See Rock City
(Not to mention the old painted barns that urge you on to Lookout Mountain)
BY SUZANNE FREEMAN
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Rock City officially opened
as a public attraction on May 21, 1932. ( David
Jenkins) |
My husband is a geology buff. On a shelf above his desk
he keeps a small collection—assorted chunks of fossiliferous
limestone, a gritty volcanic cinder. He likes to read
about plate tectonics, pillow basalts, and the vanished
Iapetus Ocean. In the car, he slows down to stare at
outcroppings along the highway, and I have suggested
that he get a bumper sticker to warn other motorists:
I brake for the Triassic, the Cretaceous, the Paleocene.
We are on a nine-hour drive, threading our way south
through Virginia's valleys—from the Shenandoah
to the New River—and across the border into Tennessee.
As we travel, he explains to me how the mountains
were formed, a process called orogeny (we brake for
orogenous zones?), and I am aware that the two of
us are clearly looking at different landscapes. While
I gaze out at a stolid spread of countryside, not
unlike a folk art painting, he is admiring the handiwork
of earthquakes, the design of crashing continents.
Our destination, aptly, is a place called Rock
City, just outside Chattanooga. This 14-acre tourist
attraction on the slope of Lookout Mountain is not
an actual city, but it offers up an improbable mix
of enticements, including wildflowers, massive sandstone
formations, gnome figurines, the 180-foot Swing-A-Long
suspension bridge, a cornfield maze, and the Mother
Goose Village. Rock City is not best known, however,
for any of those things. For the past 73 years, it's
been famous for the genius of making itself famous—for
having its name emblazoned in gigantic letters on
barns all across the South and up into parts of the
Midwest, as far north as the Great Lakes.
For more of this article, look for the November/December
2005 issue on newsstands or e-mail
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