Notes from an expedition
by Jack Neely
In all Knox County there's no more celebrated geographical feature. It's the name of a primary and middle school, a liquor store, a Baptist church, a mini-warehouse, a trafficky interstate exit, and the city's most-merciless towing company. There's a Cedar Bluff Library and a Cedar Bluff Post Office. It's so famous that a website for the local Holiday Inn refers to its location as "Cedar Bluff, TN."
A newcomer might guess it was one of Knoxville's chief tourist attractions. But go out and ask for directions to the actual cedar bluff. You may feel a little like Johnny Knoxville in some Jackass stunt.
Cedar Bluff Road is about two miles long and crosses a modest ridge, just north of I-40, but that's it. It's an area of low rolling hills. Bluffs are usually formed by rivers, but the river's three miles from here.
In America, there are places called Cedar Bluff, in Alabama, Virginia, and Missouri. Almost always, the nomenclature is obvious. Look them up on the web, and you'll even find photographs. In flat Kansas, Cedar Bluff is a striking limestone cliff dotted with cedar trees, overhanging the Smoky Hill River.
I lived right off Cedar Bluff Road for about a year in the '80s, and wondered about it. I pictured a rocky cliff with gnarled cedars growing from the crevasses. I figured that if I ever had the sort of job that would pay me to track things like that down, I'd find this forgotten vista. That's how I found myself out there last week, looking for it.
There aren't that many places where you can reasonably expect to find a bluff. I figured it might be somewhere on that steep wooded knoll between the Food Lion and Park West's medical campus. I parked my car and hiked a big circle around it. In my hour-long exploration in and around these dense woods hemmed by parking lots, I discovered one important fact about Cedar Bluff: Nobody walks here. Take a short hike around Cedar Bluff, and you quickly become a celebrity. I was stared and pointed at so much I finally know what it's like to be Johnny Depp.
Eager to fit in, I got in my car and drove over to the Cedar Bluff branch of the public library. My apparently unusual question stumped at least three librarians. I talked to some old-timers who'd been here long before the interstate and the motels and the hospital. No one remembered having actually seen a cedar bluff, or anything that looked like one. The role of Cedar Bluff historian is apparently vacant.
"Do you mean 'bluff' in the geographical sense," responded one Cedar Bluff real-estate man, "or in the poker sense?" I began to suspect it was the latter.
Still, I drove around looking for anything bluff-like. The landscaping around the modernist office buildings of the Cedar Bluff Office Park features an arrangement of weirdly shaped boulders. It's a giant-rock garden, with a little path weaving through it. Maybe there were some cedars on the steep overgrown hillside below, but it seemed unlikely that this place was what people were thinking about when they named Cedar Bluff.
Back in the office, I remembered attorney Tom McAdams mentioning something about it once. You won't find him hiking around Cedar Bluff, but he's an authority on many issues, and he knows something about this one. As it turns out, cedar trees have nothing to do with it. McAdams lives in Bearden but knows about Cedar Bluff Road because he was curious about his dining-room floor.
He bought his marbly home ten years ago, impressed with the unusual stone flooring in his dining room. Because of its brown-and-white coloring, he says, it's known as "cedar marble." To learn more about it, he attended a McClung Museum lecture given jointly by marble men Barksdale Jones and John Craig, the son of the man who built McAdams' house; both experts have since died, but McAdams remembers their talk well.
Several decades ago, when Knoxville was famous as the Marble City, one of our best sources of cedar marble was an isolated quarry in West Knox County. You can see it in an 1895 map of Knox County, the one hanging near the bathroom at the McClung Collection: a dot marked "Marble Quarry" is about the only thing out there. McAdams says that quarry was on the north side of what's now that oddly embellished office park. It was the sort of quarry that bit into the side of a hill, forming a bluff, of sorts.
"It was a 'bluff' of cedar marble," McAdams says. "This road that led to the bluff of cedar marble, they began to call Cedar Bluff Road."
Well, it made sense. That must be it, that long escarpment alongside that gravel path, partly covered with kudzu.
I went back. From the road, it doesn't look like much more than an overgrown backyard, just a rare green break in the asphalt. The area's right between driveways and only yards from Cedar Bluff Road, but pathless, overgrown, and partly fenced off; to even get a good look at it this time of year, you might have to get some thorns in your shirt, and maybe do some sliding in the mud. But there it is, full of water, with a rocky cliff no bigger than the side of a house. A cedar bluff, maybe. It's an old quarry, not nearly as big as the ones in South and East Knoxville, but dramatically steep for such a small place. Something large and unused to visitors splashed into the pool.
West Knoxville's most celebrated geographical feature is unmarked except with spent cans of Natural Ice, the choice of trespassers everywhere.
September 26, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 39
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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