Cumberland Gap became a postal town in 1803. It has at one time or another been part of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee as the boundary lines in this area shifted. Today it is in Claiborne County Tennessee.
Today the town boasts many historic buildings and celebrates its historic past, starting in the 1700s when Dr. Thomas Walker discovered the gap, soon followed by Daniel Boone. The Gap was hotly contested during the Civil War and traded hands several times between Union and Confederate forces.
From the National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form:
The Cumberland Gap Historic District is located in the rural community of Cumberland Gap (population 269) in north central Claiborne County in East Tennessee. The town of Cumberland Gap is located near a pass or gap in the Appalachian Mountains and is built in the valley below the gap adjacent to Cumberland Gap National Park (NR 10/15/66). The district is in a valley on the eastern approach to Cumberland Gap. Towering on the north is the sheer wall of the Pinnacle; to the west is the Tri-State Peak with the Cumberland Gap between. Poor valley Ridge is to the east with a spur ridge from it thrusting into the district. From its origin at Cudjo's Cave, Gap Creek flows south through the town, joining a branch which follows the base of the Poor Valley Ridge Spur from the east. The town is located off U. S. Highway 25E on the Virginia and Kentucky state lines. The central business district, intermixed with some housing, and the adjacent residential area compose the Cumberland Gap Historic District.
The town is on the Louisville and Nashville [L & N) Railroad, which runs northeast-southwest. The majority of resources-in the district are located along Colwyn Street and Pennlyn Street, parallel roads running northwest-southeast. Colwyn, which follows the historic route of the Wilderness Road, begins at the L & N rail line on the northwest and is primarily commercial. Pennlyn also begins at the L & N rail line, but is primarily residential. The district extends down Colwyn and Pennlyn to Cumberland Drive on the southeast.
The majority of resources in the Cumberland Gap Historic District were built between the 1890s and the 1930s and include several single-family and multiple – family dwellings, commercial buildings, public buildings, a church, and an unevaluated archaeological site.
For over two hundred years, Cumberland Gap has served as a significant passageway to the lands west of the Appalachian mountains. The significance of this site to early American history is well documented and the National Park Service administers the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park which serves as the town's northern boundary. The town of Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, developed as the number of travelers along the Wilderness Road increased in the late eighteenth century.
Over 300,000 people traveled the Wilderness Road from 1775 to 1840. A small town, comprised of trading posts, inns, taverns, stores, and blacksmiths, evolved on the Tennessee side of the Gap. The settlement received its initial post office designation in 1803. By this time, the town also had a small industrial base, consisting of an iron furnace (located on the Virginia side of the state line, the remains are now within the boundaries of the national park) and a grist mill.
By the middle of nineteenth century, the development of railroads and the popularity of other more direct western routes left the Wilderness Road largely abandoned by travelers and the town of Cumberland Gap, whose economic structure had been largely based on serving those travelers, declined accordingly. Accounts of the community during the Civil War document a town in serious economic depression. Both the North and the South used the town as a camp as their armies struggled over the rough and deteriorated Wilderness Road route. The movement of troops back and forth destroyed almost everything that remained of the original settlement as the armies took what they needed from the town and surrounding countryside.
This early history of Cumberland Gap is vitally important for its associations with the Wilderness Road and Civil War period. But today, only a historical archaeological site, at 219-220 Colwyn Street (#8}, the foundations of the Judge J. H. S. Morrison House, remain to document the town's pre-Civil War history. The cultural resources contained within the Cumberland Gap Historic District today document a later, yet still vitally significant, chapter of Claiborne County history: the arrival of foreign capital and its impact on the renewed development of Cumberland Gap and Claiborne County during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Foreign capitalists found the United States to be an exciting and profitable place for investment in the late nineteenth century. Throughout the undeveloped sections of the world, western capitalists poured millions of dollars into projects designed to exploit areas of rich natural resources. In the eyes of a group of English investors, the Cumberland Gap area was rich in coal, iron, and timber resources, ready for the taking.
The leader of those investors was a Canadian, Alexander Arthur, who first explored the Gap area in 1886. Arthur was convinced that the region held enough coal and iron deposits that its development would lead to the creation of a ”Birmingham" of the Appalachian region. That same year, he and a group of British investors formed the American Association, Limited and purchased thousands of acres on both the Kentucky and Tennessee side of the Gap.
The Association's plan for economic development of the area was typical of other capitalistic efforts in underdeveloped lands. Middlesboro, Kentucky, was to serve as the primary base of their operations and the headquarters of the company. The Association built a massive, imposing, Richardsonian Romanesque company headquarters in Middlesboro, a building listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. On the southern side of the town, the Association created two company towns which survive today: Cumberland Gap and Harrogate. Both of the settlements were to serve as feeder communities to the larger industrial concerns of Middlesboro. Here, natural resources would be loaded on the company's rail network and sent to Middlesboro for processing.
From 1886 to 189l, an almost entirely new town replaced the shacks and randomly distributed buildings of old Cumberland Gap. Today nine properties remain within the proposed historic district to document the first boom, 1886-1891, in the town's history. The most significant is the American Association Building at the head of Colwyn Street. In arranging the town in such a manner that company headquarters stood at the head of the primary commercial artery (Colwyn), the American Association asserted their predominance in late nineteenth century Cumberland Gap. The company building was, and remains, the town‘s most imposing and aesthetically distinctive structure, a visual reminder of the American Association's power and authority• over the community. This period also witnessed a population boom as the company built its own railroad to bring in new residents and workers and to transport the area's natural resources, especially iron deposits, to the processing center at Middlesboro. Exploitation of natural resources (iron and timber) was a key factor in the town's initial boom in population and building, as it would again in the 1920s when the exploitation of coal deposits fueled the town‘s second boom.
During the 1890s, Cumberland Gap probably would have developed more quailties typical of a company town, but the failure of Baring Brothers, an international private banking firm based in London, in 1390 spelled doom for investors across the world. It also spelled doom for the American Association's plans to further develop the Cumberland Gap area. The Gap had developed into a thriving town of about 500, the railroad was working well, and sawmills and other stores stayed busy. But the failure of Baring Brothers, and the brief financial panic that ensued, spelled doom for Cumberland Gap. New investment capital disappeared and building stopped. Also in the early 1890s, the once rich deposits of iron ore ran out and any hopes for recovery were dashed by the Panic of 1893, which began a depression that would not end at Cumberland Gap until 1898.
Indeed, the built environment of the Cumberland Gap district documents this sad turnaround. No new properties were constructed in the town until 1898, a year of general economic recovery throughout the country. But the two residences built in 1898 should not be taken as proof that the Cumberland Gap was booming again. While the L & N Railroad acquired control over the former American Association rail line and built a new depot for the town in circa 1900, and a few additional residences were built before the beginning of World War I, true prosperity did not return to Cumberland Gap until the wartime years and the 1920s. (The depot is extant but has been moved—and placed on an inappropriate foundation, so it is not included in the nomination.)
Once again, outside investors became interested in the Gap's natural resources, especially its coal deposits. Throughout the Southern Appalachian region in the early twentieth century, capitalists created coal companies to mine the wealth of the mountains and spurred the creation of small towns to service the mines and the workers who toiled in them. Cumberland Gap prospered during the 1920s as it had during the late 1880s. While the revitalization of natural resource exploitation was important so too was the town‘s location on the Boone Highway, which followed the old Wilderness Road route, and brought travelers through the town on a regular basis. The town's first service stations date to the 1920s (the Pinnacle Motor Company, the Old Gas Station, and the Gulf Service Station) and the Boone Highway Association placed a historical marker in the town (behind the local school) in circa 1923. Several of the remaining commercial buildings on Colwyn Street date to this period. Of particular significance is the former restaurant “Corner Cafe" (now post office), which dates to 1926, the expansion of the Johnston Building in 1925, and the Fuson Drug Store of 1919.
The number of residences also increased during the 1920s and eight homes dating to those years remain today. Perhaps a better indicator of town growth was the construction of the two-story, brick town school {now the City Hall) in 1925. The school's construction reflects not only the influx of new families in the area and the need for a larger school because of population growth but also reflects the permanent establishment of public education as a force for reform in the community. The property is located at the end of the historic district at the intersection of Colwyn and Cumberland.
Claiborne County• is home to twenty—eight Tennessee Century Farms. One would expect that a small community like Cumberland Gap would have a history dominated by agrarian concerns, just like hundreds of small towns throughout Tennessee. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Cumberland Gap's historical significance lies in its association with the general patterns of capitalistic exploitation of the mineral and timber resources of underdeveloped areas of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In both of the town's periods of extensive activity, the late 1880s and the 1920s, major economic depressions abruptly ended prosperity and economic growth. The town never really rebounded from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Today's residents rely on the tourist traffic from Cumberland Gap National Historical Park and on job opportunities across the state line in Middlesboro. The town's relative isolation from the local major highway has resulted in the survival of a significant number of cultural resources which document the town's period of significance. Sadly the same is not true for its once sister city, Harrogate. Fires, the construction of a four-land highway through the town, and the forces of economic change mean that Harrogate shares none of Cumberland Gap's qualities as a boom-bust company town of the turn of the century. The town of Cumberland Gap is the best representative remaining in Claiborne County of the significance of the American Association and the mining and timber industry in the county's late nineteenth and early twentieth century history.
Because of the town's economic structure, it is not surprising to find that the commercial buildings of the historic district are primarily one-and two-part commercial blocks, constructed of brick with storefront display windows and central, first floor, entrances. The decorative features are almost always confined to simple window treatments and brick corbelling. Due to the town‘s size and its relationship witkn Middlesboro, it made little sense for a merchant to construct anything more grandiose.
Stylistically the town's most dominant twentieth century influence is that associated with the Craftsman style, especially the bungalow. The stuccoed Estep house on Colwyn Street, with its companion garage, is a classic example of the bungalow form. First made popular in California by the Greene brothers and in the northeast by Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman magazine, and then widely distributed by builders and through such mail-order catalogs as Sears, Roebuck, and Company, the bungalow was a natural choice for those families locating in Cumberland Gap during the boom of the 1920s.
While few of the residences and dwellings would be architecturally distinctive enough to merit individual listing in the National Register, as a district the properties clearly represent a significant and distinguishable entity of architectural value in the context of small town architecture in Claiborne County.