Lookout Mountain: The Town That Sits Above the Battle

Most Civil War battlefields are flat or gently rolling, the kind of ground that troops can move across at speed. Lookout Mountain is none of that. It rises more than a thousand feet above the Tennessee River, a near-vertical escarpment of sandstone and limestone, and the small town that occupies its summit is one of the more unusual municipalities in the American South.

Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, is an incorporated town of roughly two thousand residents perched on the narrow top of the ridge. It shares the summit with Lookout Mountain, Georgia, which sits just across the state line, making this one of the few places in the country where a town straddles two states on top of a mountain.

Tourism shaped the summit long before the town was formally organized. In the eighteen eighties and nineties, entrepreneurs built two separate incline railways up the face of the mountain, along with a broad gauge railroad and a modern turnpike, all to move visitors up to the view. The Incline Railway that still operates today was engineered by John Crass and opened on November sixteenth, eighteen ninety-five. Near the top, the cars climb at a grade of seventy-two and seven-tenths percent, making it one of the steepest passenger railways in the world. Point Park, purchased by the federal government in the eighteen nineties, preserves the summit where Union soldiers raised the flag after the Battle Above the Clouds.

Two commercial landmarks, Ruby Falls and Rock City Gardens, joined the tourism economy in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Rock City became famous for its barn advertising, painted on hundreds of barns across many states with the slogan See Rock City. The town that grew up around these attractions has maintained its residential character while hosting millions of visitors a year, a combination that requires ongoing effort to manage and that Lookout Mountain navigates with the practiced ease of a place that has been in the business for more than a century.