35 Wild Appalachian Facts That Break Your Brain

Did you know the Appalachian Mountains hides a 112,000-square-foot bunker under a luxury resort, built to shelter every member of Congress in case of nuclear war? Or that the largest cave system on Earth winds beneath the farmland of the Appalachias, with more than 426 miles of mapped passages? How about the fact that the biggest house in America isn't in Beverly Hills or Manhattan? It's tucked into the mountains of the Appalachias, with 250 rooms and 65 fireplaces. So, here are 35 geography facts about the Appalachias that will completely change how you see it. 35. Greenbrier's Secret Congress Bunker Under a five-star resort in the West Virginia mountains, the federal government built something nobody was supposed to know about. During the Eisenhower era, engineers carved out 112,000 square feet of bunker under the Greenbrier Hotel, designed to house all 535 members of Congress in case of nuclear war. It had dorm rooms, a House chamber, a Senate chamber, and decontamination showers. The hotel above kept running like a normal luxury resort, while the bunker sat ready underneath it for over 30 years. Then in 1992, the Washington Post broke the story, and the secret was over. Walk into the resort today, and you can tour the rooms where America's leaders were supposed to ride out the apocalypse, just below where guests were sipping iced tea on the veranda. 34. Mammoth Cave Runs Forever Beneath south-central Kentucky lies the longest cave system on Earth. Mammoth Cave has more than 426 surveyed miles of passageways, and crews keep finding more. That's over one and a half times the length of the second-longest cave system on the planet. The caves formed over millions of years as slightly acidic groundwater dissolved layer after layer of limestone, carving out chambers, tunnels, and pits that go on for days. 33. The Surprise Capital of Appalachia Most people picture Appalachia as small mountain towns and country roads, but the largest city in the entire region sits up north in Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh's metro area holds more than 2.4 million people, larger than the Appalachian populations of any of the southern mountain states. The city sits at the meeting point of three rivers and grew up on the back of the Allegheny Plateau's massive coal deposits. The same bituminous coal that fueled its rise into the Steel City after the Civil War. 32. The Town That's Been on Fire Since 1962 In 1962, workers in Centralia, Pennsylvania, lit a routine trash fire in an old strip mine pit. The fire spread into an exposed coal seam under the town, and once it reached the network of abandoned anthracite mines, it became impossible to put out. That fire is still burning today. Over the decades, the population dropped from more than 1,000 residents to just a small handful of holdouts. The state condemned the town and demolished most of the buildings. If the coal estimates are right, the underground inferno could keep burning for another 250 years. 31. The Mountain Community That Lived a Century Behind On top of Brush Mountain in Kentucky, a community called the Hensley Settlement lived without electricity, indoor plumbing, or roads from 1903 all the way to 1951. Families farmed, raised livestock, and ran a one-room schoolhouse high on the ridge, completely self-sufficient. They were still using oil lamps and hand tools well into the era of television and the atomic bomb. The last resident finally walked off the mountain in 1951, leaving cabins, fences, and split-rail pastures behind. Hike up there today, and you can walk through restored cabins where families lived a 19th-century life deep into the 20th. 30. The Trail That Killed 4,000 People In 1838 and 1839, the federal government forced the Cherokee from their Appalachian homelands and marched them west. The route covered more than 5,000 miles of overland trails and river paths across nine states. Of the roughly 15,000 Cherokee forced from their homes, about 4,000 died along the way from starvation, exposure, and disease. The Cherokee called it the Trail Where They Cried. 29. The Cherokee Who Refused to Leave While thousands were marched west, several hundred Cherokee evaded the soldiers by hiding deep in the hollows and high ridges of the Great Smoky Mountains. The terrain was so rugged, the army couldn't find them. Their descendants formed the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who still live on tribal land in western North Carolina today. They run their own government, schools, and the only legal casino on the mainland of North Carolina, set right in the southern Appalachians. If you've ever driven through the Smokies, you've passed through the homeland of a people who outlasted one of the most violent removals in American history. 28. The Forest That Grows Sideways At 4,863 feet, Spruce Knob is the highest point in West Virginia. The summit is covered in a stunted forest of red spruce, but every single tree leans hard to the east. Relentless westerly winds pound the ridge year after year, killing branches on the windward side and forcing the trees to grow flagged toward the leeward side. The whole summit looks frozen mid-flinch. 27. NASCAR Was Born in Moonshine Country Stock car racing didn't start at a slick speedway. It started in the hollows and ridge roads of southern Appalachia. Bootleggers in the 1930s and 1940s souped up their cars to outrun federal agents on twisting mountain roads, then started racing each other for fun on weekends. The first official NASCAR-sanctioned track opened in 1947 in Wilkes County, North Carolina, a place once known as the Bootleg Capital of America. Walk into a small-town garage in the southern mountains today, and old-timers will quietly tell you which back roads were once moonshine routes. 26. WHEN AMERICA BOMBED ITS OWN PEOPLE During the Battle of Blair Mountain, the Sheriff of Logan County hired private aircraft to drop homemade gas bombs and shrapnel charges on the striking miners below. It was the first known aerial bombardment of American citizens by other Americans. Pilots dropped pipe bombs and gas canisters out of open cockpits over the same hollows where families lived. A few of the unexploded bombs were later recovered and now sit in museums. Hike Blair Mountain today, and the ridge looks peaceful, but the air above it once carried the engines of planes flown against fellow Americans. 25. PAID IN MONEY YOU COULDN'T SPEND ANYWHERE ELSE Coal miners in early 20th-century Appalachia were often paid not in real U.S. dollars, but in private currency called scrip. The scrip was redeemable only at the company-owned store, in the company-owned town, where the company also owned the housing. If you wanted bread, rent, or boots, the company set the price and took its own money back. Workers were trapped in a closed economic loop they could never spend their way out of. 24. THE HIDDEN COAL EMPIRE The western edge of the Appalachians sits on top of what's considered the world's largest deposit of bituminous coal. The Allegheny Plateau holds seam after seam of the stuff, and it's the fuel that powered Pittsburgh's transformation into the Steel City after the Civil War. Whole towns sprouted up around the mines. Train lines pushed deeper into the hills every year. The coal under these ridges built railroads, skyscrapers, and battleships. 23. THE WILD LEAK THAT STARTED A THOUSAND FESTIVALS Wild ramps are pungent, garlic-onion-flavored mountain leaks that grow only for a few weeks in early spring. They're so beloved across Appalachia that small towns build entire festivals around eating them. Ramp suppers, ramp dinners, ramp cook-offs. Demand grew so intense that Great Smoky Mountains National Park banned ramp harvesting altogether in 2002 to protect what was left. Walk into a small mountain church basement in April, and you'll smell the ramps cooking from a quarter-mile away, a flavor strong enough to clear out a room and bring a whole community to the table. 22. THE FOREST PLANT WORTH MORE THAN GOLD American ginseng grows wild on shaded Appalachian forest floors, and it's quietly one of the most valuable plants in North America. Experienced sang hunters can earn between $300 and $460 per dried pound on the Asian export market, where wild Appalachian ginseng is prized far above farmed varieties. People have made down payments on houses with single autumn's harvest. The plant takes years to mature, and finding a good patch is a closely guarded family secret. 21. THE ONLY BREAK IN THE WALL The Cumberland Mountain Ridge runs unbroken for hundreds of miles along the border of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, except in one spot. At Cumberland Gap, the rock dips into a natural notch low enough to walk through. It's the only break for hundreds of miles in an otherwise solid wall of mountain. For native peoples, then settlers, then armies, this single notch was the door between the eastern colonies and the interior of the continent. 20. THE ROAD THAT OPENED THE WEST In 1775, Daniel Boone took about 30 axemen to the Cumberland Gap and widened a Native American footpath into a real wagon-passable trail. The route became known as the Wilderness Road, and over the next 35 years it funneled an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 settlers westward into Kentucky and beyond. Most of America's westward expansion didn't start at the Mississippi, it started in this single notch. If you've ever driven through the Cumberland Gap tunnel, you're following almost exactly the path those first axemen cut. 19. THE CHEROKEE MAN WHO INVENTED A WRITTEN LANGUAGE ALONE Around 1821, a Cherokee silversmith named Sequoyah, living in the southern Appalachians, did something almost no individual in human history has ever done. He invented a complete writing system from scratch, even though he couldn't read or write any language when he started. He worked on it for years, ignored by neighbors who thought he'd lost his mind. Within a few years of finishing it, Cherokee literacy in the southern mountains exceeded that of many surrounding white populations. 18. THE FRUIT THAT NEVER REACHES THE GROCERY STORE Pawpaws are the largest native fruit in North America, with a flavor often described as a They grow wild in Appalachian river valleys, hanging in clusters from small understory trees. So why have most Americans never eaten one? Because they bruise within hours of ripening. Pawpaws can't be shipped, can't be stacked in crates, and can't sit on a shelf. The only way to eat one is to find it locally, fresh off the tree. 17. THE ENSLAVED MAN WHO MAPPED THE LONGEST CAVE ON EARTH In the 1840s, a man named Stephen Bishop, enslaved in Kentucky, became one of the first true explorers and mappers of Mammoth Cave. He led visitors through the underground for years by the light of a single lard oil lamp, squeezing through tight crawls and crossing pits other guides wouldn't touch. He discovered passages that are still on the standard tours today, and his hand-drawn map was used for decades. 16. THE TUNNEL THAT SWALLOWED A HIGHWAY To preserve the historic mountain pass at Cumberland Gap, engineers did something rare in American road building. They removed an entire highway. In 1996, U.S. Route 25E was rerouted through a $280 million dual-bore tunnel cut directly through the mountain. The old roadway over the gap was torn up, and the land restored to look the way it did when Boone's settlers walked through. So today, cars travel under the gap instead of over it, and the historic crossing is once again a quiet trail. 15. THE LAKE HIDDEN 140 FEET UNDERGROUND Below the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in eastern Tennessee, deep inside Craighead Caverns, sits America's largest underground lake. The lost sea covers more than four acres at its surface, and divers still haven't found the far edges or the bottom. The water is so clear that boats seem to float on glass, with stalactites hanging just overhead. 14. THE CAVE THAT HELD A GIANT CAT Inside an Appalachian cave in eastern Tennessee, paleontologists found the fossilized remains of a prehistoric jaguar, three times bigger than the modern Amazonian jaguar. The bones date back over 20,000 years, to a time when the climate was colder and the southern mountains held a very different cast of predators. 13. THE 90 BUILDINGS INSIDE A NATIONAL PARK Inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park stand about 90 historic structures, log cabins, churches, barns, gristmills, and one-room schoolhouses. They were left behind when more than 1,200 mountain families were forced off their land in the 1930s to create the park. The government bought them out, sometimes against their will, and tore down most of the homes. The 90 buildings that survived were preserved as a record of the people who lived here for generations. Walk into Cades Cove on a quiet morning and you can step inside a kitchen where a family ate breakfast a hundred years ago. 12. THE PARK BUILT BY PENNIES The financial foundation for Great Smoky Mountains National Park came from an unusual mix of money. John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated $5 million, matched by Tennessee and North Carolina. But a real chunk also came from local school children, who chipped in pennies and nickels to help buy out the mountain families. It's the only major U.S. national park created primarily through private money. Today, more than 12 million people visit it every year, walking through forests bought in part with pocket change collected in 1920s schoolhouses. 11. THE BIGGEST HOUSE IN AMERICA The largest privately owned house in the United States isn't in Beverly Hills or Long Island. It sits in the mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina. The Biltmore Estate has 250 rooms, 178,926 square feet of floor space, 65 fireplaces, and 43 bathrooms. George Vanderbilt built it in the 1890s as a country home, with its own farm, dairy, and forestry operation tucked into the southern Appalachians. 10. THE GRAND CANYON OF THE EAST In western North Carolina, the Linville River has spent millions of years cutting through hard quartzite, creating a gorge sometimes called the Grand Canyon of the East. Linville Gorge runs about 12 miles long and plunges 1,400 feet deep. The slopes were so steep that loggers in the 1800s couldn't reach much of it. As a result, the gorge holds some of the only old-growth forest left in the eastern United States. 9. THE CANADIAN FORESTS ON SOUTHERN MOUNTAIN TOPS The spruce-fir forests on the highest Appalachian peaks are biological islands left over from the last ice age. As glaciers advanced south, cold-loving northern species retreated ahead of them. When the climate warmed back up, those species got stranded on cool mountaintops where the temperature stayed low enough to survive. Today, on Mount Mitchell in North Carolina and Mount Rogers in Virginia, you can walk through forests that look exactly like the woods of Quebec or Maine. 8. THE MOUNTAINS THAT AREN'T REALLY MOUNTAINS The Allegheny Plateau, which makes up the western Appalachians, isn't technically a mountain range. It's an ancient flat plateau that erosion has cut into ridges and valleys so deeply it looks and feels mountainous from the ground. Rivers and streams have carved the original tabletop into a maze of steep hollows and narrow ridges. Drive a back road in West Virginia, and you'll feel like you're climbing mountains all day. 7. THE LARGEST ARMED UPRISING IN AMERICAN HISTORY In 1921, around 10,000 West Virginia coal miners marched on Logan County to fight for the right to unionize. They were met by 3,000 lawmen and company guards on a ridge called Blair Mountain. For five days, the two sides fought a full-scale battle in the woods, firing roughly a million rounds. It became the largest armed insurrection on U.S. soil since the Civil War. Federal troops eventually marched in, and the miners stood down. 6. THE MOUNTAIN THAT TURNS PINK FROM THE AIR Each June, the Catawba rhododendron blooms so densely on the high balds of Roan Mountain on the Tennessee and North Carolina border that the pink-purple display is visible from passing aircraft. The balds are open, grassy summits surrounded by forest, and for a few weeks they look like enormous flower gardens. Hike up to Roan in late spring, and you can walk for miles through waist-high blooms with the whole ridge glowing pink under the clouds. 5. THE TOWN IN THE SKY Boone, North Carolina sits at over 3,300 feet, making Watauga County's seat one of the highest elevation towns east of the Mississippi River. At that altitude, winters look more like New England than the South. Snow piles up, ice clings to the ridges, and the rivers stay cold all summer. Drive into Boone on a humid July afternoon from the lowlands, and you'll feel the temperature drop noticeably as you climb. By the time you park downtown, you're standing in cool mountain air on a street higher than some peaks in the northeast. 4. THE WILDERNESS STILL HIDING BOMBS Dolly Sod's Wilderness in West Virginia is one of the most beautiful high-elevation plateaus in the eastern United States. Wind-bent spruce, sphagnum bogs, and blueberry heath all sit at nearly 4,000 feet. But during World War II, the U.S. Army used Dolly Sod's as a live-fire artillery and mortar training range. Hikers there are still warned that unexploded ordnance may remain hidden in the bogs. 3. THE PITTSBURGH OF THE SOUTH Birmingham, Alabama sits at the southern tip of the Appalachian Chain. The iron-rich Red Mountain at the city's edge held everything needed to make steel, ore, limestone, and coal, all within a short distance of each other. Industrialists built mills modeled directly on the ones in Pittsburgh, and a town that didn't exist in 1870 became a major industrial city within 20 years. 2. THE HOTTEST BURNING COAL ON EARTH The Appalachian region holds anthracite coal, the hardest and hottest burning kind on Earth. It's found almost exclusively in eastern Pennsylvania, in a roughly 500-square-mile area that holds the largest known deposit of anthracite anywhere. This coal heated America's homes through brutal winters and fueled the rise of cities up and down the East Coast. 1. THE VINE THE GOVERNMENT PAID FARMERS TO PLANT Kudzu, the fast-growing vine that now blankets entire hillsides across the southern Appalachians, isn't native. The U.S. government actually paid southern farmers in the 1930s and 40s, about $8 an acre, to plant it as erosion control. It now spreads at roughly 150,000 acres per year.