There are 652 miles of Tennessee River running from Knoxville, Tennessee to Paducah, Kentucky. Two hundred and three of those miles run through North Alabama. And if you grew up here, you already know what that river is. You know it from the camping trips and the fishing and the summer afternoons at Point Mallard, from the way it shows up in the songs of people who grew up along its banks. You know it the way you know something that has always just been there.
What Brad Collett wants is for all of us to know it a little differently. Not as a backdrop. As the whole story.
Brad is a landscape architect, a University of Tennessee professor, and the executive director of the Tennessee RiverLine — a bold, TVA-partnered initiative that is quietly reframing 652 miles of river corridor, 1.2 million acres of connected public land, and 32 counties across four states as one of the most significant outdoor recreation landscapes in the country. On a recent episode of Unexpected Adventures in North Alabama, he joined me to talk about what that actually means for our communities, what’s already happening on the water, and why the Tennessee River changed the course of human history. I am not paraphrasing that last part.
More Than Twice the Size of the Smokies…