Cumberland Trail State Park (TN)
Defending public lands, natural resources from the ravages of rock removal
Photo: Cumberland Trail State Park
The Tennessee Court of Appeals has issued an important ruling in the state's challenge to large-scale rock removal from the Cumberland Trail State Park.
The Cumberland Trail State Park hugs the eastern flank of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau, one of the most biologically diverse landscapes in the world. The park forms a corridor around sections of a 300-mile scenic trail stretching from Signal Mountain, near Chattanooga, north to the Virginia/Kentucky border.
These public lands are part of a broad effort by multiple conservation and tourism groups, private entities, and the state of Tennessee to protect the natural resources and enhance the recreational appeal of this outstanding region. But about 450,000 acres of public and private land on the plateau – including the park and trail – have been at risk of large-scale rock excavation due to property deeds from years ago.
©SELC
The Cumberland Trail stretches along the Cumberland Plateau, and is one segment of Great Eastern Trail.
In 2006, a company came in to the Deep Creek Gorge area of the Cumberland Trail State Park, near Chattanooga, with bulldozers and front-end loaders and began gouging out sandstone rock for commercial sale. Some 50-100 yards of the trail were buried in rubble and dirt, and broken rock and uprooted trees were left exposed, ruining the natural setting of the trail and destroying or severely damaging wildlife habitat and water resources.
SELC has joined forces with 14 local, state and national groups to put an end to this destruction, and to ensure it doesn’t happen on more public or private lands in Tennessee.
Although the state owns the surface of the park land, a private company holds the mineral rights. This separation, or “severance” of ownership of surface land and mineral rights is not uncommon on the plateau, where coal companies that originally owned much of the land frequently sold the surface rights, often to timber companies, and kept a “mineral reservation.”
The state sued to stop the rock removal operation, but the Hamilton County court ruled against it. The state then appealed the decision to the Tennessee Court of Appeals. In April 2008, SELC partnered with Nashville-based attorney Gregory Buppert, with the firm of Dodson, Parker, Behm & Capparella, to submit an amicus brief on behalf of the conservation groups in support of the state’s challenge. We argued that, unless explicitly included in mineral reservations, rock should not be included in general mineral rights because excavating it destroys the surface and essentially deprives surface owners of their property.
On July 31, 2008, the Court of Appeals handed down a decision that agreed with this rule, saying that “basic common sense and equity" lead to the conclusion that the mineral owner cannot deprive the state of use of its land by destroying the surface. The court remanded the case to the county court for further proceedings consistent with its opinion.
