Off Limits (2011) s01e05 Episode Script
Tennessee
Let's see if I can poke myself into these little spaces.
Look, this is why I'm nervous.
Welcome to Tennessee where the hills are hiding more than you think power stations straight out of James Bond.
So this was soild rock before.
Outrages.
Secret moonshining towns Gunfire I hope that's from hunters.
And treacherous prehistoric caves.
One step, and you're falling right down into that slot.
I'm going bottoms-up in appalachia.
- It's burnin'.
- It's east Tennessee "off limits.
" In every city, every town are places sealed off from the rest of the world," hiding their amazing stories, behind locked doors, inside barbed wire, where they say you cannot go.
I'm don wildman, and these are the places I live to explore, the ones they tell you are off limits.
off limits s01e05 all forward! Let's get through this chop.
All forward! Getting tossed into an ice-cold Tennessee river is one way to wake up in the morning.
But it's the price you pay to find an illegal moonshine town deep in the heart of the appalachian back country The great valley of east Tennessee.
Ringed by the appalachian mountains, crisscrossed by rushing rivers, it looks tranquil, but for hundreds of years, people here have waged a desperate battle for survival.
They've risked their lives to live off the land and outside the law.
It's hard to make a living in the holler, but you do what you can to keep from going under.
How many people drowned in that rapid? One person me.
That was insane.
Today, my crew and I have been battling class iv rapids to try to find the ruins of lost cove, a town that ran on illegal moonshine for 50 years in utter isolation.
Roads don't go there, so if we want to see it, this is the quickest way.
All forward! We shoved off near the north carolina/ Tennessee border, and we're heading 5 Miles down the nolichucky river to an unmarked inlet, where we'll tie up and hike a mile and a half into the woods.
Fortunately, our guide, rafter Ben Gibson, knows the nolichucky and its lore inside and out.
We're about 5 Miles from where we put in.
So no inroads here.
These people were out here for a reason, which was to stay secret.
Yeah, I mean, the Mountain people had their own lifestyle.
They didn't want to be troubled by, you know, all the problems of the outside world.
Sure, yeah.
Moonshine goes back to the earliest days of the U.
S.
, when the government tried to tax whiskey to pay for the revolutionary war.
Locals were defiant and used readily available corn to churn out their own booze.
The same thing happened during the civil war, but enforcing the law was next to impossible out in the wilderness.
- So we're getting out here? - Yeah.
All right.
So this is the landing for lost cove.
And somewhere up that Mountain right in front of us We're gonna find it.
But we gotta hike up there.
The unmarked trail starts across live tracks for long freight trains.
Then it's a steep mile-and-a-half trek to the bluffs of the nolichucky gorge to find the ruins of lost cove.
- So right up this way? - Yeah.
All right.
The rafting crew is staying behind to keep an eye on the boats while Ben and I head up the Mountain.
You think we're walking on the very path that we Oh, yeah.
I mean, it hasn't been used for about 50 years or so, but And this would have taken them right down to the railroad that we crossed coming up here.
And that would have been their primary means of getting, you know, upriver and downstream.
It's long gone now, but there used to be a small train stop at the bottom of this hill, where thirsty rail man lined up to buy the cove's hooch.
For decades, the railroad was lost cove's biggest marketplace and its only connection with the outside world.
- They are really in the middle of nowhere.
- Yeah, quite.
So we are pretty close to the top here.
After a half-hour climb, the road starts to level out.
Oh, here we go.
There is a structure.
Lost cove.
That is really neat.
Man, this looks like Daniel Boone But really a pretty Pretty neat structure.
Look, I mean, all of this looks to be, I mean, up here for a reason.
These are some sort of drying shed or something like that, right? - And, you know, in addition to the shining - Okay.
They probably traded other wares.
It's classic Mountain, you know, subsistence living.
Far from a hillbilly hideaway, this was a fully self-sustaining farming community from the 1860s well into the 20th century.
Plenty of Mountain creeks made for a full range of crops and fed the stills that turned cheap corn into profitable liquor.
Up here, shine was called "life water, " used for medicine, barter, and crucial income in lean times.
Look at that truck.
How cool is that? Jeez, that's like a 19 what would you say a 1930s, '40s at the ear Round about.
Gunfire I hope that's from hunters.
There you go.
It's pretty much understood that nascar I mean, what we know as stock car racing today, modern racing, comes from the moonshining days, yeah? Oh, yeah.
When prohibition hit, demand for bootleg liquor skyrocketed, and people had to find ways to smuggle booze to the big cities.
It was really easy to spot a shine runner, because all the shine in the trunk of your car, it would weigh it down.
So then they got into modifying Tightened up the shocks so it rides higher.
They found ways to modify their cars Supercharge 'em, turbocharge 'em - Any way to outrun the cops.
- Exactly.
And the first big racing hero of nascar - Junior Johnson was actually a moonshiner, right? - That's true.
Excellent.
That is so cool.
- I mean, that's just taking American history and squishing it together.
- That's right.
Up here, the closest road was iffy, and the whole community probably shared a car or two.
But over time, lost cove's dependence on outside income became a fatal weakness.
I mean, when does this whole place when does it stop? As the railroad became more and more prevalent, uh, they moved the station up the tracks, and then they took out the station.
So when that railroad shuts down, there's no other way for these people to live, - and eventually they start moving off.
- Right I mean, it becomes basically a Mountain ghost town.
The last family left in 1957, almost 100 years after lost cove was founded.
Look up here.
They say that there's, uh, still a cemetery up there.
Sure enough, right on the top of the hill.
Unbelievable.
They say every family that lived in lost cove buried someone here.
All these families this is the tipton name here Nola tipton, died in 1918, wiley tipton, 1934, Russell tipton I mean, they've got generations here.
I mean, it speaks to the fact, just like all over Southern Tennessee I mean, family is everything.
It wasn't just evading the law.
It was a way of life and a place to die.
The forest is eating away at what's left of lost cove and the last remnants of a Mountain culture built on grit, self-determination, and a whole lot of spirit.
It's like the whole building is the machine.
The secret world of real Tennessee whiskey.
- God bless America.
- That's right.
And this engineering lifesaver only looks like a candy factory.
This whole place has been excavated.
The era of hidden moonshining towns like lost cove is long gone.
But today, the original Mountain dew still flows in Tennessee.
You just have to know where to look.
I'm heading into the foothills of the great smoky mountains to see something that years ago would have gotten an outsider shot.
Chilly day outside Knoxville.
I'm here to meet these guys who are, uh, making moonshine the old-fashioned way.
It still happens in this part of Tennessee In fact, more than ever.
Today, I'm meeting up with some Tennessee locals who are gonna give me a behind-the-scenes look at the once-illegal process of making white lightning, starting where they do, at the corn mill.
This is the real thing.
Hello.
Hey, excuse me.
How you doing? Joe Baker owns the shine distillery, but he gets his star ingredient from his cousin, mill owner clive Valentine.
It's all family.
My brother-in-law This is my brother right here.
- Nice.
- Just about all family - Everybody around here is family.
- Everybody in the mountains is family.
Clive doesn't normally let people wander inside his prized vintage mill, but today, he's giving us special access.
Clive's been in this his family's been in this business for a long time.
Oh, yeah? So your grandfather and everybody's been doing this stuff.
Uh, yes.
Similar work.
An old photograph up there on the wall.
- Oh, this is it, huh? - Yeah.
This was my grandfather Valentine Brent Valentine.
And then this is my grandfather's grandfather will Valentine.
Will Valentine fought for the federal army during the civil war.
- Oh, really.
- Yeah, most of east Tennessee was federal.
- Really? - It wasn't confederate.
- Oh, interesting.
Most of this equipment was adapted from clive's grandfather's general store.
It's a hand-built labor of love that snakes through the entire building.
All right, so this is floor two.
There's another floor up above.
It's like the whole building is the machine, isn't it? Yeah, just watch your head.
The system goes all the way back to the 1700s and was invented to allow one Miller to run the entire operation.
And all of these belts are all driving various sizes and speeds of machinery, - and you have to calibrate all this together.
- Right.
I mean, it seems to be running very smoothly.
Uh, so far.
Clive's mill turns out 10,000 pounds of cornmeal a week.
Just as good for making cornbread as it is for making liquor.
It all starts on the first floor, where the corn travels up tiny grain elevators to the attic to be cleaned.
Next, it's down to the basement for grinding and back up to the first and second floors for sifting and bagging, all without any human intervention.
In fact, the whole operation is powered by 1 tractor engine from the 1950s.
So that's running the whole thing? That's running everything in the mill all at one time.
These are techniques that have been passed from family to family here in Tennessee, yeah? Exactly.
In every community, there was a small mill, because they had to be within walking distance of a mill every week.
Everybody had to have fresh cornmeal.
But once they got trucks, small mills wasn't needed anymore.
The mill in Knoxville started supplying all the communities.
Clive's old-time mill churns out the freshest cornmeal around.
- So can I grab a little out of it? - Go ahead.
Sure.
So that is the cornmeal.
Oh, yeah, you can feel very fine.
- And this is what gets distilled into moonshine.
- Exactly.
That's what they use to make the moonshine.
See, we're old-time Southern baptists.
We just grind the corn for the moonshine.
Somebody else does that evil stuff.
Yeah.
- Well, it's not evil anymore, because it's legal.
- Oh, I see.
Tennessee has some of the toughest liquor laws in the nation.
But in 2009,a cash-strapped government eased up so more people could distill spirits.
Clive doesn't touch the stuff, but I plan to.
It was a real pleasure.
All right.
Take it easy.
All right.
I got my meal.
Let's go, uh, make some moonshine.
All right.
Joe is taking me to his moonshine distillery South of here in gatlinburg, tennessee.
In fact, it's the first legal shine operation in Tennessee history.
My family came to east Tennessee during the 1790s just out of necessity and, you know, a desire to take care of their family making liquor.
Do you remember the first time you ever made whiskey in your family? I was about 14 years old.
It's it's funny how, you know, families have their own ideas about what's right or wrong.
My mammaw probably wouldn't be real proud of me drinkin' whiskey, but she wouldn't mind for me to sell it.
So it was for her, it was a sin to drink it, but it wasn't a sin to make it.
Well, that's very practical.
Joe's agreed to let me and my crew into the restricted operations room - This is where we make our whiskey.
- All right.
To see how he distills cornmeal into good old-fashioned shine.
So we're calling it moonshine, but it's whiskey essentially the same thing or not? What we make is truly a whiskey.
It's, uh, and it's what would have been made here in the mountains 150 years ago.
It's it is true corn liquor, corn whiskey.
Unlike other whiskeys, moonshine isn't aged, so every little thing they do to it now can make a huge difference.
He might look like a kid, but Justin king is actually a master distiller, and he's gonna school me on the art of making moonshine.
Our ground corn all starts here in this cooker.
It's just basically cornmeal with water added.
We just bring it all to a boil.
That makes your sugar conversion.
You add your yeast to it.
It's actually pumped into one of our two fermenters.
It ferments for a few days or whenever Justin deems it ready, and then is pumped into a pot still where it's heated up, and the alcohol vapor is siphoned out.
- So this is all filled with with vapor in there - Right.
Coming across here and being fed directly into this barrel.
Right.
This cold water hits these hot steam pipes, and it condenses back into a liquid.
That vapor turning back into liquidIs the moonshine.
Liquid.
IsIs your moonshine.
That's so cool.
You're adjusting timing as well as temperatures.
You can really screw it up, I would imagine.
Yeah, you can screw it up.
That's for sure.
They add water to knock down this 160-proof firewater to a mellower 100.
That's 50% alcohol.
That's what I get to try.
- Justin, you want some? - Sure.
You can drink on the job.
That's the best part of this, isn't it? - So this is corn whiskey - This is, 100-proof corn whiskey.
Distilled the old-fashioned moonshiner way.
- It's as real as it gets.
- Here's to ole smoky.
Thank you.
Wow, that's really good.
It's really flavorful.
- You can taste the corn.
- I can taste the corn.
Ahh, moonshine.
It's burnin'.
- All right, bottoms up.
- Cheers.
They make all kinds of seasonal varieties here, including a devious concoction called "apple pie.
" Wow, that's dangerous.
You don't even know you're drinking alcohol.
" Turns out moonshine's far from just a cheap, illicit way to get drunk.
Mazel tov.
- Cheers, man.
- Cheers.
That is great.
It's a proud tradition refined over generations.
- God bless America.
- That's right.
I've been bushwhacking through the whole forest here.
Tracking down an old coal mine isn't easy, and finding it is even worse.
Look, this is why I'm nervous.
These rolling Tennessee hills have been home to some of the most fiercely independent folks in American history.
But when coal came to town in the 1800s, these appalachian homesteaders traded self-reliance for security and found out it was a lousy bargain.
The hills of eastern Tennessee are absolutely riddled with the other black gold Coal.
The coal business has fueled the economy in this part of the country for more than a century, creating its own culture here in appalachia.
Everybody knows coal mining is a tough job.
But if you venture up into those hills, really see where the miners work, you'll get a whole other view of Tennessee's toughest job.
At the turn of the last century, coal was fueling the industrial revolution all over America.
Mineral-rich appalachia became the heart of a feeding frenzy.
Company towns sprouted up everywhere.
And for the people who worked the coal seams, life was never the same.
Historian Jamie woodcock is taking me to find the hidden ruins of one of the only towns left standing and the abandoned McNabb mines that put it on the map.
She's taking me 20 Miles west of Chattanooga, down a winding road on the banks of the Tennessee river and up into a dense forest.
I mean, we've been driving for a good length of time And you feel like you're way, way out here.
And I imagine in those in the day, the 19th century, this is the sticks.
Absolutely.
I mean, it still is.
I mean, I'm getting carsick just going over this road here.
Back in the day, any sort of commute to the mines would have been out of the question, so companies like McNabb had to build towns to house the workers, most of them local farmers.
Out here, there are no marked trails, just lots and lots of forest that all looks the same.
Getting lost is easy and, miles from any city, a very bad idea.
How far away is this place? Oh, it's probably a couple hundred feet.
Oh, there it is.
I can see it.
Check this out.
Look.
See, she's taking me down you can barely see it.
There's a brick chimney right in there, and this foundation of one of these buildings.
Jamie, what is this structure here? I think this was probably the superintendent's house or the manager's house.
Nice nice fireplace.
Absolutely.
So we're seeing the foundation, the rock foundation, but it's likely it was a framed-out-wall building - and maybe some nice gables.
This this would have been a nice place to live.
- Yes.
It was definitely someone of a different class than, uh, the rest of the workers here.
Today, it looks like a pile of rocks, but when it was built in the 1880s, the town stretched over 457 acres.
It contained 40 homes, workshops, a school, church, even a posh hotel.
So this is, uh, we're in the midst of this community right here.
- Yes.
Well, here we have the company store.
- Oh, really? Yeah, this is, uh, where everyone who lived here would've come to get their food, their clothing.
Out here, this was the only job in town, and the company took full advantage.
They had to buy their own mining equipment.
They bought dynamite, black powder, caps.
These are things that they had to use to actually do their job, and they had to buy it from the company who paid them.
- All right, so it's it's a bit of a racket.
- Yes.
These once self-reliant farmers now owed everything to the mining company, from their rent to the shirts on their backs, and the company made sure they couldn't leave.
You're making your money up there, and you're not making a lot.
- Right.
- And how do they get paid? They actually got paid in scrip, which I have some examples here.
These are different denominations of coin.
- And what would these be worth? - That one was worth a dollar.
- Okay.
Is it like foreign exchange? You can go out of townAnd just get - No.
- You can't you can't exchange itDown in Chattanooga? - No.
No.
No.
So you you're very much enslaved to this site to this company.
To understand what this town was really all about, you have to see the mine itself.
It's difficult to get there and extremely dangerous to explore, so Jamie's staying behind.
But she pointed me in the direction of the shaft, half a mile up the hill.
Oh, look, look, look, look.
Here it is.
I feel it.
I feel it.
I feel it.
I do feel it in my eye.
Check this out.
Look at this.
All along here, everywhere underfoot, you can see big pieces of bituminous coal, what with this being transported And look, that that's very cool, a little miniature rail spike from the railroad that would have been running right down here All this evidence of what went on 100 years ago.
I've been, uh, bushwhacking through the whole thick forest here and all of a sudden, found myself on what is essentially this ramp.
This is actually from the period of the McNabb mine.
I mean, clearly this is a road that was meant to carry a lot of weight and a lot of men.
Oh, here we go.
Here we go.
Excellent.
There it is.
Let's go in.
Whoo, look at that.
Damn.
That is really neat.
Finally.
A coal mine from a century ago right down this way.
Right away, I mean, just entering this mine, you can see why it's here in the first place.
This is a seam of bituminous coal, okay? Running straight into the Mountain, and there's another one right here.
So they basically would start this mine and just start digging on this seam and start carrying it out.
And as you moved along, that became the shaft behind me.
This is called a drift mine.
The horizontal shaft is blasted with explosives, and then hand-chiseled to extract coal from the side of a hill.
It's one of the cheaper ways to mine, but it's also one of the most dangerous.
In fact, several other entrances have completely caved in.
Look at this whole Mountain collapsing, okay? All this rock could, as I walk under it, fall on us.
Okay, look oh, how about this? This is a prop from the day, holding up the ceiling.
I mean, think of that aspect of this, the claustrophobia I'm feeling right now times, you know, a hundred.
These guys are in the dark with their little lanterns, right? It gets creepier and creepier as you go.
Yeah, that is nice.
That's a cricket.
These are actually poisonous, so be careful.
Watch the bats.
The locals make things a little hairier for us, but they're nothing compared to the hazards the miners faced.
In just a decade, between 1906 and 1916, explosions, fires, and collapses in the appalachian coal mines killed over a thousand men and boys as young as 10.
Unfortunately, child labor in the mines was common until one key turn-of-the-century invention exposed it flash photography.
Finally, social reformers were able to document what was going on and convince the U.
S.
government to crack down on child exploitation.
Even today, coal mines are extremely dangerous places.
I'm 100 yards in, following the coal seam as it gets a lot more narrow.
You can see how they're supporting themselves as they go along.
Not so technical, right? Sticking a lot of rock in there, on both sides over there, too You know, to protect themselves as they go.
It seems to me a fairly flawed system of making sure a Mountain doesn't come down on your head.
I'm so far down the seam, there's no more room for a camera, so I'm using my phone to shoot.
Let's see if I can poke myself into these little spaces just to see if I can get any sense of what it must have been like to work here.
Incredibly, uh Um, claustrophobic this is.
This is somebody's workspace.
And look at what I'm working in.
That's the office for this guy.
Oh, my lord.
This is the room they have cleared out by lying on their back and their side, literally chis chiseling out this coal in this position.
Look, this is why I'm nervous A crack of rock right underneath, and it just keeps running.
That's why we're getting outta here right now.
That's that's a hell of a way to make a living, right? As extensive as this mine is, it wasn't enough to keep the place going for long.
By 1910,mcnabb went belly-up.
The people dispersed.
Some left to find work elsewhere, but some stayed to reclaim an independent lifestyle.
It was a hard life, but at least they were free.
So this would have been just filled up with With mud and silt and had to be cleared out.
A controversy buried under a Southern Metropolis.
You can't run a city like this.
If you've heard of Chattanooga, you probably know it's got a rail line.
For hundreds of years, it's been considered the gateway to the deep South, thanks to its elaborate transportation system.
But this quaint city with a famous choo-choo had to overcome a stormy past.
After the civil war ended, Chattanooga, just like the rest of the American South, struggled to rebuild.
This was the difficult age of reconstruction and made even more difficult here in Chattanooga by a series of epic floods that struck the Tennessee valley.
Flooding here has always been a problem.
But in 1867,the worst flood in Chattanooga history brought the city to its knees.
The waters got so high, a steamboat captain steered his vessel all the way downtown.
But on the banks of the Tennessee river, flooding is a fact of life.
Take a look at this.
I mean, there's been a lot of rain here recently, and this walkway is just underwater.
I mean, that's just a raised riverbank, a regular feature of life in Chattanooga.
I'm heading downtown to find out how 140 years ago, the citizens of Chattanooga found an extraordinary way to save their city by literally raising the streets above the flood plain.
I'm meeting up with archaeologist Nick honerkamp, a leading expert on early Chattanooga.
So this whole town has a whole nother level going on, right? We're about 8 or 10 feet above the original level of the city.
Interesting.
Nick tells me clues of Chattanooga¡¯s mysterious rise are hidden throughout the city.
You just have to know where to look.
- Here it is.
- Okay.
All right, it looks like a A window, a basement window.
There would be no reason to put in a window that fronts the dirt.
And all of these along here There's one here, one here, one here This would all be the first floor, basically, of this building.
Right.
They're windows and doors in an area that got filled up.
Fascinating.
And all the way around I might see more windows around here? Yeah.
Oh, I see.
Oh, okay.
Once you see it, it's hard to imagine any other explanation, but the city has its skeptics.
This is kind of a controversy in town, isn't it? Well, yeah, some people would say these arches are coal chutes.
- But what we're seeing is one, two five or six coal chutes? - That's a lot of coal.
I don't think so.
This is before Tennessee, uh, gets it together on a massive scale to fix the flood problem.
- This is the people's choice, right? - That's right.
This is a community effort to do something about the flooding.
Right.
In the late 1880s, postwar tensions still ran high between the state and the U.
S.
government.
According to Nick and other experts, instead of asking for federal help, the citizens banded together and carted fill from higher ground to raise the downtown street level and entire story, in some places as high as 20 feet.
Frustrating thing is there's no record of all this.
You'd think there would be, like, a city record of a choice that the whole place made to raise itself up.
So you're left with just, like, a detective story, trying to figure out why things are where they are.
There are few remaining spots where you can actually see old Chattanooga, and Nick's taking me to the largest.
It's hidden inside a modern gym, and it's off-limits to the public, because it's a maze of hazards.
Just kind of give it a little bit of a kick.
- And it's all you.
- Holy cow.
It is really an impressive space.
Man, okay, so before we get in it, what What are we even looking at here? We're in the belly of the beast.
Right now, I'd say we're under the street.
This massive space used to be a maintenance facility for Chattanooga's bustling transportation system from the time of horse-drawn carts all the way to modern buses.
100 years ago, it would have been teeming with repairmen working on trolley cars.
Look at these enormous pillars.
We try to find some kind of clue as to, you know, what area you're in.
I guess these are the old letterings that tell us which bay was which, right? - 933-r & blank c-10.
So this - Whatever that means.
Yeah, whatever that means.
Jeez, it just keeps going.
This thing is endless.
Yeah, it was big.
It's a whole block.
The facility had five bays and covered enough space to service dozens of trolleys for 110 Miles of track An amazing symbol for a city that had risen from the ashes of the civil war only to be devastated by Titanic floodwaters.
Incredibly wet down here, you know? This is Oh, we're so close to the water table.
So look, nick, I'm walking on, uh, on lots and lots of mud here.
It's still wet from the last rain we had a couple of days ago.
I mean, this is the story of Chattanooga, isn't it? I mean, just dealing with sediment all the time.
You could just keep digging down here And there's probably feet of of mud here.
You can't run a city like this.
Down here, on roughly the same level as the original city, you can begin to sense the magnitude of these floods.
So this would have been just filled up with With mud and silt and had to be cleared out.
These guys had to literally lift their city up to provide the The means with which to develop it further.
It speaks to how difficult it has been just making Chattanooga survive.
With almost no written records, a lot of people around here think Chattanooga's incredible civic feat is more urban legend than actual history.
But maybe the only evidence you need is that 100 years later, the city is still here and stronger than ever.
What's hiding in those hills is a lot bigger than you think.
So this was solid rock before? 1,000 feet below the top of the Mountain.
For hundreds of years, life in the east Tennessee mountains has been as hard and unchanging as the rocky terrain itself That is, until a revolutionary public works program drastically altered both the landscape and the community.
I'm driving to the top of raccoon Mountain.
Located just west of Chattanooga, this entire 1,800-foot peak has been retrofitted as an ingenious power station.
Man, all of this is the raccoon Mountain pump storage facility.
This is a man-made reservoir here that sits at the top of this Mountain.
And deep inside that Mountain is the power plant, one of many projects that together comprise the Tennessee valley authority.
It changed everything in this whole part of the world.
Look at the scope of this thing.
I mean, the t.
V.
A.
, man This is the big show in town.
In the 1930s, the t.
V.
A.
Was a lifeline in east Tennessee.
The great depression hit poor communities the hardest, and there was no poorer place than the Tennessee valley.
The soil was farmed out, resources depleted, and thousands were out of work, some literally starving to death.
But f.
D.
R.
Had an innovative plan to lift the region out of grinding poverty A government-owned corporation that would build power stations in the middle of nowhere.
Regional manager Tim gaddis is getting me into a facility that's strictly off-limits to the public, almost 40 floors down into the Mountain.
- This is a no-trespassing zone, huh? - That's correct.
- How far down do we go? - A little over 1,000 feet.
So when did this start, and how long did it take to finish? Construction began in 1970, and the first unit began generation in 1978.
Man, my ears have just been popping, huh? Down in the mine.
This is what we refer to as our generator floor, and we have four generating units here at raccoon Mountain.
That is amazing.
So this room actually was solid rock before all carved out.
Solid rock, 1,000 feet below the top of the Mountain.
The first step in this Mountain makeover was boring a 1,000-foot concrete tunnel down from the peak and excavating a space the size of a football field inside to make room for the plant.
Then an 8,500-foot dam was built on the mountaintop to create a man-made crater-shaped lake that holds 700 million gallons of water.
When that water is released, it hits the turbines below and creates electricity.
In the middle of the night, when the cost and demand for power is low, the water is pumped back uphill.
When the need for electricity spikes, it's released, and the cycle begins again, making it an incredibly cost-effective power source.
How does the water get back up? That's when we can turn these machines into a pump.
So the same apparatus is both used to create the electricity - and also pump the water.
- Correct.
And the most important moving part in the whole facility is hidden inside these Willy wonka casings A power-generating shaft spinning 300 times a minute.
We might not be able to hear each other very well.
All right, extra hearing protection.
We're not gonna be able to talk very much, but we can yell.
I can't hear you! If you think of the system as a giant engine, it generates over 580,000 horsepower.
Everything about this place, like the t.
V.
A.
Itself ,is wildly ambitious and Titanic in scale.
I mean, you can see how much of this whole place has been excavated.
Look at that.
That is dramatic.
There's a tunnel that way, a tunnel this way.
This is the one they used to bring all this rock out of here.
I mean, it gives you a sense of the scope of this effort outrageous.
Starting in 1970,it took 8 years to build this site.
Not bad when you consider they put a lake on top of a Mountain and a power plant inside it.
Listen to the hum.
That's the electricity being sent out on power lines in every direction here where once there was none.
But the electricity to build industry and the prosperity that That changed Tennessee and the Chattanooga area forever.
50 years ago, none of this was here, and now it's a testament to the fact that the t.
V.
A and the people of Tennessee are willing to literally move mountains for a chance at a better life.
Okay, this is gonna be tricky.
In Tennessee, you never do know what's underfoot.
Water just pouring in from 100 feet above us.
The t.
V.
A.
Reshaped raccoon Mountain into a state-of-the-art hydroelectric facility.
But the Mountain is hiding another side, a dark, vast, uncharted wildness, carved out over millions of years.
Look up into those mountains, you can see the layers and layers of ancient limestone.
Tennessee is world-famous for its caves.
There's thousands and thousands of them in the state, and more are being discovered all the time.
They're dangerous.
They're dark.
And for hard-core explorers, they're the last great frontier of Tennessee.
Tennessee has more caves than any other state, and they've been put to good use.
Deep in these mountains, native Americans found refuge, civil war soldiers mined saltpeter, and moonshiners stashed their booze.
The caves in this range were even used to shelter locals during the Cuban missile crisis.
Today, I'm heading deep into the other heart of raccoon Mountain to explore a massive cave system that threads through the Southern appalachians.
For security reasons, we cannot show you where or how we entered the Mountain, because parts of this cave are too dangerous to explore without a guide.
But caver Kyle oden agreed to take me in.
- This is where we're gonna enter right here.
- That's the doorway.
But once you get back here, it gets to be a little hairy.
Whatever the natural cave throws at us is what we're gonna do to get through it.
Yeah, lead on.
Here we go.
Kyle's helped map 5 1/2 Miles of this cave system, and he discovers new paths all the time.
Today, he's taking me through the slick, dark, and winding cavern to a huge waterfall that few people have ever seen.
The whole Tennessee region is famous for these caves, right? Yeah, the Tennessee or especially the Chattanooga areaIs referred to as t.
A.
G.
, 'cause we're right where Tennessee, alabama, and Georgia come together.
There are approximately 20,000 caves between the 3 states.
Amazing.
Originally, this would have been solid rock, of course.
The water comes in and erodes the limestone away, so you can get any type of passage Huge holes, small holes, very random.
This cave has been slowly carved out by the corrosive power of rainwater.
Just look at this.
I mean, this stuff takes millions of years to form.
It's called flowstone incredible.
I mean, just levels and levels of this stuff just building up over time.
This limestone dates back 300 million years, when two massive continents collided, creating the supercontinent pangaea and the appalachian Mountain range.
Over time, rainwater infiltrated cracks in the limestone, shaping this system.
Yep, gets tight, doesn't it? Slippery, too.
Okay, so there's several different passages here, and Kyle went nice.
Kyle went down to find out if we could get through this way.
Kyle, are you down there? There he is, sir.
What's it like? - It's no-go that way.
The water's way too high.
It's the only way we can go.
- All right.
The cave is full of wild, unmapped pockets, but as far back as the 1880s, caves here have helped power a robust tourism industry worth over $14 billion today.
But for people like Kyle, it's all about finding the stuff tourists don't see.
Okay, this is gonna be tricky.
Okay, this is a complete crawl here And a lot of water.
We are just gonna get wet.
That's all there is to it.
This is the good stuff.
Don't complain.
I love it.
This is what we came for.
Walking very precariously, 'cause look one foot down there, one misstep, and you're falling right down into that slot.
Just straddle your feet on both sides, 'cause it's really dangerous.
There's no no space on either side.
Oh, I can hear the water coming right around the corner.
We are gonna get wet.
Ooh, it's a shower.
Man, that's amazing.
Unbelievable.
Water's just pouring in from 100 feet above us.
All that water's coming straight from the surface.
Outrageous! All of this carved out by all this water coming down through the millions of years.
Man, it just it boggles the mind.
Thanks to Tennessee's year-round rainfall, this place is still changing.
What's the ultimate cave experience you're looking for? For me, it's to know that you can go through a crawl, go through a squeeze, get into a spot that no human being has ever been before.
It's such a wonderful feeling to stick your head in there and shine your light up on the ceiling and think, oh, I'm the very first human being that's ever seen this.
- And that's possible here.
- Exactly.
And there's parts of this cave and many other caves, and some caves that are incredibly well traveled have parts that no one's ever been to.
- This is your holy grail, man.
- It most certainly is.
For a long time, life in the rural hills of east Tennessee was hard won.
The people here beat the odds with a singular mix of craftiness and guts.
Even though life in the holler wasn't easy, it was certainly worth fighting for.
Look, this is why I'm nervous.
Welcome to Tennessee where the hills are hiding more than you think power stations straight out of James Bond.
So this was soild rock before.
Outrages.
Secret moonshining towns Gunfire I hope that's from hunters.
And treacherous prehistoric caves.
One step, and you're falling right down into that slot.
I'm going bottoms-up in appalachia.
- It's burnin'.
- It's east Tennessee "off limits.
" In every city, every town are places sealed off from the rest of the world," hiding their amazing stories, behind locked doors, inside barbed wire, where they say you cannot go.
I'm don wildman, and these are the places I live to explore, the ones they tell you are off limits.
off limits s01e05 all forward! Let's get through this chop.
All forward! Getting tossed into an ice-cold Tennessee river is one way to wake up in the morning.
But it's the price you pay to find an illegal moonshine town deep in the heart of the appalachian back country The great valley of east Tennessee.
Ringed by the appalachian mountains, crisscrossed by rushing rivers, it looks tranquil, but for hundreds of years, people here have waged a desperate battle for survival.
They've risked their lives to live off the land and outside the law.
It's hard to make a living in the holler, but you do what you can to keep from going under.
How many people drowned in that rapid? One person me.
That was insane.
Today, my crew and I have been battling class iv rapids to try to find the ruins of lost cove, a town that ran on illegal moonshine for 50 years in utter isolation.
Roads don't go there, so if we want to see it, this is the quickest way.
All forward! We shoved off near the north carolina/ Tennessee border, and we're heading 5 Miles down the nolichucky river to an unmarked inlet, where we'll tie up and hike a mile and a half into the woods.
Fortunately, our guide, rafter Ben Gibson, knows the nolichucky and its lore inside and out.
We're about 5 Miles from where we put in.
So no inroads here.
These people were out here for a reason, which was to stay secret.
Yeah, I mean, the Mountain people had their own lifestyle.
They didn't want to be troubled by, you know, all the problems of the outside world.
Sure, yeah.
Moonshine goes back to the earliest days of the U.
S.
, when the government tried to tax whiskey to pay for the revolutionary war.
Locals were defiant and used readily available corn to churn out their own booze.
The same thing happened during the civil war, but enforcing the law was next to impossible out in the wilderness.
- So we're getting out here? - Yeah.
All right.
So this is the landing for lost cove.
And somewhere up that Mountain right in front of us We're gonna find it.
But we gotta hike up there.
The unmarked trail starts across live tracks for long freight trains.
Then it's a steep mile-and-a-half trek to the bluffs of the nolichucky gorge to find the ruins of lost cove.
- So right up this way? - Yeah.
All right.
The rafting crew is staying behind to keep an eye on the boats while Ben and I head up the Mountain.
You think we're walking on the very path that we Oh, yeah.
I mean, it hasn't been used for about 50 years or so, but And this would have taken them right down to the railroad that we crossed coming up here.
And that would have been their primary means of getting, you know, upriver and downstream.
It's long gone now, but there used to be a small train stop at the bottom of this hill, where thirsty rail man lined up to buy the cove's hooch.
For decades, the railroad was lost cove's biggest marketplace and its only connection with the outside world.
- They are really in the middle of nowhere.
- Yeah, quite.
So we are pretty close to the top here.
After a half-hour climb, the road starts to level out.
Oh, here we go.
There is a structure.
Lost cove.
That is really neat.
Man, this looks like Daniel Boone But really a pretty Pretty neat structure.
Look, I mean, all of this looks to be, I mean, up here for a reason.
These are some sort of drying shed or something like that, right? - And, you know, in addition to the shining - Okay.
They probably traded other wares.
It's classic Mountain, you know, subsistence living.
Far from a hillbilly hideaway, this was a fully self-sustaining farming community from the 1860s well into the 20th century.
Plenty of Mountain creeks made for a full range of crops and fed the stills that turned cheap corn into profitable liquor.
Up here, shine was called "life water, " used for medicine, barter, and crucial income in lean times.
Look at that truck.
How cool is that? Jeez, that's like a 19 what would you say a 1930s, '40s at the ear Round about.
Gunfire I hope that's from hunters.
There you go.
It's pretty much understood that nascar I mean, what we know as stock car racing today, modern racing, comes from the moonshining days, yeah? Oh, yeah.
When prohibition hit, demand for bootleg liquor skyrocketed, and people had to find ways to smuggle booze to the big cities.
It was really easy to spot a shine runner, because all the shine in the trunk of your car, it would weigh it down.
So then they got into modifying Tightened up the shocks so it rides higher.
They found ways to modify their cars Supercharge 'em, turbocharge 'em - Any way to outrun the cops.
- Exactly.
And the first big racing hero of nascar - Junior Johnson was actually a moonshiner, right? - That's true.
Excellent.
That is so cool.
- I mean, that's just taking American history and squishing it together.
- That's right.
Up here, the closest road was iffy, and the whole community probably shared a car or two.
But over time, lost cove's dependence on outside income became a fatal weakness.
I mean, when does this whole place when does it stop? As the railroad became more and more prevalent, uh, they moved the station up the tracks, and then they took out the station.
So when that railroad shuts down, there's no other way for these people to live, - and eventually they start moving off.
- Right I mean, it becomes basically a Mountain ghost town.
The last family left in 1957, almost 100 years after lost cove was founded.
Look up here.
They say that there's, uh, still a cemetery up there.
Sure enough, right on the top of the hill.
Unbelievable.
They say every family that lived in lost cove buried someone here.
All these families this is the tipton name here Nola tipton, died in 1918, wiley tipton, 1934, Russell tipton I mean, they've got generations here.
I mean, it speaks to the fact, just like all over Southern Tennessee I mean, family is everything.
It wasn't just evading the law.
It was a way of life and a place to die.
The forest is eating away at what's left of lost cove and the last remnants of a Mountain culture built on grit, self-determination, and a whole lot of spirit.
It's like the whole building is the machine.
The secret world of real Tennessee whiskey.
- God bless America.
- That's right.
And this engineering lifesaver only looks like a candy factory.
This whole place has been excavated.
The era of hidden moonshining towns like lost cove is long gone.
But today, the original Mountain dew still flows in Tennessee.
You just have to know where to look.
I'm heading into the foothills of the great smoky mountains to see something that years ago would have gotten an outsider shot.
Chilly day outside Knoxville.
I'm here to meet these guys who are, uh, making moonshine the old-fashioned way.
It still happens in this part of Tennessee In fact, more than ever.
Today, I'm meeting up with some Tennessee locals who are gonna give me a behind-the-scenes look at the once-illegal process of making white lightning, starting where they do, at the corn mill.
This is the real thing.
Hello.
Hey, excuse me.
How you doing? Joe Baker owns the shine distillery, but he gets his star ingredient from his cousin, mill owner clive Valentine.
It's all family.
My brother-in-law This is my brother right here.
- Nice.
- Just about all family - Everybody around here is family.
- Everybody in the mountains is family.
Clive doesn't normally let people wander inside his prized vintage mill, but today, he's giving us special access.
Clive's been in this his family's been in this business for a long time.
Oh, yeah? So your grandfather and everybody's been doing this stuff.
Uh, yes.
Similar work.
An old photograph up there on the wall.
- Oh, this is it, huh? - Yeah.
This was my grandfather Valentine Brent Valentine.
And then this is my grandfather's grandfather will Valentine.
Will Valentine fought for the federal army during the civil war.
- Oh, really.
- Yeah, most of east Tennessee was federal.
- Really? - It wasn't confederate.
- Oh, interesting.
Most of this equipment was adapted from clive's grandfather's general store.
It's a hand-built labor of love that snakes through the entire building.
All right, so this is floor two.
There's another floor up above.
It's like the whole building is the machine, isn't it? Yeah, just watch your head.
The system goes all the way back to the 1700s and was invented to allow one Miller to run the entire operation.
And all of these belts are all driving various sizes and speeds of machinery, - and you have to calibrate all this together.
- Right.
I mean, it seems to be running very smoothly.
Uh, so far.
Clive's mill turns out 10,000 pounds of cornmeal a week.
Just as good for making cornbread as it is for making liquor.
It all starts on the first floor, where the corn travels up tiny grain elevators to the attic to be cleaned.
Next, it's down to the basement for grinding and back up to the first and second floors for sifting and bagging, all without any human intervention.
In fact, the whole operation is powered by 1 tractor engine from the 1950s.
So that's running the whole thing? That's running everything in the mill all at one time.
These are techniques that have been passed from family to family here in Tennessee, yeah? Exactly.
In every community, there was a small mill, because they had to be within walking distance of a mill every week.
Everybody had to have fresh cornmeal.
But once they got trucks, small mills wasn't needed anymore.
The mill in Knoxville started supplying all the communities.
Clive's old-time mill churns out the freshest cornmeal around.
- So can I grab a little out of it? - Go ahead.
Sure.
So that is the cornmeal.
Oh, yeah, you can feel very fine.
- And this is what gets distilled into moonshine.
- Exactly.
That's what they use to make the moonshine.
See, we're old-time Southern baptists.
We just grind the corn for the moonshine.
Somebody else does that evil stuff.
Yeah.
- Well, it's not evil anymore, because it's legal.
- Oh, I see.
Tennessee has some of the toughest liquor laws in the nation.
But in 2009,a cash-strapped government eased up so more people could distill spirits.
Clive doesn't touch the stuff, but I plan to.
It was a real pleasure.
All right.
Take it easy.
All right.
I got my meal.
Let's go, uh, make some moonshine.
All right.
Joe is taking me to his moonshine distillery South of here in gatlinburg, tennessee.
In fact, it's the first legal shine operation in Tennessee history.
My family came to east Tennessee during the 1790s just out of necessity and, you know, a desire to take care of their family making liquor.
Do you remember the first time you ever made whiskey in your family? I was about 14 years old.
It's it's funny how, you know, families have their own ideas about what's right or wrong.
My mammaw probably wouldn't be real proud of me drinkin' whiskey, but she wouldn't mind for me to sell it.
So it was for her, it was a sin to drink it, but it wasn't a sin to make it.
Well, that's very practical.
Joe's agreed to let me and my crew into the restricted operations room - This is where we make our whiskey.
- All right.
To see how he distills cornmeal into good old-fashioned shine.
So we're calling it moonshine, but it's whiskey essentially the same thing or not? What we make is truly a whiskey.
It's, uh, and it's what would have been made here in the mountains 150 years ago.
It's it is true corn liquor, corn whiskey.
Unlike other whiskeys, moonshine isn't aged, so every little thing they do to it now can make a huge difference.
He might look like a kid, but Justin king is actually a master distiller, and he's gonna school me on the art of making moonshine.
Our ground corn all starts here in this cooker.
It's just basically cornmeal with water added.
We just bring it all to a boil.
That makes your sugar conversion.
You add your yeast to it.
It's actually pumped into one of our two fermenters.
It ferments for a few days or whenever Justin deems it ready, and then is pumped into a pot still where it's heated up, and the alcohol vapor is siphoned out.
- So this is all filled with with vapor in there - Right.
Coming across here and being fed directly into this barrel.
Right.
This cold water hits these hot steam pipes, and it condenses back into a liquid.
That vapor turning back into liquidIs the moonshine.
Liquid.
IsIs your moonshine.
That's so cool.
You're adjusting timing as well as temperatures.
You can really screw it up, I would imagine.
Yeah, you can screw it up.
That's for sure.
They add water to knock down this 160-proof firewater to a mellower 100.
That's 50% alcohol.
That's what I get to try.
- Justin, you want some? - Sure.
You can drink on the job.
That's the best part of this, isn't it? - So this is corn whiskey - This is, 100-proof corn whiskey.
Distilled the old-fashioned moonshiner way.
- It's as real as it gets.
- Here's to ole smoky.
Thank you.
Wow, that's really good.
It's really flavorful.
- You can taste the corn.
- I can taste the corn.
Ahh, moonshine.
It's burnin'.
- All right, bottoms up.
- Cheers.
They make all kinds of seasonal varieties here, including a devious concoction called "apple pie.
" Wow, that's dangerous.
You don't even know you're drinking alcohol.
" Turns out moonshine's far from just a cheap, illicit way to get drunk.
Mazel tov.
- Cheers, man.
- Cheers.
That is great.
It's a proud tradition refined over generations.
- God bless America.
- That's right.
I've been bushwhacking through the whole forest here.
Tracking down an old coal mine isn't easy, and finding it is even worse.
Look, this is why I'm nervous.
These rolling Tennessee hills have been home to some of the most fiercely independent folks in American history.
But when coal came to town in the 1800s, these appalachian homesteaders traded self-reliance for security and found out it was a lousy bargain.
The hills of eastern Tennessee are absolutely riddled with the other black gold Coal.
The coal business has fueled the economy in this part of the country for more than a century, creating its own culture here in appalachia.
Everybody knows coal mining is a tough job.
But if you venture up into those hills, really see where the miners work, you'll get a whole other view of Tennessee's toughest job.
At the turn of the last century, coal was fueling the industrial revolution all over America.
Mineral-rich appalachia became the heart of a feeding frenzy.
Company towns sprouted up everywhere.
And for the people who worked the coal seams, life was never the same.
Historian Jamie woodcock is taking me to find the hidden ruins of one of the only towns left standing and the abandoned McNabb mines that put it on the map.
She's taking me 20 Miles west of Chattanooga, down a winding road on the banks of the Tennessee river and up into a dense forest.
I mean, we've been driving for a good length of time And you feel like you're way, way out here.
And I imagine in those in the day, the 19th century, this is the sticks.
Absolutely.
I mean, it still is.
I mean, I'm getting carsick just going over this road here.
Back in the day, any sort of commute to the mines would have been out of the question, so companies like McNabb had to build towns to house the workers, most of them local farmers.
Out here, there are no marked trails, just lots and lots of forest that all looks the same.
Getting lost is easy and, miles from any city, a very bad idea.
How far away is this place? Oh, it's probably a couple hundred feet.
Oh, there it is.
I can see it.
Check this out.
Look.
See, she's taking me down you can barely see it.
There's a brick chimney right in there, and this foundation of one of these buildings.
Jamie, what is this structure here? I think this was probably the superintendent's house or the manager's house.
Nice nice fireplace.
Absolutely.
So we're seeing the foundation, the rock foundation, but it's likely it was a framed-out-wall building - and maybe some nice gables.
This this would have been a nice place to live.
- Yes.
It was definitely someone of a different class than, uh, the rest of the workers here.
Today, it looks like a pile of rocks, but when it was built in the 1880s, the town stretched over 457 acres.
It contained 40 homes, workshops, a school, church, even a posh hotel.
So this is, uh, we're in the midst of this community right here.
- Yes.
Well, here we have the company store.
- Oh, really? Yeah, this is, uh, where everyone who lived here would've come to get their food, their clothing.
Out here, this was the only job in town, and the company took full advantage.
They had to buy their own mining equipment.
They bought dynamite, black powder, caps.
These are things that they had to use to actually do their job, and they had to buy it from the company who paid them.
- All right, so it's it's a bit of a racket.
- Yes.
These once self-reliant farmers now owed everything to the mining company, from their rent to the shirts on their backs, and the company made sure they couldn't leave.
You're making your money up there, and you're not making a lot.
- Right.
- And how do they get paid? They actually got paid in scrip, which I have some examples here.
These are different denominations of coin.
- And what would these be worth? - That one was worth a dollar.
- Okay.
Is it like foreign exchange? You can go out of townAnd just get - No.
- You can't you can't exchange itDown in Chattanooga? - No.
No.
No.
So you you're very much enslaved to this site to this company.
To understand what this town was really all about, you have to see the mine itself.
It's difficult to get there and extremely dangerous to explore, so Jamie's staying behind.
But she pointed me in the direction of the shaft, half a mile up the hill.
Oh, look, look, look, look.
Here it is.
I feel it.
I feel it.
I feel it.
I do feel it in my eye.
Check this out.
Look at this.
All along here, everywhere underfoot, you can see big pieces of bituminous coal, what with this being transported And look, that that's very cool, a little miniature rail spike from the railroad that would have been running right down here All this evidence of what went on 100 years ago.
I've been, uh, bushwhacking through the whole thick forest here and all of a sudden, found myself on what is essentially this ramp.
This is actually from the period of the McNabb mine.
I mean, clearly this is a road that was meant to carry a lot of weight and a lot of men.
Oh, here we go.
Here we go.
Excellent.
There it is.
Let's go in.
Whoo, look at that.
Damn.
That is really neat.
Finally.
A coal mine from a century ago right down this way.
Right away, I mean, just entering this mine, you can see why it's here in the first place.
This is a seam of bituminous coal, okay? Running straight into the Mountain, and there's another one right here.
So they basically would start this mine and just start digging on this seam and start carrying it out.
And as you moved along, that became the shaft behind me.
This is called a drift mine.
The horizontal shaft is blasted with explosives, and then hand-chiseled to extract coal from the side of a hill.
It's one of the cheaper ways to mine, but it's also one of the most dangerous.
In fact, several other entrances have completely caved in.
Look at this whole Mountain collapsing, okay? All this rock could, as I walk under it, fall on us.
Okay, look oh, how about this? This is a prop from the day, holding up the ceiling.
I mean, think of that aspect of this, the claustrophobia I'm feeling right now times, you know, a hundred.
These guys are in the dark with their little lanterns, right? It gets creepier and creepier as you go.
Yeah, that is nice.
That's a cricket.
These are actually poisonous, so be careful.
Watch the bats.
The locals make things a little hairier for us, but they're nothing compared to the hazards the miners faced.
In just a decade, between 1906 and 1916, explosions, fires, and collapses in the appalachian coal mines killed over a thousand men and boys as young as 10.
Unfortunately, child labor in the mines was common until one key turn-of-the-century invention exposed it flash photography.
Finally, social reformers were able to document what was going on and convince the U.
S.
government to crack down on child exploitation.
Even today, coal mines are extremely dangerous places.
I'm 100 yards in, following the coal seam as it gets a lot more narrow.
You can see how they're supporting themselves as they go along.
Not so technical, right? Sticking a lot of rock in there, on both sides over there, too You know, to protect themselves as they go.
It seems to me a fairly flawed system of making sure a Mountain doesn't come down on your head.
I'm so far down the seam, there's no more room for a camera, so I'm using my phone to shoot.
Let's see if I can poke myself into these little spaces just to see if I can get any sense of what it must have been like to work here.
Incredibly, uh Um, claustrophobic this is.
This is somebody's workspace.
And look at what I'm working in.
That's the office for this guy.
Oh, my lord.
This is the room they have cleared out by lying on their back and their side, literally chis chiseling out this coal in this position.
Look, this is why I'm nervous A crack of rock right underneath, and it just keeps running.
That's why we're getting outta here right now.
That's that's a hell of a way to make a living, right? As extensive as this mine is, it wasn't enough to keep the place going for long.
By 1910,mcnabb went belly-up.
The people dispersed.
Some left to find work elsewhere, but some stayed to reclaim an independent lifestyle.
It was a hard life, but at least they were free.
So this would have been just filled up with With mud and silt and had to be cleared out.
A controversy buried under a Southern Metropolis.
You can't run a city like this.
If you've heard of Chattanooga, you probably know it's got a rail line.
For hundreds of years, it's been considered the gateway to the deep South, thanks to its elaborate transportation system.
But this quaint city with a famous choo-choo had to overcome a stormy past.
After the civil war ended, Chattanooga, just like the rest of the American South, struggled to rebuild.
This was the difficult age of reconstruction and made even more difficult here in Chattanooga by a series of epic floods that struck the Tennessee valley.
Flooding here has always been a problem.
But in 1867,the worst flood in Chattanooga history brought the city to its knees.
The waters got so high, a steamboat captain steered his vessel all the way downtown.
But on the banks of the Tennessee river, flooding is a fact of life.
Take a look at this.
I mean, there's been a lot of rain here recently, and this walkway is just underwater.
I mean, that's just a raised riverbank, a regular feature of life in Chattanooga.
I'm heading downtown to find out how 140 years ago, the citizens of Chattanooga found an extraordinary way to save their city by literally raising the streets above the flood plain.
I'm meeting up with archaeologist Nick honerkamp, a leading expert on early Chattanooga.
So this whole town has a whole nother level going on, right? We're about 8 or 10 feet above the original level of the city.
Interesting.
Nick tells me clues of Chattanooga¡¯s mysterious rise are hidden throughout the city.
You just have to know where to look.
- Here it is.
- Okay.
All right, it looks like a A window, a basement window.
There would be no reason to put in a window that fronts the dirt.
And all of these along here There's one here, one here, one here This would all be the first floor, basically, of this building.
Right.
They're windows and doors in an area that got filled up.
Fascinating.
And all the way around I might see more windows around here? Yeah.
Oh, I see.
Oh, okay.
Once you see it, it's hard to imagine any other explanation, but the city has its skeptics.
This is kind of a controversy in town, isn't it? Well, yeah, some people would say these arches are coal chutes.
- But what we're seeing is one, two five or six coal chutes? - That's a lot of coal.
I don't think so.
This is before Tennessee, uh, gets it together on a massive scale to fix the flood problem.
- This is the people's choice, right? - That's right.
This is a community effort to do something about the flooding.
Right.
In the late 1880s, postwar tensions still ran high between the state and the U.
S.
government.
According to Nick and other experts, instead of asking for federal help, the citizens banded together and carted fill from higher ground to raise the downtown street level and entire story, in some places as high as 20 feet.
Frustrating thing is there's no record of all this.
You'd think there would be, like, a city record of a choice that the whole place made to raise itself up.
So you're left with just, like, a detective story, trying to figure out why things are where they are.
There are few remaining spots where you can actually see old Chattanooga, and Nick's taking me to the largest.
It's hidden inside a modern gym, and it's off-limits to the public, because it's a maze of hazards.
Just kind of give it a little bit of a kick.
- And it's all you.
- Holy cow.
It is really an impressive space.
Man, okay, so before we get in it, what What are we even looking at here? We're in the belly of the beast.
Right now, I'd say we're under the street.
This massive space used to be a maintenance facility for Chattanooga's bustling transportation system from the time of horse-drawn carts all the way to modern buses.
100 years ago, it would have been teeming with repairmen working on trolley cars.
Look at these enormous pillars.
We try to find some kind of clue as to, you know, what area you're in.
I guess these are the old letterings that tell us which bay was which, right? - 933-r & blank c-10.
So this - Whatever that means.
Yeah, whatever that means.
Jeez, it just keeps going.
This thing is endless.
Yeah, it was big.
It's a whole block.
The facility had five bays and covered enough space to service dozens of trolleys for 110 Miles of track An amazing symbol for a city that had risen from the ashes of the civil war only to be devastated by Titanic floodwaters.
Incredibly wet down here, you know? This is Oh, we're so close to the water table.
So look, nick, I'm walking on, uh, on lots and lots of mud here.
It's still wet from the last rain we had a couple of days ago.
I mean, this is the story of Chattanooga, isn't it? I mean, just dealing with sediment all the time.
You could just keep digging down here And there's probably feet of of mud here.
You can't run a city like this.
Down here, on roughly the same level as the original city, you can begin to sense the magnitude of these floods.
So this would have been just filled up with With mud and silt and had to be cleared out.
These guys had to literally lift their city up to provide the The means with which to develop it further.
It speaks to how difficult it has been just making Chattanooga survive.
With almost no written records, a lot of people around here think Chattanooga's incredible civic feat is more urban legend than actual history.
But maybe the only evidence you need is that 100 years later, the city is still here and stronger than ever.
What's hiding in those hills is a lot bigger than you think.
So this was solid rock before? 1,000 feet below the top of the Mountain.
For hundreds of years, life in the east Tennessee mountains has been as hard and unchanging as the rocky terrain itself That is, until a revolutionary public works program drastically altered both the landscape and the community.
I'm driving to the top of raccoon Mountain.
Located just west of Chattanooga, this entire 1,800-foot peak has been retrofitted as an ingenious power station.
Man, all of this is the raccoon Mountain pump storage facility.
This is a man-made reservoir here that sits at the top of this Mountain.
And deep inside that Mountain is the power plant, one of many projects that together comprise the Tennessee valley authority.
It changed everything in this whole part of the world.
Look at the scope of this thing.
I mean, the t.
V.
A.
, man This is the big show in town.
In the 1930s, the t.
V.
A.
Was a lifeline in east Tennessee.
The great depression hit poor communities the hardest, and there was no poorer place than the Tennessee valley.
The soil was farmed out, resources depleted, and thousands were out of work, some literally starving to death.
But f.
D.
R.
Had an innovative plan to lift the region out of grinding poverty A government-owned corporation that would build power stations in the middle of nowhere.
Regional manager Tim gaddis is getting me into a facility that's strictly off-limits to the public, almost 40 floors down into the Mountain.
- This is a no-trespassing zone, huh? - That's correct.
- How far down do we go? - A little over 1,000 feet.
So when did this start, and how long did it take to finish? Construction began in 1970, and the first unit began generation in 1978.
Man, my ears have just been popping, huh? Down in the mine.
This is what we refer to as our generator floor, and we have four generating units here at raccoon Mountain.
That is amazing.
So this room actually was solid rock before all carved out.
Solid rock, 1,000 feet below the top of the Mountain.
The first step in this Mountain makeover was boring a 1,000-foot concrete tunnel down from the peak and excavating a space the size of a football field inside to make room for the plant.
Then an 8,500-foot dam was built on the mountaintop to create a man-made crater-shaped lake that holds 700 million gallons of water.
When that water is released, it hits the turbines below and creates electricity.
In the middle of the night, when the cost and demand for power is low, the water is pumped back uphill.
When the need for electricity spikes, it's released, and the cycle begins again, making it an incredibly cost-effective power source.
How does the water get back up? That's when we can turn these machines into a pump.
So the same apparatus is both used to create the electricity - and also pump the water.
- Correct.
And the most important moving part in the whole facility is hidden inside these Willy wonka casings A power-generating shaft spinning 300 times a minute.
We might not be able to hear each other very well.
All right, extra hearing protection.
We're not gonna be able to talk very much, but we can yell.
I can't hear you! If you think of the system as a giant engine, it generates over 580,000 horsepower.
Everything about this place, like the t.
V.
A.
Itself ,is wildly ambitious and Titanic in scale.
I mean, you can see how much of this whole place has been excavated.
Look at that.
That is dramatic.
There's a tunnel that way, a tunnel this way.
This is the one they used to bring all this rock out of here.
I mean, it gives you a sense of the scope of this effort outrageous.
Starting in 1970,it took 8 years to build this site.
Not bad when you consider they put a lake on top of a Mountain and a power plant inside it.
Listen to the hum.
That's the electricity being sent out on power lines in every direction here where once there was none.
But the electricity to build industry and the prosperity that That changed Tennessee and the Chattanooga area forever.
50 years ago, none of this was here, and now it's a testament to the fact that the t.
V.
A and the people of Tennessee are willing to literally move mountains for a chance at a better life.
Okay, this is gonna be tricky.
In Tennessee, you never do know what's underfoot.
Water just pouring in from 100 feet above us.
The t.
V.
A.
Reshaped raccoon Mountain into a state-of-the-art hydroelectric facility.
But the Mountain is hiding another side, a dark, vast, uncharted wildness, carved out over millions of years.
Look up into those mountains, you can see the layers and layers of ancient limestone.
Tennessee is world-famous for its caves.
There's thousands and thousands of them in the state, and more are being discovered all the time.
They're dangerous.
They're dark.
And for hard-core explorers, they're the last great frontier of Tennessee.
Tennessee has more caves than any other state, and they've been put to good use.
Deep in these mountains, native Americans found refuge, civil war soldiers mined saltpeter, and moonshiners stashed their booze.
The caves in this range were even used to shelter locals during the Cuban missile crisis.
Today, I'm heading deep into the other heart of raccoon Mountain to explore a massive cave system that threads through the Southern appalachians.
For security reasons, we cannot show you where or how we entered the Mountain, because parts of this cave are too dangerous to explore without a guide.
But caver Kyle oden agreed to take me in.
- This is where we're gonna enter right here.
- That's the doorway.
But once you get back here, it gets to be a little hairy.
Whatever the natural cave throws at us is what we're gonna do to get through it.
Yeah, lead on.
Here we go.
Kyle's helped map 5 1/2 Miles of this cave system, and he discovers new paths all the time.
Today, he's taking me through the slick, dark, and winding cavern to a huge waterfall that few people have ever seen.
The whole Tennessee region is famous for these caves, right? Yeah, the Tennessee or especially the Chattanooga areaIs referred to as t.
A.
G.
, 'cause we're right where Tennessee, alabama, and Georgia come together.
There are approximately 20,000 caves between the 3 states.
Amazing.
Originally, this would have been solid rock, of course.
The water comes in and erodes the limestone away, so you can get any type of passage Huge holes, small holes, very random.
This cave has been slowly carved out by the corrosive power of rainwater.
Just look at this.
I mean, this stuff takes millions of years to form.
It's called flowstone incredible.
I mean, just levels and levels of this stuff just building up over time.
This limestone dates back 300 million years, when two massive continents collided, creating the supercontinent pangaea and the appalachian Mountain range.
Over time, rainwater infiltrated cracks in the limestone, shaping this system.
Yep, gets tight, doesn't it? Slippery, too.
Okay, so there's several different passages here, and Kyle went nice.
Kyle went down to find out if we could get through this way.
Kyle, are you down there? There he is, sir.
What's it like? - It's no-go that way.
The water's way too high.
It's the only way we can go.
- All right.
The cave is full of wild, unmapped pockets, but as far back as the 1880s, caves here have helped power a robust tourism industry worth over $14 billion today.
But for people like Kyle, it's all about finding the stuff tourists don't see.
Okay, this is gonna be tricky.
Okay, this is a complete crawl here And a lot of water.
We are just gonna get wet.
That's all there is to it.
This is the good stuff.
Don't complain.
I love it.
This is what we came for.
Walking very precariously, 'cause look one foot down there, one misstep, and you're falling right down into that slot.
Just straddle your feet on both sides, 'cause it's really dangerous.
There's no no space on either side.
Oh, I can hear the water coming right around the corner.
We are gonna get wet.
Ooh, it's a shower.
Man, that's amazing.
Unbelievable.
Water's just pouring in from 100 feet above us.
All that water's coming straight from the surface.
Outrageous! All of this carved out by all this water coming down through the millions of years.
Man, it just it boggles the mind.
Thanks to Tennessee's year-round rainfall, this place is still changing.
What's the ultimate cave experience you're looking for? For me, it's to know that you can go through a crawl, go through a squeeze, get into a spot that no human being has ever been before.
It's such a wonderful feeling to stick your head in there and shine your light up on the ceiling and think, oh, I'm the very first human being that's ever seen this.
- And that's possible here.
- Exactly.
And there's parts of this cave and many other caves, and some caves that are incredibly well traveled have parts that no one's ever been to.
- This is your holy grail, man.
- It most certainly is.
For a long time, life in the rural hills of east Tennessee was hard won.
The people here beat the odds with a singular mix of craftiness and guts.
Even though life in the holler wasn't easy, it was certainly worth fighting for.