Appalachian History

Breaks Interstate Park, located astride the SW Virginia/eastern Kentucky border along the Russell Fork of the Big Sandy River, is one of only two interstate parks in the nation. Perhaps the scale of the 5-mile-long, .25-mile-deep gorge that forms the park's centerpiece cannot rival that of the Grand Canyon, but the 250 million year old "Grand Canyon of the South" IS the largest gorge east of the Mississippi.

The park takes its name from this gorge, which forms a “break” in Pine Mountain. Passes through these rugged mountains were called breaks by early settlers. Where the raging waters have carved the solid sandstone to break through Pine Mountain, nature has dressed the canyon walls in some of the region’s most spectacular scenery.

Daniel Boone is credited with discovering The Breaks in 1767 as he attempted to find ever-improved trails into Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley beyond. Both he and Simon Kenton explored here in the last quarter of the 18th century.

Because of elevation and moisture differences, the park contains various biospheres, ranging from oak/hickory climax forests on the drier ridge tops to a laurel/hemlock environment in the bottoms and along the creeks. This biodiversity results in an amazing display of spring wildflowers, including rare plants like yellow lady’s slipper and Catawba rhododendron.

The region was a hunting ground for Cherokee and Shawnee Indians. It is the home of Pow Wow Cave, used by the Shawnees.

The crown jewel of the park is the Towers, an imposing pyramid of rocks more than half a mile long and a third of a mile wide. The area around the Towers is said to contain the lost silver mine of Englishman John Swift. In the late 1700s Swift supposedly had one or more silver mines that were subsequently lost. He spent the last part of his life trying to relocate them. The lost mines are one of the great –and recurring- legends of southeastern Kentucky.

Public Law 275 created the park on August 14, 1953, and today, the 4,600-acre Breaks accommodates more than a third of a million visitors annually.

Sources: “Hiking Kentucky” by Brook Elliott (1998, Human Kinetics)
www.virginia.org/site/features.asp?featureid=283
www.breakspark.com
www.parks.ky.gov


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Middlesboro, KY is the only city in the US now known to be built within a meteor crater. William M. Andrews Jr., a geologist with the Kentucky Geological Survey, said erosion and vegetation have hidden most signs of the meteor's impact. However, enough evidence remains, he said, to support the conclusion.

"You have the round shape, shattered rock in the middle and deformed rocks around the sides that have been bent, folded or shoved," Andrews said. "That's pretty strong evidence that it was a meteor impact crater."

"Middlesboro is in this strangely round valley in the middle of Appalachia," he said. "You don't get round valleys here. It's not normal."


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The town (also spelled “Middlesborough”) was established in 1886 to exploit iron and coal deposits. The town's founder, Alexander A. Arthur, apparently did not know of the crater's extraterrestrial origin. Omni magazine listed the site in a 1979 article as one of the 15 outstanding craters in North America (there are more than 170 known meteor craters on the continent) and also as the most circular.

The Middlesboro Crater is located in the Appalachian Mountains, exposed to the surface, between the Cumberland Mountains and Pine Mountain. The theory is that a meteor more than 1,500 feet in diameter struck the earth here less than 300 million years ago and carved a hole approximately 3 miles in diameter, with slopes that rise as high as 1,900 feet.

As much as 80 percent of the meteor either was blown back into the earth’s atmosphere or disintegrated on impact, and life may have been destroyed within 50-100 miles of the impact. Geological maps indicate that the center of impact occurred where the YMCA pool is now on North 30th St, and that the crater perimeter ran through what is now 12th St and Cumberland Avenue intersection. Geologists believe that before the meteor hit, the area around Middlesboro may have been a wide plain, much higher than the 2,400 ft Pinnacle overlook at Cumberland Gap. Geologists say that rock formations in the area do not substantiate the theory that the Gap itself may have been created by the impact and explosion of the meteor.

sources: Kentucky Stories, by Byron Crawford(Turner Publishing, 2001)
Associated Press article in St Petersburg Times (Sept 20, 2003)
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/09/20/Worldandnation/Kentucky_town_sees_a_.shtml

related post: "Bald is Beautiful"


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