Hiking to See the Serpent Wall at Long Hunter State Park (Tennessee)

Hey everybody Keith Dodson here with Tina in Longhunter State Park outside of Nashville. Today we're taking an 11 mile hike to see an old stone wall and if you've watched my channel for very long you know that I've posted a few previous videos about historic dry built stone walls in Tennessee and one on the Collins Farm in Kentucky a few years ago. That particular video about the old stone wall in Kentucky caught the attention of an architectural historian from Lexington, Virginia named Daniel Pozzoni. While Joe Collins and I had made the assumption that that big stone wall was built by an early settler, Dan Pozzoni saw many other clues that told him it was a Native American ceremonial wall. It was Dan who made me aware of the stone wall that Tina and I were hiking to see on this day. I'll explain more about it when we get out there but first we have some hiking to do. It's on the Volunteer Trail which is about five and a half miles out and then another five and a half miles back through a mature oak hickory forest that includes many unique cedar glade ecosystems and quite a bit of rocky karst limestone terrain. The Volunteer Trail runs along the shores of Percy Priest Lake, a man-made reservoir created in the 1960s. Now that's the same lake responsible for the destruction of Old Jefferson, a lost community that I've visited in previous videos. It was so peaceful out here. It was a quite beautiful March morning. I wanted to make this hike before the weather started getting too hot and humid. The trail gains about 640 feet in elevation and it alternates between level and hilly and the trail tends to be soft dirt covered by leaves but it's also quite rocky in many places and there are a lot of tree roots. We encountered quite a lot of mud on the trail too. Along the way the trail crosses this other old stone wall. It looks mostly collapsed now but this is not the one we're going to see. We decided to take a break along the lake shore. There are a lot of fossils. As the day progressed we started hearing the noise of a lot more air traffic from nearby Nashville airport. We found some significant patches of daffodils. This was most certainly a home site at some point in history and finally Tina spotted our destination through the trees. Look at this thing. We arrived at the wall at 12 51 and we left the trailhead at about 10 a.m. So with our various pauses and diversions it took us almost three hours to get here and about 13,600 steps. At the end of the hike Tina had logged over 32,000 steps. Now the official story from the park and from other various sources seems to indicate that the old stone wall is in fact what it looks like. A property wall that looks like so many others in Middle Tennessee. Daniel Pozzoni suggests that this could be a 1,000 foot long serpent effigy wall built by Native Americans prior to contact with foreign explorers and settlers. It's known that the Native Americans have occupied this region for a long time up to 12,000 years. It was Cherokee territory more recently but they gave it up around 1805. There's also a nearby park with an ancient burial mound where indigenous people lived in a creekside community for between 300 and 400 years. They left there about 600 to 700 years ago. There are also numerous instances of what are probably modified trees in the area. That's where a tree was purposely modified as it grew in order to make a marker or a signpost to a resource like water for example. So the area is rich with examples of Native American population and their influence on the landscape. There's a video on YouTube where Dan Pozzoni explains all the clues that make him believe this is a Native American construction. I'll put a link in the description. He makes some very compelling observations. One of the things Mr. Pozzoni has identified is the multiple courses of rocks stacked on top of the wall. Now settlers did stack rocks on top like this but according to Mr. Pozzoni they didn't do it in so many layers. He's also identified lines of golden or reddish stones running up and down through the white limestone like snakes which he says were intentional and he draws connections to other places that he has studied. But Mr. Pozzoni explains it much better than I do and he also has noticed several more representations in this wall that I haven't mentioned here. So be sure to go watch his video. If Mr. Pozzoni's theories are right about this wall this would have certainly been a place of big and powerful magic. Snakes symbolize many important concepts in Native American culture across the continent including in the southeast. Regardless of the origins of this old stone wall I have to say it's a very impressive place. I'm From a photography point of view bright sunlight makes shooting these old stone walls very difficult but I had a few advantageous cloud shadows pass over giving me the soft light that I prefer for photography. If you want to get a better look at this wall Tina literally recorded the entire length of both sides. I'll post that video on Patreon and here on my channel for members. Thanks for watching Be sure to visit my website at KeithDodson.com