Reelfoot Lake State Park

Reelfoot Lake exists because the ground moved. The 1811-12 New Madrid earthquakes dropped this corner of Tennessee and flooded it, and the lake formed or grew then. It is the state's only large natural lake, shallow and crowded with bald cypress. See it slowly: the Cypress Boardwalk behind the visitor center on Highway 21, the free Donaldson Memorial Museum and Nature Center, and the eagle tours in January and February. Before settlers, this was Chickasaw (Chikasha) hunting ground. The popular tale of a Chickasaw chief named Reelfoot is legend, and the lake's name has other proposed origins.

The lake's second shaping was human. Families fished and farmed around it as common ground until James Harris of Tiptonville, who had bought old land claims, announced in 1899 that he owned it and would drain it. In 1908 masked Night Riders burned fish docks, whipped people they judged enemies and, across the state line in Kentucky, murdered Dave Walker and members of his Black family, a baby among them. No one was prosecuted for those killings. On October 19 riders took the company lawyers Quentin Rankin and Robert Z. Taylor from a hotel at Walnut Log; Rankin was hanged and shot, and Taylor escaped through the water.

The National Guard held nearly a hundred suspects, and two died awaiting trial. Six men were sentenced to hang; the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdicts in 1909. The lake was ruled public, and the state took title in 1914. Reelfoot Lake Park began in 1925, and eagles were brought back to nest in 1981.