Things to Do & Location

South Pittsburg was laid out in 1873 as a planned industrial town on the Tennessee River, modeled after its Pennsylvania namesake and built on the coal and iron of the Sequatchie Valley. In 1896, Joseph Lodge — a machinist who'd come to town to run the local blast furnaces — started his own cast-iron foundry down the street. That same family-run foundry still pours the skillets sold at the Lodge Cast Iron factory store and museum in town, and every last weekend of April, South Pittsburg throws the National Cornbread Festival in its honor.

A Civil War crossroads

Long before the town existed, the river ford near here — the old Creek Crossing at the south end of Long Island — was a hub for Native American trade routes and, later, for Union and Confederate troops maneuvering through the Sequatchie Valley during the fight for Chattanooga. Fortifications built to guard the river crossing and rail line changed hands more than once during the war, and nearby Nickajack Cave was mined by Confederate forces for the saltpeter used in gunpowder production.

If you're visiting in the fall, South Pittsburg leans into the season. The Old South Pittsburg Hospital, a shuttered hospital right in town on Holly Ave, is one of Tennessee's best-known paranormal hotspots — the Old South Pittsburg Paranormal Research Center runs day tours and overnight ghost hunts through it by advance booking. Marion County's Hale's Bar Dam has also hosted a seasonal haunted house in past Octobers. Either way, it's a fittingly eerie complement to a quiet night around our own campfire.