Monday June 23rd 2008, Sunny, 88*
Our son Mike come to spend the night with us last night, we picked him up in Knoxville on Sunday evening. Haven't seen him for quite awhile due to him not being able to get enough time off work to come visit so this was the perfect solution. This park is only about an hour away from him.
Monday afternoon we hopped in the truck and headed off to Cumberland Mountain State Park for their lunch buffet. They call it chicken crazy days. They had fried chicken, chicken strips, chicken and dumplins, chicken soup and then an assortment of vegetables and deserts. Good feast for $7.95 a person. To say the least we were all stuffed like turkeys before we left!
We waddled out of there and headed for the Homestead tower, back in the 1930's they created the homestead act in an effort to make communities self sufficient, so people unemployed and down on their luck who had no skill were given the chance to better themselves and help the community. So they could pick a piece of ground and build a house on it. There were skilled tradesmen to teach them and guide the way. Mostly masons and carpenters, the people would work everyday learning and helping build others houses. We were given an example that perhaps each guy would make $30 and $20 of it would go to the purchase of the property and the construction of the house, leaving them $10 to live on. This was done in many states and Ohio was one of them and that is in the Dayton area. Now that I know about it I can research and see if they are available to tour. With the exception of one house all the others are privately owned and not available for tour. Here I believe there were 254 houses built on nealy 10,000 acres. You paid the same amount of money regardless of whether you had 5 acres or 125 acres. The Tower was the first building constructed and from there they said you could see the majority of the houses being built, there are 97 steps to climb to the top of the tower. Of course now trees have grown up and few can be seen. The
archetucture and symmetrical design is incredible and great pride was taken in building these homes. The woodwork was all made at a sawmill they built to produce all the necessary lumber needed and that all coming from trees in the area.
Interestingly we went to the one house you can tour, now part of the deal was the house had to be built with native materials which here would be sandstone slab rock. So all the house look similar in manufacture though not necessarily the same in design. The walls were up to 14" thick as the rock was layed flat unlike houses built today with stone fronts where the face of the rock is put flat against the wall. It is easy to pick the original houses out. Very time consuming to build walls when the block is only about 2-3 inches thick. Anywho, my point I was heading to was the house we toured was hit by a tornado in 2003, the house itself took the F3 tornado and remained standing while the houses around it of modern manufacture were destroyed. This particular house had an original style refrigerator in it at the time of the tornado, when you look at the side of the refrigerator you can see a LARGE dent where the tornado drove a 2x4 thru the wall and hit it! Much of the roof remained as did the walls and the house was restored to original condition. Cost of tour for the house and the Tower museum is only $2 per person per place. Well worth seeing if you come to the Crossville area.
After that we headed off to find another Falls we were told about by the lady at the Tower museum. Ozone Falls, both her and the Buddy the gentleman at the house we went thru warned us not to get to close to the edge as there were no railings. THEY WERE RIGHT! HOLY COW! I got down to the falls, walked as close as I dared and sat on my butt and scooted to the edge to look over! Quite a rush of feeling to be that close to going over. This falls is 110' and although not a huge falls by any means was still spectacular to see it. There is just merely a creek that flows over the falls and at the bottom is a large pool of water and a LOT of rocks. After seeing the top side we went in search of the bottom, a trail that had a pointer that said Pool, we hadn't gone far and it was looking like a rough trail, so I said I would go ahead and check it out while they waited up top. WOW, that was a hike, the further down the trail I went the more intrigued I became, along the way were small caverns and lots of big rocks, not an easy hike by any means. It could definitely be considered and unimproved trail! Anyway I made it to the bottom and you could actually stand behind the falls as the wall of the canyon was carved out. I took several picture and a short movie of it and headed back. By the time I got back up top I was exhausted and my legs told me I am in no shape at all! This was much worse than when w e were at Dover, Ohio for the metal detecting hunt climbing the steep hills!
From here we headed to a Mennonite community that had several stores, mainly we were told of the leather shop where you could get a real leather belt for cheap. Well just the trip was an experience, about 8-10 miles of narrow winding steep hills and then suddenly OUT pops the stores! We browsed the store and I did find a nice leather belt cut to length for $16. Pretty impressive the work they do there, they made a lot of saddles and gun belts with scabbards and such. A hand made all leather western style saddle was $210! That is stupid cheap! If you wanted to get fancy they had the all decked out and metal studded saddle that cost $750 but that was like a show saddle! I was quite impressed.
Right next door was the general store with a lot of home made candies and fudges and other supplies like flours and bread mixes, we picked up an assortment of candies and I got a bottle of hot chocolate mix in french vanilla flavor, it comes in what reminds you of an old style clear glass milk bottle.
Well by now it is getting late and we had to get Mike back to Knoxville so we had to hightail it back to the campground and let Major out and go meet Mikes friend John for dinner. We barely had enough time to get all this done. :) But we did make it and had another way to large for us dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Remember we eat one meal a day and we already had a VERY large lunch which is when we normally have our meal. Now we packed a huge Mexican dinner on top of that! AUUGHHHHHHHHHHHH stuffed again!
End of the day, sun setting on more memories!
