Lost Cove

The story

Lost Cove earned its name. The community sat in a steep hollow above the Nolichucky River on the Tennessee line, first settled around the Civil War by Morgan Bailey and a handful of families who lived on logging, farming, railroading, and — by most accounts — moonshine.

For a while the timber and the Clinchfield railroad kept it alive; the line was the town's only real link to the outside, since no road ever reached the cove. When the surrounding forest was logged out, the railroad stopped servicing Lost Cove, and the residents petitioned the state to build them a road. The legislature refused. Without the trains and without a road, families drifted away one by one until the last left in 1957.

The cove is now part of the Pisgah National Forest, and its collapsing log cabins and lone chimney are reached the same way people always reached it — on foot. The usual route is a steep hike of several miles from Unaka Springs, Tennessee, up along the active Clinchfield tracks and across the state line.

What remains today

Several decaying log cabins, a standing chimney, and a small cemetery in the forest above the Nolichucky.