Cades Cove, TN
In The Great Smoky Mountains National Park

The most popular site in the most popular national park in America, Cades Cove is a stunning collection of historic structures set in grassy fields, in an absolutely flat-bottomed valley surrounded on all four sides by steep mountains. Its river flows into it from a deep gorge cut through the mountains, flows straight through its thick, rich soil, and then flows straight out of it again — through a deep gorge cut through the mountains. This strange geology is due to the surrounding mountains having block-faulted over a limestone layer. The limestone dissolved away in a one-by-two square mile block, and its collapse formed a window in the surrounding mountains, a flat-bottomed karst window with limestone-rich soils.

Cades Cove was settled late, around 1830, but remained a fairly ordinary (if remote) place until the railroads came. Railhead settlements grew explosively, while places further away fell behind economically. Cades Cove was about as far as you could get from a railroad, a two-day wagon trip as late as the First World War. Its remoteness froze in it folkways based on self-sufficiency and local resources. When paved roads came in the 1920s tourists from nearby Knoxville marveled at its log farmhouses and stunning scenery. In the 1930s the National Park Service condemned the entire valley and turned it into the open-air museum you see now.