Rutledge Falls, Tennessee
On Sunday, August 31st a friend, Keith Misegades, and I packed up our photo gear and headed south of Nashville along I-24 in search of some good photo opportunities. Our general objective was the Sewanee, Tennessee area. We got off I-24 and traveled south on Highway 41 (also known as Hillsboro Highway and Dixie Highway) towards Pelham and Monteagle. Near Pelham we spotted a nice looking barn (on the west side of the highway) with the usual “See Rock City” painted on its roof. There were fields of green soybean plants in front of the barn. Unfortunately the light was against us as we were basically shooting back towards the southeast and the morning sun wrecked havoc with any decent shots. We made the climb up Highway 41 into Monteagle and then headed east towards Tracy City. We spotted a small pond with a stair stepped rock dam with a nice cascade of water flowing over the dam. We took some long exposure shots of the water that produced some decent images. This would be a great place to catch some of the fall colors or in the midst of a hard freeze during the winter. It appeared that Littell Lake feeds this pond (Hines Pond) so it would make sense that water could be flowing year round.
We drove into Tracy City in search of the Dutch Maid Bakery. The bakery was established in 1902 and is on the Historic registry for being the oldest family owned bakery in the state of Tennessee. It doesn’t open until 11:00a on Sundays so we took a couple of quick snapshots and traveled on. Keith spotted an interesting building that proved to be a good photographic subject. A gas station that burned down several years ago (signs said $1.17 per gallon for regular gas). We talked to a man cutting grass across the street and he told us that we were standing on the site of a lot of dubious local history including a couple of murders.
Heading back towards Monteagle we made a quick lunch stop at the Monteagle Café and headed into Sewanee. Sewanee is home of the University of the South and includes many stone gothic buildings on its campus. We photographed the exterior of the All Saints Chapel, but once again the light didn’t want to cooperate. Being right around midday the light was pretty flat and the sky was a dull white. Again, we noted that fall colors would add a lot of interest to the scenes around Sewanee.
We travelled (still on Highway 41) west towards Winchester and discovered the railroad museum at Cowan. We photographed the locomotives and old station that make up the museum and enjoyed some conversation with a gentleman that was there photographing some of the old tools that belonged to the museum. He commented on the fact that we used tripods and that it was good to see that some people still knew good photographic technique.
Going thru Winchester we took Highway 55 out of Tullahoma towards Manchester. I had seen Rutledge Falls on Google maps and this looked like a promising waterfall. Rutledge Falls is on private land, but the landowner allows public access. There were several people at the falls swimming, but we waited them out and were able to get some very nice shots of the falls. The high cloud cover made perfect lighting for the falls, but we still had to be careful to not include sky in our shots or we’d end up with lots of blown out white areas. Again, fall colors would add a tremendous interest to images taken here and I kept making mental notes of when to come back in the fall.
After the falls we head back through Manchester and caught I-24 back towards Nashville and home.
You can view my edited shots from this trip at http://www.blackburnimages.com/albummaster.aspx?g=aug09trek
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