Noccalula Falls: The Legend and the Gorge

About two miles from downtown Gadsden, Black Creek drops ninety feet into a sandstone gorge, and the name attached to that waterfall has carried a story across more than two centuries. The falls are called Noccalula, and the legend behind that name is one of the oldest place-name traditions in northern Alabama.

The story, in its most familiar form, centers on a Cherokee princess. As the telling goes, her father arranged her marriage to a wealthy chief of another tribe, but Noccalula loved a man from her own people. Unwilling to accept the match, she climbed to the edge of the falls and leaped. The earliest versions of the tale date to the late seventeen hundreds and may reflect events that took place in the Cherokee settlement of Turkey Town, which once stood near present-day Gadsden.

The most widely read retelling appeared in an eighteen ninety-five poem by Anne Mathilde Bilbro, published in the Gadsden Times. Bilbro's verse gave the legend its modern shape and fixed it to this specific waterfall, which had previously been known simply as Black Creek Falls.

The park around the falls grew up in the twentieth century. Gadsden established it as a public recreation area in nineteen forty-six. In the nineteen sixties, the Woman's Club of Gadsden commissioned Belgian sculptor Suzanne Silvercruys to create a permanent memorial. Silvercruys completed the work in nineteen sixty-nine: a nine-foot bronze figure, weighing three thousand pounds, depicting Noccalula at the moment of her leap. The statue stands at the falls' edge today.

Historians have long noted that no contemporaneous Cherokee records confirm the specific events in the legend, and the name Noccalula does not appear in Cherokee documents from the period. What survives is the place itself: two hundred fifty acres of gorge, botanical garden, and miniature train rides around a ninety-foot waterfall, and a story that a Gadsden community chose to preserve whether or not every detail can be proven.