Steps of Change

There’s a big change taking place on the mountain as the main North-South road, Highway 127, is being re-designed. Now, I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of change; yet I realize that an historian’s mission is to document change. The beginning of roadwork got me to thinking about the changes wrought with previous roads.

Many of the Plateau roads have been modified over the years, in fact in pre-pavement days when a road became impassable, it might just be moved. I suppose when the mountain was more sparsely populated and no fences were erected to confine stock it was easy enough to take a different route. Country roads were never really planned, they were just the by-product of many feet passing the same way.

Before World War 2 and the rise of the automobile, feet were the only means of travel – whether it was your own feet, or those lent by a horse or a mule. Roads curved to take the easier route around a big hill, swamp, or even a farmstead. And homes were built along those roads which further established the routes.

Then cars came along and the little footpaths had to change. It only took a decade for the Tennessee’s State Highway Commission to begin work on a couple of the main plateau roadways. By the early 1950’s highway 127 was being flattened and straightened with great hills blasted and lands appropriated where engineers deemed the road was lay.

Sometimes this meant that the road now passed your back door instead of the front door. And often it meant that a home built straight out from the road was now perched upon a hill. My own home currently has a 7 foot drop to the road despite being nearly level when it was built over 50 years ago.

Even though the growing popularity of the automobile was the catalyst for the new roads, there was still an awful lot of foot traffic. And I don’t suppose anyone could foresee the day when no one would walk anywhere. So those homes left perched high above the new road were given steps down from their yard.

The Martha Washington Church has a set of these steps, and they can still be seen at a few homes along Highway 127. Today they are crumbling from age and disuse. We all arrive at home or church and drive our cars right up those steep driveways. Walking today is “cardio” rather than conveyance and it’s barely safe to share the road with the fast cars and heavy trucks. The new highway they are building will probably be limited-access and it will bypass many of these old homesteads and these steps of change become something for historians to document.