The park takes its name from a stone that is gone. According to the earliest settlers, Native people revered a monolith that stood beside the old Walton Road at what is now Monterey, between ten and twelve feet high and shaped like a seated dog. William Walton came on it in the late 1780s. Why it stood there nobody knows. Some accounts make it a boundary marker between Cherokee and Shawnee country, others a guidepost for Cherokee hunting parties.
Railroad builders blasted it in the 1890s. The Improved Order of Red Men gathered several pieces and in 1895 set one, engraved, atop a monument in Monterey City Park, where it remains. The land around the park was a hunting preserve for Native peoples. By the mid-1700s the Cherokee controlled it, and the chief Nettle Carrier had a camp a few miles east of here until he left in 1799. Archaeologists place villages and rock shelters in northern Overton County as far back as the Archaic period.
The park itself is New Deal work. From 1935 the Resettlement Administration, the WPA and the CCC moved farmers off worn-out hillsides, replanted the forest and built a lake and cabins in a horseshoe bend of Mill Creek. The state leased the land in 1939 and named the park for the stone, and the original park is a National Register historic district. The National Rolley Hole Marbles Championship is played here each September.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour