Big Creek Gap

Joseph A. Cooper, whose Campbell County company first forced the gap, was a Cove Creek farmer, Baptist deacon and Mexican War private who had backed John Bell in 1860. At the Greeneville convention of 1861 he joined a secret pact to recruit and drill Unionists, and by August he was drilling more than five hundred men near Jacksboro before fleeing to Kentucky. He rose to colonel of the 6th Tennessee Infantry and brevet major general, collected federal revenue at Knoxville under Grant, and farmed in Kansas from 1880 until his death in 1910. He lies in Knoxville National Cemetery.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Norris Dam and Norris Dam State Park — 11 mi
  TVA's first dam, finished in 1936 on the Clinch River, and the state park beside it with the 1798 Rice Grist Mill, built for a valley whose families were moved out.
• Museum of Appalachia — 15 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 20 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Frozen Head State Park — 26 mi
  A 24,000-acre Cumberland Mountains park around a 3,324-foot peak, made from Brushy Mountain prison lands and the CCC, and home to the Barkley Marathons.

More markers nearby

• Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong — 0.5 mi
• Kentucky-TN, Campbell — 14 mi
• The Coal Creek War — 15 mi
• The Market Place of Pearls — 20 mi