Crab Orchard, Tennessee

Crab Orchard sits in a mountain gap in the Cumberland Plateau that travelers have used for more than two centuries. Pioneers named it for the wild crab apple trees growing in the hollow, and by the seventeen eighties a road had been cut through the gap to help migrants cross from East Tennessee to the Nashville basin. That Walton Road became part of the stage route linking Knoxville and Nashville, so Crab Orchard was a waystation long before it was incorporated in nineteen twenty-one.

What put it on the map in a lasting way was the sandstone beneath it, a buff-and-russet rock called Crab Orchard stone that builders came to prize in the nineteen twenties as both handsome and durable. It was used in Scarritt College in Nashville, in courthouses, and in countless structures across Tennessee and beyond.