Tennessee’s Mountain Plateau is home to Breckenridge Lake Resort where guests are offered a variety of tourist attractions as well as a taste of the great outdoors. Not only is it situated midway between Knoxville, Nashville, and Chattanooga, but it’s just south of the Cumberland Mountain State Park and near the Catoosa Wildlife Management Area.     

 

In Crossville, be sure to visit the Historic Homesteads Tower Museum in a stone tower built in the late 30’s. The tower was used as the administrative offices for 250 families involved in the Cumberland Homestead project when Franklin Roosevelt was president. The museum exhibits photographs, documents, and items from that era as well as a view of the original homesteads in the “Showplace of the New Deal.”     

 

Take a drive south to Pikeville and absorb the magnificent scenery in the 20,000-acre Fall Creek Falls State Resort Park where deep chasms and a 256-foot waterfall are just some of the park’s highlights.     

 

If you’re  interested in science and recent history, the hour’s drive east to Oak Ridge will be worthwhile. This city was built specifically for the personnel of the Clinton Engineer Works during World War II. The Works and their Manhattan Project were instrumental in the development of the first atomic bomb and the invention of the nuclear reactor.  

 

The only government-owned reactor that is regularly open to the public, it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966.     Nearby Knoxville has gained fame as the home of the University of Tennessee, host

 

of the 1982 World’s Fair, and headquarters for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Today the TVA has 30,000 employees and oversees fifty dams.     A map of surface rocks, specimens of marine fossils and 12,000 year-old Native Ame

 

rican artifacts are part of the Tennessee River Valley display at the Frank H. McClung Museum.