The Tennessee state line the parkway crosses in southern Wayne County is also a survey baseline. In 1807 Thomas Freeman, an Irish-born surveyor who had already run part of the boundary between the United States and Spanish Florida and led Jefferson's expedition up the Red River, was sent to settle where Tennessee ended. An earlier line run by James Bright had been rejected by the Tennessee legislature, and Freeman's replacement put the boundary about two and three-quarter miles south of Bright's. He then set a point on it and ran a meridian south from there into Alabama. Land in the northern half of that state is still described from it. Everything in the northern half of Alabama is surveyed off a point a man put in the ground on the Tennessee line.
Latitude was the one coordinate a surveyor of that generation could actually pin down, by repeated star and sun observations rather than by any clock, and Freeman had the instruments for it. He was still off. The initial point of the Huntsville Meridian sits at 34 degrees 59 minutes 27 seconds, about two-thirds of a mile south of the thirty-fifth parallel it was meant to mark. That is a small error by the standards of the day. Eleven years later James Camak put the Georgia line a full mile wrong in the same direction, and Georgia has been arguing about the Tennessee River ever since.
Getting there
35.0118, -87.8225
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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