Fiery Gizzard, has changed little during recent decades. The town, which began as a coal mining community well over a century ago, was also influenced by the nearby Swiss utopian colony of Gruetli. Even now, one of Tracy City’s main attractions is the Dutch Maid Bakery, a 90-year-old store where bread and pastries are baked fresh daily and packed up for sale in stores as far away as Nashville and northern Alabama. It was founded in 1902 by John Baggenstoss, one of the original settlers at Gruetli. Walking by the bakery today you can still smell the rich aroma of applesauce bread and cinnamon pull-aparts, hot from the oven. The Dutch Maid serves as a museum and a meeting a place, a crossroads for everything that goes on in Tracy City and all of Grundy County.
It was one of John Baggenstoss’ sons, Herman, who helped build Fiery Gizzard into the hikers’ haven that it is today. One of the founders of the Tennessee Conservation League, Herman Baggenstoss worked with the national Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s to establish trails through the area, and he was responsible for building the 13-mile Fiery Gizzard Trail. Baggenstoss was also instrumental in seeing that 12,000 acres of land was designated the South Cumberland State Recreation Area, which includes two state parks in the Fiery Gizzard region: the eerily beautiful Grundy Forest State Natural Area and Foster Falls TVA State Natural Area.
These three areas are the only protected areas in the long gorge created by the Fiery Gizzard Creek. The rest of Fiery Gizzard is owned by private individuals and companies.
Near the source of Big Fiery Gizzard Creek, construction on the Tracy City Dam is now nearing completion. “Tracy City has always been in a perilous condition for water,” says State Naturalist Mack Pritchard, who, over the years, has acquired an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the Cumberland Plateau and its history. According to Pritchard, Tracy City, like the rest of the plateau, lacks a reliable water source. During droughts, the county seat is susceptible to severe water shortages. In 1988, water became so scarce that Tracy City residents were reduced to using trucks, called “water buffaloes,” to haul in water from the nearby Grundy Lakes. Tracy City found it “embarrassing” to borrow water, Pritchard says. “They didn’t like it.”
To make matters worse, it turned out that Tracy City’s source for borrowed water had once been a coal mine owned by the Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company. City residents had been traveling miles to transport truckloads of contaminated water. In 1989 the state of Tennessee ordered Tracy City to come up with a long-term solution to its water problem. Otherwise, the state warned, penalties would be forthcoming.
Last October Tracy City broke ground for a huge earthen dam at the head of Big Fiery Gizzard Creek. When construction is completed in coming months, the dam will draw a million gallons of water per day into a 57-acre reservoir. Tracy City needs the water, but conservationists charge that the dam will have an adverse impact on the already shallow creek. Pritchard suggests that the dam may even lead to more dry spells in Fiery Gizzard, endangering the area’s lush forest, while creating danger for fish by raising water temperatures and lowering oxygen levels in the creek.
Conservation groups attempted to halt construction of the dam, but the site was approved by the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Tennessee Valley Authority. In February 1994, the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) issued a “finding of no significant impact” and the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals declared that Tracy City had “obtained all federal and state permits necessary for construction.”
Construction of the dam was the hot issue in that year’s city council elections. “People basically ran on two sides, pro-water or not,” says Jimmy Campbell, chairman of the Tracy City Water Board. “We couldn’t have school. Everybody was in trouble because of the lack of adequate water—we had to do something. It was a community effort. It was something we had to do.”
Tracy City voters had spoken, but the issue was not settled. Environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, Friends of Fiery Gizzard, Tennessee Scenic Rivers Association and Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning, filed suit in District Court, requesting an injunction against the construction of the dam. “What they couldn’t stop at the ballot box, they tried to stop in court,” says Forrest Shoaf, who was one of three attorneys representing the defendants in the case, who included Tracy City and its mayor, Charles Fults, and the FmHA and its state director, David Seivers.
The people of Tracy City, who had been waiting for years for a decent, dependable water supply, grew indignant when outsiders attempted to halt the dam’s construction. With the Sierra Club involved in the protest, Tracy City officials anticipated a lengthy, expensive court battle. Meanwhile, Campbell says, “just a few local people” opposed the project, and he insists that the city had tried its best to be “extra careful” in planning the project. “This is a big hiking area that people appreciate,” Campbell says. “And the people who appreciate it the most are the people who live here. We wouldn’t think about harming it because we live here.”
Tracy City resident Byron Mays was vocal in his opposition to the dam. A retired rural carrier for the postal service, Mays argues that “the debate in the town was distorted” and that opponents of the project were intimidated. During the 1994 election, he says, “the waterworks itself put out a full-page ad [explaining why townspeople] ought to vote for water.
“Like we aren’t for water,” Mays says in disbelief.
The true issue in the controversy, according to Mays, was over whether Tracy City had chosen the best alternative for its water source. The chosen site, he says, is “one of the sorriest places we could have built a dam on this mountain. All those other places, you could take less money and build another dam.”
Mays argues that a much better alternative would have been to pipe water in from Ramsey Lake in northern Grundy County. “Ramsey Lake is much deeper, dug out better, and fed by springs,” he insists, while Fiery Gizzard Creek is “fed by a watershed” and is more likely to be polluted. The Ramsey Lake project would also have cost $1.3 million less than the new Big Fiery Gizzard Dam, he says.
During the 1988 drought, Mays says, Fiery Gizzard Creek was “bone dry,” while water was still running at Ramsey Lake. “If we ever have a drought, we’ll run out of water, just as sure as 2 and 2 is 4,” Mays insists. “Then where will they go for water? The answer is that they will pump water from Ramsey. Well, why don’t they go do that to begin with?”
Water Board chairman Jimmy Campbell says that he, too, saw the attractiveness of the Ramsey Lake alternative. However, he says, the state would not approve the Ramsey Lake plan. “When I found out it wasn’t a realistic idea, I dropped it,” he says.
Campbell is eager to clear up what he sees as a misperception of what the dam will actually do. “People were misinformed because they thought the location was going to be in the gulf—that was their impression,” he says. Tracy City dammed Big Fiery Gizzard Creek, which, despite its name, is actually the smaller of the two creeks that flow into the gorge. “The Little Fiery Gizzard is the one that puts 80 percent of the water in the gulf,” Campbell explains. “The one that we’re damming is the small stream. I don’t think that people really understood that.”
No one seems certain as to what the Big Fiery Gizzard Dam’s actual impact on Fiery Gizzard may be. “There’s no question in my mind that the lower part of the Fiery Gizzard Creek will be different after the impoundment,” says Pritchard. “The main thing I’m concerned about is that flat water warms the temperature up and actually withholds the amount of oxygen that the creek would have had if it continued to tumble over rocks.” Pritchard maintains that, once it has been dammed, the creek will not “support the diversity of aquatic life” it now nurtures.
Were these kinds of worries enough to deny the residents of Tracy City their water supply, for which they had been waiting at least six years? Ron Castle, a founding member and the first president of Friends of South Cumberland State Recreation Area, predicts that “stream-born aquatic insects and plant life will probably perish or at least be greatly reduced in numbers” once the dam is in operation. But he admits that “the feeling is that it’s unfortunate that the water flow’s going to be reduced but it’s probably not going to be devastating to the gorge.” Now that the dam is almost complete, according to one longtime environmentalist, “it’s a moot point.”
The fight has been very public—and very bitter. Meanwhile, it has served to distract both environmentalists and Grundy County residents from what may well be an even more serious problem. In recent years, wood-pulp providers have been exporting more and more wood from Tennessee’s forests. Fiery Gizzard’s advocates have been successful in resisting attempts to harvest the trees there, but it seems that it will be only a matter of time before the cutting begins. “This area is not going to stay as a wilderness area,” says Doug Cameron, former director the Tennessee Commission on the Outdoors and a member of Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCUM).
Because most of the land along the Fiery Gizzard Trail is owned by individuals or companies, it is not protected from development or exploitation. The owners of the most scenic portion of the area, the first six or so miles of the ravine, including spectacular Raven Point, have expressed a keen interest in protecting the land. Pritchard has been working with them to ensure that the trail between Grundy Forest and Raven’s Point is protected. Meanwhile, according to a State Parks official, the owner of another portion of the bluff is considering developing his property, which extends to the very edge of the bluff overlooking Fiery Gizzard. Vacation homes could be built there, much like the Clifftops development near Monteagle.
Other stretches of the trail are owned by J. M. Huber Co., a logging company with a reputation for careful, selective cutting. Huber owns much of the area at the south end of the gulf, the least scenic portion of the trail. However, Huber also owns much of the land in the gorge, land that is not reached by the trail but is within sight of many of the overlooks. A clearcut in such an area would create a painful eyesore. Individuals own several other slices of land near the south end of Fiery Gizzard, and one portion of the trail was actually cleared by loggers in 1985. Ten years later, it is hard to tell where the trees were cut down.
In the midst of the controversy and uncertainty over Fiery Gizzard’s future, there is at least one happy, encouraging story. Anybody familiar with the area and its recent struggles can also point to the story of Jim Prince and be assured that good things can happen in the gulf. Several years ago, Prince, now president of Friends of Fiery Gizzard, bought a tract of land directly below Foster Falls, land that covers 500 acres of old growth timber.
A little over four years ago, Prince was diagnosed with cancer of the neck and throat. “I was given a few months to live,” he recalls. At that time, he says, he owned a small piece of land near Fiery Gizzard. Every day, between radiation treatments, he says, “I’d go up there [to the gorge] and pray. I could run up there between treatments and sit under the rushing water and pray. Even the pressure that I was going to die left me.” Eventually, Prince underwent surgery and emerged victorious from his struggle with cancer. Six months after the surgery, even though he was exhausted, physically and financially, he managed to buy the land that served as his spiritual retreat. He borrowed “100 percent of the money” to pay for it. “When you face death and you think you’re going to die, then the other risk does not seem so big,” Prince says.
When Prince bought the land, its timber belonged to Mead Corporation, the huge Dayton, Ohio-based paper company. “I was up out walking one day,” Prince recalls, “and some vehicles pulled in.” The visitors, who were from Mead, mistook Prince for a park ranger. One of the men approached him and asked for help in finding the trail. “They had gotten all kinds of letters from people wanting to preserve this trail,” says Prince. Incredible as it sounds, Prince insists, Mead officials did not know about the Fiery Gizzard Trail and were there trying to get a look at it for the first time. While he showed them the trail, Prince says, he tested the waters. “I want to ask you guys a favor...,” he began.
That tentative conversation led to one of the most successful collaborative preservation efforts ever attempted on the Cumberland Plateau. Responding to Prince’s gentle per- suasion, as well as phone calls and letters from environmentalists throughout the Southeast, Mead agreed to forgo its timber rights. Prince has nothing but good things to say about Mead’s behavior. “It had nothing to do with pressure,” he says. “It was them taking the time to see what it was, and for us to show them the people that used it.”
Newspaper accounts suggested a fight between the paper company and the environmentalists, but Prince insists that there was no fight at all. “I could tell from the first time they saw the place they were going to keep it,” he says. “I could see it in their faces when they were looking out on the overlooks.”
This year, after consulting with Mead officials, Prince decided that his property should be sold to the state of Tennessee, for use as a park. In January, when the transaction became final, one state senator told Prince, “I don’t know how you got all them mules pulled in the same direction.”
In retrospect, Prince says, he learned a lesson from his experience with Mead. Extremists are seldom right, he says; the solution to the problem, he says, is usually found “somewhere in the middle.”
Prince remains calm when he surveys the possible fate of Fiery Gizzard. “There’s nobody, to my knowledge, that owns property here that would do anything to hurt the land,” he says. Preservationists, he says, can overreact and grow confrontational, unintentionally damaging their own cause. “I am not pro-logging by any means,” he says, “but I have learned an awful lot more about their side of it, and that has helped me become more effective.”
Nevertheless, the skies above Fiery Gizzard are not all clear. As long as most of the property in the area is privately owned, the trail may feel like a park, but has no long-term protection. It is that sort of protection that is the goal of organizations such as Friends of Fiery Gizzard. Even though landowners along the trail have been, for the most part, conscientious about preserving the area, anything might happen—land might be sold, or it might become too much of a liability. “If we want to preserve any of the diverse forest in the gulf or on the top, we’re going to have to buy the land because [property owners] cannot afford to leave it like it is,” says one parks official. “They’d have to get a return on their investment or they just can’t keep it. Taxes will make them [sell]. The logging will be done.”
Grundy County is by no means a wealthy area, and private property owners along the gulf will be hard pressed to resist the temptation to sell their valuable timber rights. “One fellow on the mountaintop got $380 an acre,” Doug Cameron says. For a landowner struggling to pay the bills, he admits, it is hard to turn down such an offer. “We’ve got to have some jobs,” he insists. “If there were more jobs and more money in the area, it would cut the pressure to sell timber rights off the land.” Cameron’s ideal vision for the future of the Cumberland Plateau includes “more of a service-oriented economy,” in which tourists are encouraged to visit Fiery Gizzard and other natural areas and to spend their dollars in Tracy City along the way. If the Plateau’s beautiful areas are destroyed, he explains, tourists have no reason to spend their dollars there.
The trees that grow along the Fiery Gizzard ravine are, for the most part, fit only for paper and wood chips. The soil is not deep, and the few good trees have already been harvested. “A good straight veneer walnut tree can be worth $10,000,” so much that people often steal them, Cameron says. But “you can’t find trees like that anymore in Fiery Gizzard. Those trees have been gone for my lifetime.” Down below Foster Falls, at the southern end of Fiery Gizzard, the trees are older and more suitable for furniture-making. These trees are much sought-after, but the very factors that make the timber more valuable are also the factors that make the land more important to conservationists and hikers.
The defenders of Fiery Gizzard admit that their goals are long on self-interest: to preserve a scenic area that many people enjoy and to provide long-lasting economic benefits to a low-income area. There are no endangered species harbored here—no spotted owls. What’s more, there is not much old growth in the Fiery Gizzard forest, and naturalists know, better than anyone else, that nature regenerates itself fairly efficiently. A generation or two down the road, the evidence of deforestation disappears. Ron Castle, founder of Friends of South Cumberland State Recreation Area, notes that much of the area now considered wilderness was little more than one big clearcut a century ago.
If Fiery Gizzard’s trees were sold to paper companies and furniture makers, however, a breathtaking scenic area could be razed for our lifetime. And, even though the Cumberland Plateau would experience a short-term surge in income, the potential of an ongoing economic opportunity for area residents would be lost.
Fiery Gizzard’s future seems riddled with question marks. At present, hikers are allowed to use the trail, thanks to the good graces of the property owners. Meanwhile, those property owners are taking a risk. “If you go down there and hike, and you step in a hole and fall down and break your ankle, you could sue the property owner, potentially,” says Castle.
Due to the concern over potential liability, he explains, “there has been a lot of discussion about limiting access. There are some landowners who have said, ‘Well, maybe I don’t want to be responsible for these folks that are walking up and down these trails.’ ”
Friends of South Cumberland State Recreation Area has been working with John Christof, park manager at the South Cumberland State Recreation Area, to create a permanent easement, deeded to the state, that would free landowners from all liability claims. However, with a new administration in office, Castle says, the possibility of the state acquiring the land appears to be “out the window.”
The struggle to preserve Fiery Gizzard is also a struggle to generate an economy for a region that is traditionally impoverished, a community where residents often have to leave the county to find work. “[Fiery Gizzard] could be the backbone of Tennessee’s tourist industry, but we could blow it,” worries Pritchard. As a warning, he points to the popular Fall Creek Falls State Park. “At present,” he says, “we are about to love it to death.” More than ever, there is the need for more state parks with the kinds of facilities, such as lodges, that can take the pressure off the parks that are already in operation. If Fiery Gizzard had the right facilities, it could, according to Pritchard, pay for itself.
Ron Castle is not so sure. “The purpose of having a wilderness park is to allow people to visit the wilderness with minimal impact on what’s there. The improvements that are made are just to protect the environment.” It is difficult for such parks to be self-sufficient, Castle says, because, by definition, they lack “a golf course and a lodge and a restaurant and various types of concessions and entertainment.”
Meanwhile, a major attraction of Fiery Gizzard is that it is not crowded like Fall Creek Falls—that it still has a semblance of wildness to it.
To generate revenue, Fiery Gizzard visitors might be asked to pay a small admission fee, just as visitors to many national parks are asked to do now. Castle predicts that “the majority of the users would not have any problem” with a fee, and it does seem logical to put the burden for a park’s upkeep on those who enjoy it. The management of South Cumberland State Recreation Area estimates that 1 million people visited the area last year alone. A fee of $1 per person could provide a sizable annual income. The only downside, according to Castle, is that any fee “would probably limit access for some folks and for certain types of groups like Boy Scouts and that sort of thing.”
Those who fight to keep Fiery Gizzard intact would like the state to buy up the entire area and manage it. By most accounts, however, the state of Tennessee now has less interest in acquiring natural areas than ever. Public funds, quite simply, are not forthcoming.
To make matters worse, the state generally offers land prices that are less than attractive to property owners. In appraising land, the state considers acreage and timber value, but not ecological significance. A landowner might be able to sell his property to a developer at a high price because it offers a thundering waterfall or a scenic overlook, but the state does not take these factors into consideration and often offers an amount too low to be attractive. Many of Fiery Gizzard’s property owners might be willing to sell, but not at the low prices offered by the state.
Still, the Fiery Gizzard region’s champions believe, as long as there is the story of Jim Prince and the Mead Corporation, there is hope. One piece at a time, with help of land trusts, individual contributors, and the property owners themselves, members of the Friends group hope, eventually, to assure Fiery Gizzard the park status they feel it deserves. Jim Prince is sure that it can happen, “if everybody works together.” If such a thing happens, he says, it will allow him to rest easy, “when I close my eyes for the last time, to know that I’d done something good.”
