This outdoor haven is overshadowed by the Smokies. Can it stay a hidden gem?
PALL MALL, Tenn. – It’s 7 a.m. and the sun has just risen over the Appalachian foothills of the Cumberland plateau, but already pickup trucks are lined up outside the York Country Store for a unique morning ritual.
In a backroom of the Pall Mall, Tenn. store, more than a dozen local men, some in weathered caps and camouflaged hunting jackets, hunch over checkered tablecloths, sipping from hot coffee or Mellow Yellows, bantering and peering into handfuls of playing cards in a game of “Pig.”
Among them are Mike York, a great nephew of Alvin York, the World War I hero credited with capturing over 100 German soldiers, his historic home nearby and the family-owned country store full of memorabilia. Here too is Jim Buck, 75, a former teacher who played the area card game as a kid, playing on a soda case next to a pot-belly stove in this rural part of Tennessee.
“Lay ‘em down. There we go,” one man urged as they vied for points amid wood-paneled walls hung with old frying pans, a list of Pig champions and a huge rattlesnake skin. “Oooh, lookie there. Yes sir!”
The before-work gatherings play out in one of the small towns that ring the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, 125,000 National Park-run acres straddling Kentucky and northeast Tennessee, where the river carves its way through deep gorges of the Cumberland Plateau amid a landscape of sandstone arches, forested mountains and lush valleys.
For years, the area has largely flown under the national radar. The park gets a fraction of the visitors to the Great Smoky Mountains just over 100 miles to the southeast, and has attracted little of its attendant tourist amenities.
“It’s always been a little bit of an obscure place that people don't tend to hear or know a whole lot about,” Chris Derman, the park’s chief of interpretation.
That obscurity has extended to the working class and rural towns nearby, with names that sound like they belong in a forgotten Steinbeck novel: Rugby, Stearns, Pall Mall, Oneida.
If the Big South Fork region has been long overshadowed by the Smokies – with all its Pigeon Forge glitz, pirate-themed dinner shows, Titanic museum and fudge factories – that’s just fine with many lifelong residents like Buck. Flyover country? Not a problem.
“We don’t want to become Dollywood,” he said
But these days, there are some signs that the park area and its nearby towns have been getting more attention. Visitors in October last year, often a peak time, reached a five-year high. The park is seeing more out-of-state visitors, Derman said, many drawn less-restrictive rules allowing people to ride horses, mountain bike, paddle, hunt and fish as well as camp and hike – often on gloriously uncrowded trails.
And outside its boundaries, higher-end homes have begun popping up as more discover the affordable slice of country tranquility. Buck himself has sold land to out-of-staters amid population shifts to sunbelt states like Tennessee and the rise of remote work since the pandemic.
Jim Buck watches over a game of "Pig" at the York Country Store in Pall Mall, Tenn.
For some here, it’s raising hopes for a bigger economic boost from tourism in a region still struggling with poverty long after the coal mines closed and various industries packed up and left, a past visible in some areas of closed stores, secondhand shops and sagging homes.
But others are uneasy about what that could mean in the future. Can the area’s rural and working class communities become a more prominent but still authentic, un-glitzy destination without losing its under-the-radar charm?
“You’re at a crossroads in this community,” said Ralph Trieschmann, who opened Timber Rock Lodge near Oneida, a small hotel and wedding venue after a corporate career in St. Louis, has been advocating for sustainable tourism expansion while opposing a proposed landfill he argues runs counter to the area’s economic future.
Yet his home of Scott County – where yard signs talk of God’s salvation, and more residents voted for Trump than any other county in the state – change is not always an easy sell.
For now, the park and its nearby communities are a place where you can find a slice of America that remains complex, sometimes misunderstood, and relentlessly, stubbornly itself.
Just ask those that make it tick: A volunteer on a railroad that runs to the “ghost structures” of a coal mining camp. A fourth-generation restaurant owner frying up bologna sandwiches near a former utopian community. A park ranger who took a federal buyout to open a brewpub. A Filipino chef, whose restaurant is connected to an auto repair shop, winning over both Subaru-driving outdoor tourists and skeptical locals.
And Buck, who watched one of his sons play a hand of Pig at the country store.
“I’m fixing to have my first great grandkid,” he said. “I want this to be still around.”
Becoming the Big South Fork
Historic Stearns, Ky, former hub of the Stearns Coal & Lumber Company.
By the time the Big South Fork park land was set aside in 1974, Beth Ann Kilburn’s father was already working in one of the last open coal mines in McCreary County, Kentucky.
The area’s coal past is visible in Stearns, Ky., where on a recent fall day, Kilburn, 68, walked along the platform of a railroad station that once ferried miners. It sits next to the former company stores of the Stearns Coal & Lumber Company.
It is now a tourist stop, where visitors ride the Big South Fork Scenic Railway to the Blue Heron, an abandoned coal mining town run by the company until the 1960s. Today it’s a historic site of “ghost structures” including a former church, bathhouse, school and mining facilities.
Kilburn’s grandfather, she calls “pa-daddy,” worked for the company as a surveyor. Mining jobs put food on the table but was dangerous work, still reflected in some area cemeteries, where headstones that are topped with flowers in the Appalachian tradition of “decoration days.”
The Blue Heron coal mine community, now a historic site in the Big South Fork NRRA.
While coal’s decline, portions of the Big South Fork almost wound up submerged. Officials initially planned to dam up the river to create a lake, Derman said. That came at a time when the region’s power needs were growing.
Instead, Tennessee’s late U.S. Sen. Howard Baker Jr., a Scott County, Tenn. native who served in the Reagan Administration, pushed for a park to preserve land that the Army Corps of Engineers had been purchasing for the dam project.
Not everyone, however, was behind the idea of a river and recreation area.
“Initially it was resented by the locals, because it was the federal government coming in,” said Jimmy Barna, a retired park ranger. “But I think now they appreciate it.”
It’s easy to see why. Just hike to the soaring Twin Arches, one of the largest natural land bridges in the Eastern U.S. Or go another mile to Charit Creek, a rustic lodge reaching only by trail. Elsewhere, paddlers cruise down the river to places like “Devil’s Jump,” equestrian trail riders and mountain bikers traverse quiet forests and fisherman toss in lines for bass and walleye. The area also has the largest black bear population in the eastern U.S.
While the Great Smoky Mountain National Park gets all the “attention, notoriety and visitation,” Derman said – 12.1 million visitors in 2024, compared to 779,602 at Big South Fork – that makes it feel blissfully empty with little traffic, parking woes or crowded trails. In fact, frazzled Smokies rangers joke that it’s where they go to decompress.
“A lot of people love coming here because they feel like they have the whole place themselves, and it's magical,” Derman said.
A scene from the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area.
Yet while the park supports and generates $28.5 million in revenue to communities near the park, according to park-service study, some of the counties still struggle with poverty. In Scott County, for example, about 23% of its roughly 22,000 residents live in poverty.
Kilburn, who volunteers on the railroad around Christmas, said that the park gave the area a new identity – turning land once mined for its coal and timber into a new kind of asset, even if it hasn’t yet transformed her county’s economy as much as some other destinations.
“We're all about the scenic beauty, the natural beauty, the waterfalls, the arches,” she said.
Beer, memorabilia, and hints of growth
Main Street in Oneida, Tenn., which is close to the Big South Fork park.
On the quiet old Main Street in Oneida, a blue-collar commercial hub of 3,800 on the east side of the park, where dump trucks rumble down a nearby two-lane highway, Jimmy Barna was preparing to open the city’s first brewpub for the day.
After spending a career as a park ranger including at Big South Fork, Barna earlier this year took a buyout offered by the Trump Administration as it slashed the federal workforce.
He transformed a long-vacant bank, built in 1922, into the Big South Fork Brewing. He kept a vault being turned into a party room and the bank’s 1970s paneling. Local residents voted only last year to allow liquor sales by the drink.
“It’s the Bible Belt,” he explained.
Already his clients are “half locals and half transplants and visitors.” He expects tourism traffic will grow as more people learn about the park and its gateway towns.
“I think it's inevitable that it will come,” he said. “But we kind of enjoy the calm right now.”
Moe Mullis at his curio store called The Black Cat in Oneida, Tenn.
Across the street, still dotted with empty stores, Moe Mullis stood inside the Black Cat, a curio store full of everything from antiques, oddities such as human skeleton named Elmo that was used for medical research, and historical memorabilia in a county that on the eve of the civil war dubbed itself the unionist “Free and Independent State of Scott.”
Earlier, a group of equestrian riders from Ohio, heading to a Big South Fork-area Wild-West themed horse camp with teepee huts, picked through the store. Then a resident arrived asking if he wanted to trade for a switchblade knife for a dusty blue lantern Mullins had on the shelf.
“Absolutely,” he said.
But he’s especially hopeful that the historical memorabilia he’s collected will be displayed in a former train depot that is being renovated with state tourism dollars.
Not far away, across the highway and tucked down an alley beside a tire repair shop, is Ruth’s Little Asian Kitchen. Inside, Ruth Eskew fried up beef in the city’s first Filipino restaurants opened several years ago, serving Pancit Lumpia, noodles and other Asian fare.
Ruth's Little Asian Kitchen in Oneida, Tenn.
How Ruth and her restaurant arrived in this unlikely stretch of rural America is really a love story -- one she and her husband told as they sat across from each other before another busy evening.
Ruth was living in Canada when her sister who lived in Tennessee said she knew someone she might like: An iron worker and avid hunter named Kelley Eskew. Soon enough, he was going to see her.
“I flew up - first time I ever flew too – and seen her,” Kelley recalled. “Tried to talk her into marrying me then, but she wouldn’t.”
He lost his phone on the despondent journey back to Tennessee. When he got home, her sister found him and said Ruth had been trying to reach him. “Come back. I'll marry you,” she told him.
When they finally tied the knot in Niagara Falls and she finally moved to Oneida following a long stretch of immigration red tape, she worked at a drug store. But at home she was cooking Filipino dishes, noodles, egg rolls and sushi.
“She's like, ‘You like sushi?’ And of course, I'm a dumb hillbilly, you know, ‘I'm not eating raw fish,’” he said, laughing.
But a spicy tuna roll later, he was hooked. And so were his co-workers and people at school events when she cooked. Soon she opened a food truck and later a restaurant in the vacant space next to the tire shop – where it has become a beloved, hole-in-the-wall draw.
The Timber Rock Lodge near Oneida, Tenn.
Further outside of town, past a stretch of car lots, trinket shops, fast food joint and a WalMart, sits the Timber Rock Lodge, a former office of a log-cabin company into a hotel and event and wedding venue, complete with higher-end finishes, outdoor patios and a spa. It also serves as an event space for yoga, book club meetings and dinners.
“Because of Covid, we got the corporate layoffs and early retirement checks, and we're like, okay, hey, let's go out into the world and do something,” Trieshmann said, noting the couple went to stay where his wife Michelle's mother lived and near where she grew up and have stayed ever since.
While their lodge has filled a niche for a more upscale venue in a place with few hotels, the couple dream of extending the property and supporting other projects, such as converting an abandoned railroad into a bike trail. But he said not everyone is rushing to embrace that project.
The couple also joined a coalition opposing a proposed landfill not far away, an issue that has brought opponents out to crowded public meetings. Trieshmann argues that it runs counter to the area’s economic future that he views as linked to sustainably-planned outdoor tourism.
“The future around here is going to really be dependent on the natural resources and how we can share it with people and take advantage of it,” he said.
New residents and hopes to retain a slow way of life
Outside the R.M. Brooks general store in Rugby, Tenn.
Dale Gaide and his wife, both Michigan veterinarians, were looking for somewhere warmer where they could ride or raise horses. They considered Florida. They heard about the Big South Fork region.
On the maps, it’s a zone with no large cities, and that appealed. After falling for the rural countryside, they purchased 70 acres near Pall Mall from Buck, not far from the horse-enthusiast community of Jamestown and within easy reach of the park.
“I would have to say it's one of the better-guarded secrets in the mid-America area,” he said “We like the fact that it's conservative and really kind of down-home, old style.”
Others are finding it, too. Affluent homes with three-car garages have popped up in pockets of the area, locals said. Some are arriving from places like the West Coast, drawn by the rising but still relatively affordable land and cost of living prices, said Buck, who still works as an nsurance agent whose hobby is playing Santa wherever he can and has written a Santa-themed book.
“In Florida, I’ve got a good friend and sold their house for $2 million. Came here and built a brand new house, and got 50 acres of land and can have a little farm and horses and all,” he said. “And put half the money in the bank.”
Some are retirees, others are moving in as white-collar remote workers, he said.
A scene from the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area
Near the Scott County Municipal Airport is a 450-acre residential airpark that features “estate-sized homes” some with their own hangars. For private pilots, it’s a place of community barbecues and a chance to ride horses and ATVs. And it’s right next to the Big South Fork park.
Developer and pilot B.A. Armstrong told AOPA Pilot Magazine this year that he was part of a group that purchased land nobody seemed to want 18 years ago because it was close to the airport. It’s now in its fourth phase, and its website says interest has been running strong.
While some find the potential for too much development or tourism too distant a threat to spark concern, Buck said it’s not outlandish to envision someone creating a new Gatlinburg-type gateway destination in the area.
“People would go crazy over it,” he said. “But do you want it to happen? It'd be good money wise, but then you're changing your culture.”
One place that’s hard to imagine changing is just southwest of the park, in the tiny hamlet of Historic Rugby, despite already being a tourist attraction. To get there requires long drives on winding roads through bucolic countryside and rolling hills.
The town was founded in the late 1800s by an English author as a utopian colony where people could be free of Victorian class and inheritance strictures, focusing instead on equality. While it quickly fell apart, the homes were restored in the 1960s and it’s now a historic district, an odd mash-up of the British Isles and Appalachia. Visitors can stay in historic lodgings with period furnishings.
Just down the road is another landmark, the R. M. Brooks General Store, where fourth-generation owner Tiffany Garrett was taking orders for her famous thick-cut friend bologna sandwiches from tourists and locals.
Order the “Tiffany” version, with a fried egg and all the fixings, and she hands you a cow bell to ring loudly in her charming southern lilt. She tells you to grab one of the hanging mugs at a help-yourself coffee station.
TIffany Garrett stands outside the country store in Rugby, Tenn. her family has run for generations.
The history of the store, long a stop for highway workers, travelers, and politicians and now tourists, is visible in warped wooden floors, rocking chairs, pot-belly stove and walls hang a dizzying assortment of odds and ends: Newspaper clippings, books, old phones and bottles and taxidermied animals.
“My great-grandfather went to work in Florida, and then my great-grandmother sent word she was pregnant. So he had to come back,” she said. “He got wind that they were building the state highway. And so he thought it would be a good business move.”
Closed for a few years before she took the store over in 2014, it gained a steady flow of visitors after a youtube influencer boost and more visitors to the park, such as the couple from Vermont who show up with a trailer to camp in the handful of sites behind the store.
“The traffic has picked up for sure,” she said, joking that while she’ll never make a fortune, she aims to earn enough to “get my hair did every five or six weeks.”
For her part, Garrett isn’t certain either about whether the quiet life of this stretch of Cumberland Plateau is on the clock.
For now, she pushes back through the front door.
There’s another order of thick-cut fried bologna to fry, and another bell to ring.
Chris Kenning is a national correspondent. He can be reached at [email protected]
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: This outdoor haven is overshadowed by the Smokies. Can it stay a hidden gem?
