TENNESSEE NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE.
Day 380 – It was sunny today with a cooler high of 62 degrees. Supposed to be low 40’s tonight. After running an errand in town this morning, we drove to the Tennessee NWR’s Big Sandy Unit. It wasn’t located far from our campground.
We stopped first at the NWR’s Headquarters & Visitor’s Center. We spent almost two hours talking to the gentleman behind the counter. What an interesting person! He and his wife had retired in 2014. He’d been an OB/GYN doctor for 40 years, and he loved his work, but his favorite thing to do was travel and take pictures. So that’s what we talked about – traveling and wildlife pictures. Eventually other people came into the Center and he had to help them, but we exchanged e-mail addresses and will be in touch. Sometimes you meet the nicest people when you least expect it. And by the way, he said the waterfowl have not arrived yet this year; we are too early.
We drove the auto tour loop at this part of the Big Sandy Unit, stopping for our sandwiches along the way. As with other recent NWR visits, we didn’t see much in the waterfowl department, but we still saw plenty.
We left this section of the Big Sandy Unit and drove to a peninsula in a rural area which had an auto tour through another section of the Unit. It was called “The Old 23rd Auto Tour”. This area was previously known as the 23rd Civil District; it is now part of the Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge. The District was once a small community, but by mid 1940’s the people were gone, and the land was turned over to the Department of the Interior to be used as a national wildlife refuge and is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a conservation area for migratory birds. (If only the birds were migrating, we might’ve seen them. Hee hee.)
This drive was at times a one-lane rock & gravel road. Along the road were markers that were numbered. We had a brochure that gave a description of what was once there. Only one of the markers had an actual building and we were able to walk through the old building and the grounds of the Old 23rd Mount Zion Church.
The brochure said, “You have reached the only remaining structure left in the Old 23rd, Mt. Zion Church. The original church was a log structure built in the late 1850’s. The present building was erected in 1897 when the log structure burned. Go inside, sit on one of the original pews and feel the history within its walls. Can’t you almost hear the fire and brimstone sermons? Restoration of this wonderful old church is ongoing with the help of the Friends of Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge and the Mt. Zion Cemetery Association.”
Tomorrow we’ll do more exploring of the area. This area of Tennessee is rural and quite pretty, particularly with the fall colors. The people have been very nice, and we are enjoying the southern drawl when they speak. We’ll see what we find tomorrow when we drive to either an area called, “the land between the lakes”, or to a different unit of the NWR – or maybe we’ll explore both places.