Cumberland River

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cumberland River runs 688 miles through some of the most storied terrain in the American South, draining nearly 18,000 square miles of southern Kentucky and north-central Tennessee before disappearing into the Ohio River near Paducah. It is a river that has carried hunters, flatboats, and floodwaters in roughly equal measure. It passes beneath mountains, falls over a 68-foot curtain of white water, and fills a reservoir stretching more than 100 miles before threading through Nashville and turning northwest toward the Tennessee border country. What does it take to trace a river from its three separate headwater forks all the way to its meeting with the Ohio? And what happens when that river, dammed and diverted and controlled for generations, still finds a way to overflow everything in its path?

• 2. Three Forks, One River

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  Martin's Fork begins near Hensley Settlement on Brush Mountain in Bell County, Kentucky, winding north through the mountains until it reaches the small town of Baxter in Harlan County. Clover Fork starts on Black Mountain in Holmes Mill, close to the Virginia border, and runs west alongside Kentucky Route 38 until it enters Harlan. Poor Fork rises as a thin stream on Pine Mountain in Letcher County, near Flat Gap, Virginia, and tracks southwest along the ridge until it joins the other two in Baxter. That convergence at Baxter is where the river earns its name. From there the Cumberland turns west through the Kentucky mountains before bending north toward Cumberland Falls, where it drops 68 feet in a cascade recognized as one of the largest waterfalls in the southeastern United States. The falls carry another distinction: they are among the very few places in the Western Hemisphere where a moonbow, a rainbow cast by moonlight, can be seen.

• 3. Dams, Lakes, and Engineered Water

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  Past Cumberland Falls, the river widens as it absorbs the Laurel and Rockcastle rivers from the northeast, then the Big South Fork from the south, before spreading into Lake Cumberland, impounded by Wolf Creek Dam. That reservoir stretches more than 100 miles and ranks among the largest artificial lakes in the eastern United States. Crossing south into Tennessee near Celina, the Cumberland picks up the Obey River and Caney Fork, then encounters two more dams northeast of Nashville that form Cordell Hull Lake and Old Hickory Lake in sequence. After Nashville adds the Stones River to the flow, yet another dam creates Cheatham Lake. The river continues northwest to Clarksville, where the Red River joins in, before the Cumberland re-enters Kentucky at the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. There it feeds Lake Barkley, sitting on one side of a narrow strip of land that separates it from Kentucky Lake. The river makes its final run north to Smithland, northeast of Paducah, where it meets the Ohio.

• 4. Names and Origins

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  Thomas Walker, an explorer from Virginia, named the river in 1758, though historians cannot say with certainty whether he meant to honor the Duke of Cumberland or the English county of that name. Long before Walker arrived, the Shawnee knew the river as Wasioto and had lived along its banks for generations. French traders working the interior of North America called it the Riviere des Chaouanons, which translates as River of the Shawnee, a name that acknowledged the people most closely associated with it. For years after Walker's 1758 journey, English-speaking settlers continued to refer to it simply as the Shawnee River, or sometimes the Shawanoe River. The eventual acceptance of "Cumberland" came gradually, and the older names faded from common use even as they preserved a record of who had been there first.

• 5. Trade, Settlement, and Rivers as Roads

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  Hunters and settlers moving into the interior of Kentucky and Tennessee relied on the Cumberland first as a passage, a route through difficult mountain terrain. Riverboat commerce followed, with vessels traveling downstream to the Ohio and then the Mississippi, connecting the Kentucky and Tennessee backcountry to broader markets. Towns and villages planted themselves at natural landing points along the banks, and through the middle of the nineteenth century, rivers functioned as the primary roads for both trade and travel across this part of the continent. Nashville and Clarksville, the two largest cities on the river today, both grew in part from that era of waterborne commerce. The geography that made the Cumberland useful for boats also made it useful for floods, and the two forces, commerce and catastrophe, have shaped every era of the river's human history.

• 6. Floods and Forced Rerouting

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  In April 1977, floodwaters from the Cumberland inundated Harlan, Kentucky and the communities around it, destroying most of the homes and businesses standing in the river's floodplain. That disaster triggered the construction of Martins Fork Dam and the diversion of Clover Fork around Harlan entirely. The original channel of Clover Fork had once run directly through downtown Harlan, merging with Martins Fork at the intersection of Kentucky Route 38 and US Route 421. A flood control project begun in 1992 rerouted it through a tunnel bored beneath Little Black Mountain; the fork now emerges at Baxter. The river was also redirected through a mountain cut at Loyall, Kentucky. In late April and early May of 2010, the river overflowed its banks and flooded both Nashville and Clarksville during what became known as the 2010 Tennessee floods, prompting evacuation orders for Nashville's downtown. A decade later, in early February 2020, major flooding struck again at Pineville, Barbourville, and Williamsburg along the upper river, a reminder that the miles of dams and diversions have not ended the Cumberland's capacity to overwhelm the landscape it drains.