Cumberland County, Tennessee

Cumberland County is a county located in Tennessee, and the county seat is Crossville, comprising it's statistical area, which is relatively small.

Overview
The county was created in 1856 by parts of several surrounding counties, and during the American Civil War, the county was split 50/50 between the Union and Confederacy itself, but the roots of the county are even older, before the United States ever came into existence in 1787, as North Carolina's legislature ordered the widening and improvement to Avery's Trace, which ran through North Carolina all the way to Nashville, raising funds building a lottery and completed a project that made a road, but required a jarring trip. The road was often unpaved and muddy and crossed slabs that was only passable in some places on foot, though reportedly, wagons couldn't get down the steep grade at Spencer's Mountain without locking brakes on wheels and dragging a freshly felled tree behind to slow it down. The mountain top was literally descripted as "quite denuded of trees".

The county was a site of an important saltpeter mine, and it was the main ingredient of gunpowder, created by leeching the soil from a nearby cave. Richard Waterhouse settled this area in 1800, going with William Kelly into Grassy cove and explored the cave in 1812, but it was not until near the Civil War when gunpowder began to be manufactured at the cave in 1859 with the cave being vast and expansive and evidence of mining extending far from the entrance with the vats being located in a large room near the entrance. However, the room is soaking wet and the wooden vats have rotted to the point that they are difficult to recognize. During the turn of the 20th century, the federal government established the Cumberland Homesteads outside of Crossville, with the program providing land and houses for at least 250 poor families, and the state park was built as part of the project too.

Namesakes
The county was named after a vast mountain range in the southeastern section of the Appalachian Mountains, which span through Virginia, all the way through Tennessee, including the Crab Orchard Mountains, with the highest peak being an elevation of 1,287 meters above sea level, located near Norton, Virginia, and named after Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, and the geology of the region is the northern limb of the Powell Valley Anticline, which exists because of the Lee-type prehistoric sandstones cropping out of these lines, with softer rock being eroded away, leaving the resistant stones to form a ridge itself, with a cliff-lined southeastern slope being created by millennia of erosion and forms the drainage divide between the Cumberland River, and the Powell River on both the north and south. The county is home to several karst formations, most notably at Grassy Cove, near Crossville, and near the Sequatchie River, and it's Valley too, and it's divide is where the watersheds of the Cumberland River and the Tennessee River meet which goes through the county itself.

The Cumberland River is also a major waterway in the Southern United States, that drains almost 18K square miles through southern Kentucky and north-central Tennessee, the river flowing westwards from the headwaters in the Appalachian trail from it's confluence from the Ohio river itself, beginning in Kentucky and converge in Baxter in the state of Kentucky located in Harlan County, flowing west in parallel with Kentucky Route 38 until it reached Harlan. Clover Fork used to flow through downtown Harlan and merged with Marti's Fork between two routes, including US Rote 421 with a flood prevention project beginning in 1992 which diverted it through a tunnel under Little Back Mountain.

From there, the wider, now called Cumberland River continued flowing through the west, through the mountains of Kentucky before northward towards Cumberland Falls, and one of the only few places in the Western Hemisphere where a moonbow can be seen. Beyond the falls, the river turns abruptly west again, and expands to other creeks and streams that feed into it, and flows into one of the largest artificial lakes in the United States, and finally flows back into Kentucky at the Lakes National Recreation Area, which is nestled between Lake Barkley, which is still fed by the river and Kentucky Lake, flowing northeast of Paducah.

In seemingly recent history, a number of serious floods have struck regions that the river flowed through, and well into the 21st century simultaneously.