The Three Grand Divisions

Draw a line south to north along the Cumberland Plateau, then another along the Highland Rim, and you have divided Tennessee into three distinct worlds. Residents here have understood that geography for a long time. The state constitution of eighteen thirty-five formally recognized the three grand divisions, East Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, and West Tennessee, giving each its own seat on the Supreme Court, a constitutional acknowledgment that the land itself shapes the people who live on it.

East Tennessee is folded mountains and narrow limestone valleys, the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky range rising to the highest peaks in the state. The soil is thin and the farms were small. Slavery never took the same hold here that it did elsewhere, and when secession came in eighteen sixty-one, most East Tennessee counties voted to stay in the Union.

The Tennessee River is born here, threading through Appalachian ridges before bending west. Middle Tennessee opens into the Central Basin, a great oval depression of phosphate-rich limestone that grows some of the finest pasture in the eastern United States. This is the land of the Hermitage, of bluegrass and thoroughbred horses, of towns that grew fat on the Nashville Turnpike.

The Cumberland River drains it toward the Ohio. West Tennessee is something else entirely: the western coastal plain of the ancient Mississippi Embayment, flat bottomland cotton country whose tributaries run straight to the great river. Its culture, its crops, and its music point south toward Memphis and the Delta.

Three states compressed into one, held together by a single constitution and the long memory of the mountains watching it all.