Linear parks located
along rivers connecting towns that were once significant transportation
corridors for commerce remain so for wildlife. Today, narrow
bands of "unusable" floodplain have become invaluable
places to take a break from an ever-increasing pace of life
and connect with nature and history. Long Hunter State Park
in Hermitage offers just such opportunities.
Long Hunter is located
on the eastern shores of J. Percy Priest Lake, an impoundment
of Stones River. In 1767, the fairly shallow meandering stream
originating just north of Murfreesboro was explored by a party
of long hunters that included Uriah Stone. Year-long forays
into the 18th century western frontier were conducted by colonists
from Kentucky, Virginia and the Carolinas. Products of these
"long hunts," deer hides and other animal skins, were
traded with Cherokee Indians, who with Chickasaw, Shawnee and
Creek Indians shared and fought over this middle hunting ground,
now Middle Tennessee. Euro-American settlement began here in
earnest after the establishment of Fort Nashborough in 1780
and after the American Revolution, when veterans of North Carolina,
to which Tennessee belonged, were offered parcels of land up
to 640 acres in size as payment for military service. By 1805,
almost all Indian lands east of Nashville had been ceded to
the infant state of Tennessee, effectively closing 12,000 years
of occupation by Native Americans. Flint implements of the earliest
Tennesseans, Paleo-Indians, have been found in two areas at
Long Hunter.
The physiographic
province in which Stones River flows is called the Central Basin.
It is elliptically shaped and runs 120 miles north-south by
60 miles wide. Long Hunter is in the northern section, the deepest
and flattest part called the Inner Basin. Beneath relatively
thin, poor soils are very old weathered limestones of the Ordovician
Period, laid down as sea sediments 425 million years ago. One
particular formation, Lebanon Limestone, was lain in thin deposits
and erodes to a fractured tabular to gravelly pavement. Interspersed
with thickets of Eastern Redcedar, these strange desert-like
openings called cedar glades are home to about 30 adapted or
endemic flowering plants. Cedar glades make up about five percent
of the Central Basin region and are present throughout the park.
The park’s endemic
plants, those found only in glades and nowhere else, include
two federally endangered species, Tennessee Purple Coneflower
(Echinacea tennesseensis), and Leafy Prairie Clover (Dalea foliosa).
The diminutive Limestone Fameflower (Talinum calcaricum), grows
on solid rock, as does Prickly Pear Cactus (Opuntia humifusa),
a plant of deserts and prairies but distributed throughout the
Central Basin.
In areas where thicker
soils have developed, native perennial grasslands known as barrens
occur and over a century or so some have developed into oak-hickory
forests, which here range in age from about 40 to 100 years.
White, Black, Post, Shingle and Chinkapin are among the kinds
of Oaks present, as well as Shagbark, Bitternut, Mockernut and
Pignut Hickory. Their hard mast crops support white-tailed deer,
wild turkey, fox squirrels and a host of other small mammals.
Where the glades themselves have succeeded to woods, small solution
crevices and sinkholes shelter animals from predators such as
Rat Snakes, Red Foxes, Cooper’s Hawks and Great Horned
Owls. Earthworms, snails, Tiger Salamanders and a myriad of
insects, including glade-endemic moths, complete the food webs
that keep these diverse habitats thriving.
The most fertile
soils of the Inner Basin were immediately adjacent to the Cumberland
and Stones Rivers so there the earliest North Carolina land
warrants were claimed. Very little arable land could be found
above the floodplain. In the 19th century Nashville was about
25 miles away, a day’s commitment by horse and buggy. Out
of isolation self-sustaining communities grew to dot early maps.
One such community was Couchville, named for the Couch family
who owned land and a grocery store on Stones River at a crossing
site, now west of the park.
Some three miles
to the east by way of the Couchville Pike was Bryant Grove.
One of the earliest documented residents (1820), was Henderson
Bryant, a "free man of color." His father was Sherrod
Bryant, a farmer, who by the time of his death in 1854 was probably
the most wealthy free African-American in Tennessee. He established
and resided in a settlement called Bryant Town just east of
Nashville. The Bryants owned property during a period described
in the Public Broadcasting System Web site Africans in America:
"The nation tripled its population, doubled in size, and
extended slavery to parts of the western frontier. For black
Americans, this same period was a contradictory mix of community-building
for free blacks and entrenched enslavement for those not yet
emancipated."
The goings-on of
19th century Bryant Grove defined rural community life in general.
Bryant descendant and historian Oddie Bryant-Jones wrote: "Mostly
an agrarian society of people who strongly showed skills as
business entrepreneurs, their livelihood had come chiefly, after
the cessation of slavery in 1865, from the sales of produce
off their farms; trade and bartering at the Davidson County
Farmer’s Market; logging; horses and cattle; trapping and
fishing; sale of furs and tanned skins; preaching; school teaching;
midwifery; blacksmithing and copper forging; carpentry; stonemasonry;
and fabric weaving, mostly linen and wool…" A deep
section of Stone’s River known as raft shoals was a place
where during times of flooding, logs floated from upstream were
tied into rafts for the 21-mile trip to the Cumberland, then
about 12 miles to Nashville. There, Bryant-Jones noted, at the
wharves of Hermitage and First Avenues, near the site of Fort
Nashborough, logs were sold and hewn into lumber. The timbermen
returned home on foot. The agricultural way of life persisted
well into the 20th century. Resident Lawrence Perry remembered
growing up there in the 1940s: "We had cattle, goats, hogs
and mules, and sold milk. We raised cotton, corn, and sold cedar
logs, cut in lengths and snaked ‘em out to the road."
By the early 1960s,
the demand for flood control, electric power and recreation
spelled doom for Bryant Grove and Couchville, by then called
Morrow-Headden. Resident Robert Hurt recalled getting marooned
when high water covered roads: "The river was just a big
creek, but after a big rain it got to be a man." In 1963
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (COE) began construction on
Stewart’s Ferry Dam, renamed J. Percy Priest Dam in memory
of the late Tennessee congressman. Farms were bought, residents
moved and hundreds of cemeteries relocated to Mount Juliet Memorial
Gardens. The reservoir was completed in 1968, inundating an
area of 14,200 acres. The portions of Morrow-Headden and Byrant
Grove above 490 feet in elevation stayed dry, but the heart
of these places, the Community Center and the Missionary Baptist
Church, respectively, did not. Narrow bands of overgrown and
wooded uplands adjacent to the reservoir are all that remain
of these once active little towns, vestiges forming parts of
Long Hunter.
In 1972 the COE leased
2,400 acres of land to the Department of Conservation for development
and management by Tennessee State Parks. Facilities include
two boat ramps; a non-supervised swimming beach; three picnic
areas, two with playgrounds and shelters; and a visitor center.
The focal point of
the park is 110-acre Couchville Lake. It formed when water backed
up through a cave system into several sinkholes when J. Percy
Priest Lake was impounded. It is a serene body of water where
Great Blue Herons wade for fish and a large flock of Hooded
Merganser spends the winter. The lake has a covered fishing
pier with rowboat and canoe rental in the summer months. Electric
or non-motorized boats are permitted on the lake. Catches include
large- and smallmouth bass, rockfish, crappie, bream and catfish.
Encircling Couchville
Lake is a paved, level two-mile trail that weaves through oak-hickory
forest. It’s a favorite of runners, families with strollers
and wheelchair users. Some 14 more miles of trails traverse
cedar glades, old fields, former homesteads and woodlands in
various stages of succession. Views of J. Percy Priest Lake
are offered on the Day Loop and the Volunteer Trail that terminates
at a backpacking campsite.
Upon request, rangers
interpret this preserved representation of Middle Tennessee
forests and globally important cedar glades, providing programs
on a variety of natural and cultural history topics for schools,
scouts and organized groups. Activities for the general public
are scheduled year-round. Many thousands of visitors annually
enjoy these pursuits in the park; chief among them is the study
of the park’s examples of cedar glades. Long-time visitor
and amateur botanist Darel Hess summed it up this way: "The
cedar glades of Long Hunter have provided a unique opportunity
to observe an all to rapidly disappearing environment. I have
particularly enjoyed photographing and learning to identify
the rare plants associated with a glade environment and in so
doing, realize that in the face of advancing development we
must continue to work toward their preservation."
Nashville is blessed
with a number of city-operated parks and the beloved Radnor
Lake State Natural Area. Parks in the city’s environs,
rapidly being enveloped by urbanization, fall into the greenway
category. As Nashville grows eastward, we could today consider
Long Hunter a type of greenway, linearly configured along the
reservoir.
Presently the Metro
Nashville Greenways Commission is working with the Greater National
Regional Council and COE on developing a regional greenway system
that would include the entire western shore of J. Percy Priest
Lake. The ultimate goal is to link Murfreesboro to Clarksville
by way of several Metro Nashville Parks and Cheatham County’s
Cumberland River Bicentennial Trail (The Tennessee Conservationist,
March/April, 1998.) In Murfreesboro, the project starts with
a completed trail along six and a half miles of the West Fork
of Stones River, taking in Stones River National Battlefield,
site of the 1863 Civil War battle. The Stones River Greenway
in Nashville, under construction, follows the river from J.
Percy Priest Dam to the Cumberland River and on to Two Rivers
Park.
It may be too late
for one continuous linear park along Stones River to happen,
but having a number of oases, convenient and accessible, will
ensure a quality of life for future generations.
For information on
Long Hunter, call the park visitor center at 615-885-2422. To
find out more about greenways in Middle Tennessee, contact the
Metro Nashville Greenways Commission at 615-862-8400. Their
Web site is: www.nashville.org/ greenways.
