The Land
Before the Lake

You drive out here from Nashville — an hour down I-40, a turn onto the Scenic Byway, and suddenly you're climbing through wooded ridgelines above a lake that seems to appear from nowhere — and it's easy to think of this as a place that has always just been a beautiful backdrop. Water. Trees. Quiet. A good place to stop and breathe.

But this land has stories going back thousands of years. The hills you're looking at from the deck, the creeks that drain into the lake's coves, the little towns you pass through on the way to get groceries — all of it has been layered, slowly, by people who came here for the same reason most of us do. It looked like a good place to build something.

This is the history of DeKalb County before — and beyond — the lake.

The first people to call this part of the Highland Rim home left their marks in the soil — stone-lined graves, burial mounds, remnants of campsites along the river bottoms. Nineteenth-century settlers dug them up on their farms near Liberty and elsewhere in the county, finding skeletons arranged in a sitting posture inside rock-walled chambers. The people who built them are known now only as the Mound Builders, or Stone Grave culture — a term that tells us more about what they left behind than who they actually were.

By the time European settlers arrived, those earlier inhabitants were long gone. What had replaced them was something unusual: a vast, rich, and largely unpeopled hunting ground. Cherokee and Chickasaw groups used the Caney Fork valley and the surrounding Highland Rim as common hunting territory — a deliberately shared wilderness, stocked with buffalo, bear, deer, and elk — but neither tribe made permanent settlements here. The valleys were too valuable as neutral ground to claim.

That arrangement held until the late 1700s, when American settlers began pressing in from the east. The 1791 Treaty of Holston established an "Indian Line" that made it technically illegal for settlers to cross into the region — but the line proved difficult to enforce, and by the turn of the century, the first permanent homesteads were going in along Smith Fork, just a few miles from where Smithville now stands.

In 1797, a man named Adam Dale arrived from Maryland and settled on a creek called Smith Fork, near what is now the town of Liberty. He is recorded as DeKalb County's first permanent European settler, and everything about how he got here says something about how hard it was to get here. He and a small group of followers cut a road through forest and canebrake all the way from Nashville — a journey that took several weeks and required chopping a path through terrain so dense the wagons couldn't pass otherwise.

Within a few years, a colony of several dozen families from Maryland had followed, coming down the Ohio River, up the Cumberland to Nashville, and overland from there. They settled in and around Liberty, cleared land, built mills on the creeks, and started growing corn. By 1800, Adam Dale had erected the county's first grist mill on Smith Fork. A few years later, a man named Jesse Allen had a cotton gin, a distillery, and an iron forge running on Pine Creek — the first manufacturing in the county, pulling iron ore out of the nearby mountains.

Between 1805 and 1815, settlers would load keelboats on the Caney Fork and float them all the way to New Orleans, trading furs and produce for salt — which sold in the settlements for as much as $10 a bushel on the return trip. The river you're looking at from the deck wasn't just a pretty view. It was a highway.

The county itself was officially established in December 1837, carved out of portions of Cannon, Warren, and White counties. It was named for Johann DeKalb — a Bavarian-born major general who fought for the American cause in the Revolution and died of wounds at the Battle of Camden in 1780. The county seat, Smithville, took its name not from any local Smith family but from Samuel Granville Smith of Jackson County, a state senator and Tennessee's Secretary of State who had nothing to do with the county at all. That kind of political naming was standard practice. The actual founders — Dale, Allen, Fite — got their names on creeks and hollows instead.

DeKalb County did something unusual when Tennessee voted on secession in June 1861: a sizeable minority of its citizens voted against it. In a state and a region that was moving hard toward the Confederacy, this county was genuinely divided — and that division produced one of the stranger local stories of the entire war.

Two men dominated DeKalb County politics before the war. John H. Savage was a former congressman and Smithville attorney — a Democrat, a secessionist, and a proud son of the South. William B. Stokes was his rival — also a congressman, also a slave owner, but a Unionist who believed leaving the country was a catastrophic mistake. They had been political enemies for years. When the war came, they each raised a regiment and went to fight: Savage commanded the 16th Tennessee Infantry for the Confederacy; Stokes led the 5th Tennessee Cavalry for the Union.

Their political rivalry turned into a military one, playing out across the county's hills and hollows for the duration of the war. Confederate guerrillas operated out of the ridgelines, harassing Unionist communities around Liberty and Smithville. Union cavalry swept the roads. Horses, mules, corn, and ham were seized from farms on both sides. A widow in Smithville had two mules and seventeen loads of cut corn taken in a single raid. The battle of Snow's Hill, fought near Liberty on April 3, 1863, engaged roughly two thousand men on each side. For a county that had spent its first fifty years just trying to build something, the war was a thorough undoing.

After the war, DeKalb County settled back into what it had always been: a farming community on the Eastern Highland Rim, working the same creek bottoms and ridge-top fields that Adam Dale's generation had cleared by hand. Electricity didn't reach the towns until the late 1920s. Rural families wouldn't get it until the late 1940s. The county's population actually declined between 1900 and 1920, as young people drifted toward the cities.

But a few things were quietly remarkable. Alexandria hosted the first DeKalb County Fair in 1856 — and it's still held there every year. The fairground grandstand is the oldest in the state and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The same town's Seay Chapel United Methodist Church, a former African American church, is also on the National Register — and you may remember it from the Du Bois blog, since that's where a young W.E.B. Du Bois attended services during his teaching summers here in 1886 and 1887.

Meanwhile, the Caney Fork kept running through the valley, providing water power for mills and, come the right season, a navigable route south toward the Cumberland. It was a self-sufficient corner of Tennessee — quiet, complicated, and older than it looked.

Since the lake came in 1948, DeKalb County has reinvented itself in ways its keelboat-era founders couldn't have imagined — and in other ways that would feel completely familiar to them. The craftsmanship tradition is one of them.

Perched on the Highland Rim above Center Hill Lake, the Appalachian Center for Craft is Tennessee's largest craft institution — a Tennessee Tech University facility that blends traditional Appalachian craft with contemporary art across blacksmithing, clay, fiber, glass, and wood. It sits on over 500 wooded acres overlooking the lake, and its gallery carries work from nationally recognized artists. The craft tradition it preserves — making things by hand from the materials the land provides — is genuinely continuous with what the earliest settlers were doing on these ridgelines two hundred years ago. Jesse Allen's iron forge on Pine Creek feels like a distant ancestor of the blacksmithing programs at the Craft Center today.

And then there's the Fiddler's Jamboree. Every Fourth of July weekend since 1971, Smithville's courthouse square has hosted one of the most celebrated old-time music competitions in the South. The National Old Time Fiddlers' Contest & Bluegrass Festival draws competitors and listeners from across the country. If you've ever wanted to understand what the musical culture of the Highland Rim actually sounds like — not the polished Nashville version, but the thing underneath it — the Jamboree is where to go.

The county today is still small and still rural. It still grows things. It still makes things. The lake made tourism a real part of the economy, and the proximity to Nashville has brought in a new wave of visitors who come for the water and the quiet. But underneath all of that is a place with a very long memory — Mound Builders, Cherokee hunters, Maryland frontiersmen, Civil War colonels, and a young man from Massachusetts who taught school in a corn crib and went on to change the country. That's DeKalb County. That's what's under the deck.

Most people who visit Center Hill Lake don't know any of this. They come for the water, which is the right reason to come. But knowing the ground under the lake — who hunted it, who farmed it, who fought over it, who taught school in a corn crib on the ridge — gives the view from the deck a little more weight. This isn't just a beautiful place. It's a place that has been beautiful to a very long line of people, and that has asked something real from every one of them.