Jack-o-Lantern Huff

Nathan Kirkham carved a pumpkin to portray Jack Huff carrying his mom up Mount Le Conte

 Among the ways the Lodge crew amuse themselves is by having a Jack-o-Lantern contest the week of Halloween. The 2014 winner, by Nathan Kirkham, celebrated the 85th anniversary of Jack Huff's famous 1929 hike carrying his mother up the mountain.

Jack Huff's great-grandsons complete the Tour

Parker Bowling, Cade Huff, and Wes Fortner—completing 3 trips over Le Conte

 Following in the footsteps of their great-grandfather Jack Huff, Parker Bowling and Cade Huff—along with their friend, Wes Fortner—made their own history on Mount Le Conte when they completed the Tour de Le Conte challenge, which involves hiking all six trails in 24 hours.
 Parker, Cade, and Wes started at 4:10 a.m. on Friday, July 31, and went up Rainbow Falls, down Trillium (yielding to the up-bound llamas), up Bullhead, down Alum, up Boulevard despite a thunderstorm, and down Brushy Mountain, finishing at 3:12 a.m. on Aug. 1. That's a total of 45.7 miles, which they completed in 23 hours and two minutes. Jake Agee did the first two legs with them, so there are four in their video.

 Jack Huff (1903-1985) founded LeConte Lodge in 1926 and climbed the mountain thousands of times, including the famous day in 1929 when he carried his mother to the Lodge in a chair strapped to his back. Jack and Pauline were married at Myrtle Point in 1934, raised their children on the mountain, and ran the Lodge until 1960. He built the original buildings, including the dining hall in 1939. Jack stopped counting hikes after he surpassed 1,000 in 1937, but we have estimated that his lifetime total was about 2,500. Parker has climbed Le Conte 27 times (eight this year), Cade 23, and Wes 22.
 Cade is the grandson of the late Phillip Huff. Parker is the grandson of Cookie Bowling, Jack's daughter. Cookie once had a piggy-back ride up the mountain, too—when she was three months old.
 "Jack would be so proud!" says a Facebook post from the family-owned Jack Huff's Motor Lodge in Gatlinburg. Parker said, "This challenge is very personal to us and was an amazing and challenging experience." Parker, Cade, and Wes all are 19 years old and students at the University of Tennessee.
 We have documented 31 hikers who have completed the Tour de Le Conte, including five this year. They are listed in the sidebar on the left side of this page (If you are reading on a mobile device, you will need to switch to full-screen mode to see the list.)

Back when you could keep a reservation for years, Jack Huff's descendants had a reunion hike each May. This one was in 2012. On the second row, Cookie Bowling is second from the left, and Cade is wearing a stocking cap. On the third row, Wes is on the left and Parker in the center.  

A decade of 'I hiked it' T-shirts

Chivonne Smith climbed Le Conte for the 16th time to get this T-shirt
 

 Here are the "I Hiked It!" T-shirts designed by Le Conte Lodge since 2010. I found these images in the bountiful archives of the Lodge blog. Which design is your favorite? Leave a comment below.
 The 2020 design features the Lodge dining hall on the front (with a graphically understated "I Hiked It!" boast) and the trail maps on the back.

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014 front

2014 back

2013

2012

2011

2010

It was a mild winter by Le Conte standards

Several of Le Conte's most relentless climbers braved knee-deep snow for this rare Leap Day photo-op, including Adam Gravett #62, Timothy Massey #57, Chris Maulden #57, Philip Clarkson #55, and Adam Ozment #39. (Photo by Adam Gravett)

3.5 degrees on Leap Day (photo by Chris Maulden)

 Spring arrived early—Thursday, March 19, thanks to the extra Leap Day—to end a mild winter atop Mount Le Conte.

 Snowfall was unusually light. Blame mist opportunities: Winter brought 40 inches of rain—enough to make 30 feet of powder. Had it been colder, we might have broken the 2000 record of 164 inches of snow. Average snowfall is 82 inches, but this past winter saw just 39.9 inches. 
 Since the start of spring, another 11 inches of snow has been measured at the Lodge, bringing the total to 51.1 inches. That included two inches on Mother's Day weekend—the seventh time since 1978 Le Conte has had snow on Mothers Day.

 This past winter was the first time Le Conte Lodge has not had a sub-zero night, according to 42 years of weather records. The coldest temperature in 2020 was 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit on the night of Jan. 21. That was the 35th anniversary of the alltime-record of minus-32 in 1985.

➤Here is a link for weather at 2,010 meters atop Mount Le Conte. 

Wrapping February in a 10-inch blanket (photo by Adam Gravett)

The holy grail of T-shirts

Airlift cargo next to the office. T-shirts on board? (Photo by Melissa Coatney)

 The "I hiked it" T-shirt is the holy grail of the Le Conte pilgrim. It is only sold at the Lodge, so you have to earn it by hiking to the top of the mountain. 
 Actually, you can pick up a classic version for free, assuming you know where to look, you're willing to bushwhack, and you're willing to put up with some stains and critter holes. 

2007 shirt

2009 shirt

 These are T-shirts that were accidentally dropped years ago during the annual airlift to resupply the Lodge. Each March, bundles of T-shirts along with propane tanks and various staples, are packed into cargo nets that are slung below a helicopter and flown from Highway 441 to the mountaintop. At least three times, T-shirts somehow slipped through the nets and were lost in the Smokies. 
 Off-trail hikers sought these T-shirts for years. In December of 2014, Dave Landreth, Ronnie McCall, and Tommy McGlothlin were exploring a rockslide near Anakeesta Ridge when they found some of the 2007 shirts.
 Landreth described the discovery in an interview with the Cub Report, the newsletter of the Great Smoky Mountains Association: "We simply couldn't believe that after all this time, after eight years, and after enduring all of the brutal weather that regularly sweeps this high aerie in the Great Smokies, that we had actually found the mystery shirts and that many of them were still salvageable. Over the years, [the shirts] had become a source of great debate and conjecture and really had become the holy grail." Some of the shirts were still worthy of framing.
 Landreth is on our honor roll with well over 100 summit hikes. He said in a 2014 interview with the Meanderthals blog, "I've hiked the Alum Cave Bluff trail at least one way hundreds of times over the 40-something years I've been hiking in the Smokies." He also estimated that he has climbed at least 40 times off-trail via Huggins Hell. For more about Landreth, read Peter Barr's 2014 story in Blue Ridge Outdoors magazine, "The Edward Abbey of the East."

 Another off-trail hiker, Mike Poppen, said he has found shirts from three miss drops. In 2019, he posted video of the 2007 shirts. "The holy grail of miss drops," he said, "is the legendary story of a red wagon that fell and is stuck in the top of a tall spruce tree somewhere."

Terra Incognita: Untangling the Le Conte name

On this 1863 map, Mount Le Conte was still labeled as Bullhead. The name is hard to read over the terrain. Look closely above the K in SMOKY. The names for Clingmans Dome, Mount Mingus, Mount Guyot, Laurel Top, Snow Bird Mountain, and Max Patch were already settled by this time.

Joseph Le Conte in 1875

 When Marty Polk signed in at LeConte Lodge on Oct. 2, 2019, she left an intriguing comment in the logbook, identifying herself as a "distant niece of Joseph Le Conte."
 Joseph Le Conte was the namesake of Mount Le Conte, according to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. However, he made no such claim in his autobiography, which casts doubts on the the government registry. We know that Joseph was not shy about putting his name on mountains, because his book uses the caption Le Conte Dome for Yosemite's South Dome, which is now known as Mount Starr King. (Thomas Starr King was a Unitarian preacher who was instrumental in the movement to establish Yosemite National Park.)
 The Tennessee mountain we call Le Conte was known as Walasi'yi or Mylegony to the Cherokee and Bullhead to early settlers, until Princeton professor Arnold Guyot renamed it sometime after his 1859 and 1860 expeditions to measure the Great Smoky Mountains. In hindsight, it appears that Guyot intended to honor Joseph's older brother, Professor John Le Conte. See this footnote by Ken Wise in the book Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains.

 While Guyot, Samuel Buckley, and Gen. Thomas Clingman explored the mountaintops of the Smokies, the scientifically trained Le Conte brothers were supposedly responsible for monitoring a stationary barometer in Waynesville, N.C., that was used to calibrate the summit measurements. 
 Apparently, Joseph was elsewhere. In his autobiography, Joseph never mentions Waynesville, Bullhead, nor the expeditions of Guyot, Buckley, and Clingman. He respected Professor Guyot on an academic level and described him as "a lifelong friend," so if he had been involved in this project, he certainly would have mentioned it. 
 In 1858, at age 35, Joseph wrote that he climbed "Black Mountain (Mount Mitchell)*, the highest peak in the Appalachians, 6,710 feet high." If it was a clear day, he might have seen Bullhead 66 miles west. If not, then he probably never laid eyes on the mountain that made him famous. Since he spent the summer of 1858 in the N.C. mountains, it is possible that he had a role in Buckley's survey, which measured Bullhead at 6,670 feet.

John Le Conte

 In 1859, Guyot measured Bullhead at 6,613, missing the modern standard of 6,593 by just 20 feet. Meanwhile, Joseph Le Conte said he spent most of that year in Columbia, S.C.
 The Le Conte brothers were from a Hugenot family who fled from France because of religious persecution. John Le Conte (1818-1891) and Joseph Le Conte (1823-1901) were raised on a rice plantation in coastal Georgia. Both graduated from Franklin College (the forerunner of the University of Georgia) and earned MD's in New York. They taught at South Carolina College during the Civil War era and moved west in 1869, when John became the first president of the University of California.
 Joseph became a professor of geology and was a charter member of the Sierra Club along with his friend John Muir. You'll find Joseph's name on 13,930-foot Mount Le Conte in California, the Le Conte Glacier in Alaska, and Le Conte Falls in Yosemite. Because he was a slaveowner, his name was removed in 2016 from Yosemite's Le Conte Memorial Lodge (now known as the Yosemite Conservation Heritage Center.
 His son Joseph Nisbet Le Conte (1870-1950) succeeded Muir as president of the Sierra Club in 1915 and was noted for his maps and photographs, which caught the eye of Ansel Adams.

Le Conte means "the tale." The Le Conte brothers usually spelled their name with a space, which is how Mount Le Conte is labeled on USGS topographic maps and registered with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. However, the space is often omitted in modern usage, such as the name of Tennessee's LeConte Lodge. I've chosen to keep the space in the name of this blog.

* The name of Mount Mitchell was not settled until after Dr. Elisha Mitchell was buried on the summit in 1858. The official elevation is now 6,684 feet. Dr. Mitchell measured it in 1835 at 6,476—proving that North Carolina outranked New Hampshire (Mount Washington was listed as 6,234 then and 6,288 now) as the highest point in the eastern U.S.

'Grand finale' for grandfathered reservations

The first snow of the season fell Halloween night at LeConte Lodge. That's more than a month later than the record for the earliest snow: Sept. 24 in 1985. This was the 9th time in the last 11 years that the first snow has come in October. (Photo credit: highonleconte.com)

 There have been plenty of nostalgic comments in the LeConte Lodge logbook in recent weeks from hikers who may have been making their last overnight stays at the Lodge.
 Many of these guests have enjoyed standing or "grandfathered" reservations, which allowed those who have been coming since 1998 to carry over the same date from one year to the next, without going through the annual lottery and waiting list. This made it convenient for families and groups to schedule annual trips, but it also meant that a third of the season might fill up even before the general public had an opportunity to request reservations.
 For the past several years, the managers of the Lodge and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park have been working together to phase out the standing reservations, according to this report on WVLT-TV.
 In theory, the end of standing reservations should make it easier for first-time visitors to get a cabin, although the Lodge is already fully booked for 2020. The 2020 season runs eight months, opening March 23 and closing Nov. 24. 

 "Last trip," wrote Rick Hobson of Hilton Head, S.C., as he signed in Oct. 20 on his 36th visit to the Lodge. "Thank you all!"

 "Last year for reservations!" wrote Aaron and David Cain on Oct. 20 as they logged trips #20 and #32. "Been a great run!" 
 Norm Harber signed in Oct. 3 with #32. "Last group hike," he wrote. "Started in 1992. Been amazing!" 
 The Williams family signed in Nov. 9 with #20, "Last of the grandfathered years😞." 
 A group from St. John's Episcopal Church (evidently in South Carolina) signed in Oct. 25 with a note indicating they have been coming since 1964. "End of a wonderful tradition," wrote Margaret Anne Dubose, making her 17th trip. 
 Aimee Bridges of Raleigh, N.C., signed in Oct. 19 with "24 years!" Three days later, Dawn Eipeldauer of Oak Ridge, Tenn., left a note saying, "50 years. Love!" 
 The Fleming family—Dwight, Laura, Barrett, and Margaret—logged in Oct. 12 with #38, and wrote, "The grand finale!"
 Standing reservations date back to the 1980s, according to this 1989 clipping I found in the Raleigh News & Observer. At that time, standing reservations filled one-third of the season. By 1998, according to a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer, half of all guests came with standing reservations.

Remembering the hottest days ever on Le Conte

 The recent 100-degree heat wave across the South is a reminder that for decades, the thermometer at LeConte Lodge never topped 80 degrees Fahrenheit. (Grace McNicol's journal from 1983 mentions that the record high was 80 "years ago.")
 Then on June 29, 2012, this happened: 

 The next day, it hit 81.5. It was too hot for the llamas to work, so a helicopter had to be used to get fresh supplies to the Lodge. 
 With deference to global warming, I'm glad to report that the mountaintop hasn't come close to 80 since 2012. Over the past seven years, the high has been 77 in the summer of 2019.
 In case you are wondering, the all-time lows are minus-32 in January 1985, minus-26 in 1982 and 1983, and minus-24 in 2015.
 Here are the weather records from LeConte Lodge:

Thanks, Tim Line: 41 years serving us on Le Conte

Tim Line has been climbing Mount Le Conte even longer than the llamas, who have been supplying the Lodge since 1986. If it looks like Tim has horns, that's just the ears of the llama behind him.
(photo by Dr. Ed Jones)

 
 This is the 94th season for Le Conte Lodge, and for the past 41 years the team has always included Tim Line. But this spring as he turns 65, Tim has decided it's time to retire.
 “I’ve been doing this for a long time,” he told Morgan Simmons in a story published in Blue Ridge Outdoors magazine. “My knees are starting to wear out and my back hurts. I loved every minute of this job, but it’s time to let someone else take over.”
 Line estimates he has climbed Mount Le Conte 1,500 times, according to a profile in Smoky Mountain Living magazine. That's an average of once a week since the Lodge hired him as a cook in 1977. All those hikes cover more than 15,000 miles, which would span more than halfway around the world.
 As far as we know, only two men have climbed Le Conte more than Tim Line:

1. Ron Valentine, now in his 80s, has been hiking Le Conte regularly since 1946 and probably has made about 4,000 climbs. When Ed Wright wrote about his 1,310th and final climb in 2008, he asked Valentine to disclose his total: "My hearing is marginal at best, but I think that he said that he had made 798 hikes to Le Conte since January 1, 2000. I think that he said that he had about 3,000 hikes before that. I asked him when he was going to come clean and tell the world of his accomplishments. He replied that he would give the number after I died. I told him that I was not half dead yet."
2. Jack Huff, like Line, managed the Lodge for over three decades (1926-59) and probably made between 2,000 and 3,000 hikes in his lifetime. He stopped counting hikes after he reached 1,000 in 1937 and was probably near 2,000 by 1948. We estimate his lifetime total at 2,500, considering that he climbed less frequently after he took over his father's Gatlinburg motel in 1949. His wife Pauline continued as the site manager for the Lodge through 1959. I've added her to our honor roll, since she surely made more than 100 climbs in 25 years. The Huffs were married at Myrtle Point in 1934—this past Sunday would have been their 84th anniversary. 

 Tim Line met his wife Lisa on Mount Le Conte, and they home-schooled their children there. Daughter Gracie is named for Gracie McNicol, who once claimed the Le Conte record with 244 ascents. Son Jacob is now part of the Lodge crew.

 Tim Line once ran down the 5-mile Alum Cave Bluff Trail in 33 minutes, setting an unofficial record that stood until 2012, when John Northrup galloped down in 26 minutes. So it's appropriate that Northrup is the man who will be following Line's footsteps as the Lodge's new manager. Northrup has worked for Line for nine years and has been climbing Le Conte since before he was born: His first ascent was when his mom Pat was 5½ months pregnant.
 Between day hikers and overnighters, close to a million guests have visited Le Conte Lodge during Line's tenure. (That includes me, five times through 2019). On behalf of all of us, thank you, Tim! It's all downhill from here.

See 5 state highpoints from Le Conte

The website peakfinder.org will help you simulate and identify peaks visible from any point you choose.
This is the projection south/southwest from Myrtle Point on Mount Le Conte. Click on this link and zoom
and pan to see the entire panorama. Click on the name of a mountain to get the bearings and distance.

     Rock City advertises that you can see seven states from Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga. The scenery in Rock City is spectacular, but it falls short of the barnyard hype—you'll be lucky to see four states: Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina. A monument at the overlook points toward Kentucky, Virginia, and South Carolina, but all of those are way beyond the horizon. (South Carolina is 120 miles away, not 80 as the sign says.) And of all the mountains you can see from Rock City, none of them are the highest in their states.
     From Mount Le Conte, however, it is possible to not only see five states, but also to see the highest point in all of them.
     On a perfectly clear day in the Smokies—antithetical, I know—all five should be visible from Myrtle Point on the east side of Le Conte. From right to left, the panorama includes Tennessee's Clingman's Dome (7 miles southwest), Georgia's Brasstown Bald, (57 miles southwest, just to the left of Clingman's), North Carolina's Mount Mitchell (66 miles east), Virginia's Mount Rogers (126 miles northeast), and Kentucky's Black Mountain (92 miles north/northeast).
     The highest points in Tennessee and Georgia can be seen from the Cliff Top overlook on the west side of Le Conte, and the Kentucky high point should be visible from the deck at Le Conte Lodge.
     It may also be possible to see six states and five state highpoints from the tower at Clingman's Dome. Virginia's Mount Rogers is hidden from there, but South Carolina's Sassafras Mountain may be barely visible 57 miles to the southeast. The computer projections at peakfinder.org and heywhatsthat.com are inconclusive, but once the tower is built on Sassafras later this year, we'll put it to the eye test.
     (There is a Sassafras Mountain visible on the horizon southeast of Le Conte, but alas, it is not the one in South Carolina.)
     Can you really see all the way from Myrtle Point to Mount Rogers? It is far-fetched but not impossible, considering the way those peaks are aligned across the upper Tennessee Valley. Looking down the same corridor, I've been able to see Mount Guyot from Elk Knob—a distance of 100 miles. 
     Even if the Virginia highpoint is out of range, you still may be able to see other prominent Virginia peaks across the valley northeast of Le Conte, including High Knob near Norton, Va.

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IF YOU ARE READING THIS ON YOUR PHONE, you will need to switch from the mobile view to full screen (iPhone users click on "View web version" below) to see our Honor Roll and enjoy the full breadth of the information we've accumulated.

SPEAKING OF PEAKFINDER.ORG, I highly recommend the Peakfinder app ($4.99), which works with the iPhone camera to create an augmented reality. It will show you the names and outlines of the mountains before you—superimposed over the image on your camera. The overlay moves with you.

Ernie Pyle on Alum Cave Trail, Hudson Bay blankets

 Here is another newspaper column by Pulitzer Prize winner Ernie Pyle from his 1940 trip to Mount Le Conte. He vividly describes the views, the wildlife, the weather (record high 68 then vs. 81 now), and the accommodations at Le Conte Lodge ($4 then vs. $175 in 2019).
 Note that on the late-October night he stayed at the Lodge, he was the only guest.

 Pyle's guide was Wiley Oakley, the famed "Roamin' Man of the Mountains," whose home was near Le Conte Creek. They climbed the Alum Cave Trail, and it may have been at Inspiration Point that Pyle had this epiphany:

"It was then I realized, for the first time in my life, that there can be as much majesty and stirring beauty in eastern mountains as in the Rockies. Many times on the trail I just stopped and stared and stared. I don't know that I have ever seen a lovelier sight than the onward-stretching undulations of the haze-softened and color-splashed immensities of the Great Smoky Mountains."

 This was one of a series of nine columns that Pyle wrote from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the fall of 1940. We previously posted his profile of Jack Huff. His columns were syndicated nationwide, and I clipped this copy from the Jackson (Miss.) Daily Clarion-Ledger, published October 29, 1940.

 Want to see more of Ernie Pyle's columns from the Smokies? Explore these clippings that I've posted on newspapers.com. If the links don't work, let me know.

• President Roosevelt's visit and first impressions of the Smokies
• Alum Cave Trail and Ranger Harold Edwards
• Profile of Jack Huff and the story of his mom's backwards climb
• Storytelling with Jack Huff at Le Conte Lodge
• Wiley Oakley, Edna Lynn Simms, and Uncle Steve Cole's bear-choking tale
• Cades Cove, Emiel Larsen, and Laura Thornburgh's "Hearts-a-Bustin'-with-Love"
• The founding families of Gatlinburg: Ogle, Whaley, Maples, Huff
• Final thoughts on the Smokies and the demise of the traditional mountain culture

Jack Huff made thousands of climbs, 1 for Mama

In 1929, 25-year-old Jack Huff strapped a chair to his back to carry his frail mother to the top of Mount Le Conte. He made the seven-mile hike in five hours, stopping only when she got tired.

 How many times did Jack Huff climb Mount Le Conte? We can only guess, since he stopped counting in 1937 after he surpassed 1,000 climbs in 11 years.

 Considering that he operated Le Conte Lodge for 24 years from 1926 through 1949, it's possible that he more than doubled that total.
 When I first compiled the Le Conte Log, I estimated Huff's total at 3,000. Since then, I learned that after 1949, his wife Pauline Huff  managed the mountaintop Lodge, while Jack stayed in Gatlinburg to manage his family's hotel. The Huffs sold the Lodge in 1960 to Herrick and Myrtle Brown in 1960. Considering that, I revised my estimate and now list Huff at about 2,500. 
 What we can document about Huff's hikes comes from this 1940 newspaper column by Ernie Pyle, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and war correspondent who was killed in 1945 in the Battle of Okinawa. This clipping was one of a series of nationally syndicated columns Pyle filed from the Great Smoky Mountains in the weeks after President Franklin D. Roosevelt officially dedicated the new national park.
 "A mountaineer's strength is in his heart, and not necessarily in a big body," Pyle wrote. "Jack Huff weighs only 150 pounds, and stands sort of folded up with his hands in his pockets. But his walking feats are astounding." By 1940, Pyle figured that Huff had walked over 15,000 miles on the steep slopes of Le Conte, treading out the trails we follow today.
 Jack Huff is the architect of the Lodge we know today. He chose the site near the Le  Conte Spring and built the first three-room Lodge in 1933 and the dining hall in 1939. According to his daughter, Cookie Bowling, the previous campsite built by Paul Adams in 1925 was further up toward Cliff Tops. "Dad chose the site where the Lodge is today," she  said. "This is how he explained it to me."
 Jack Huff died Nov. 4, 1985, at age 82. His family still owns and operates a hotel in Gatlinburg named Jack Huff's, and I sent this clipping to them to see if they could tell me more about his exploits. Cyndi Bowling replied:

That is a wonderful article that we have not ever seen. I shared it with my mother-in-law, Cookie Bowling [Jack Huff's daughter]. She doesn't know exactly how many trips he made after he stopped counting in 1937. She said she does know he hiked many more times because she was born in 1944, and there is a story of him carrying her off the mountain. She said his last trip was in 1960 when he sold Mt. LeConte Lodge.

 Speaking of President Roosevelt and his 1940 speech at Newfound Gap to dedicate the Great Smoky Mountains National Park ... one of the men who was in the presidential honor guard that day ranks among the centurions of Le Conte.

 Dr. John Adler, now 95, built the Cabins at Sandy Mush Bald, another mountaintop lodge 30 miles east of Le Conte. I had the opportunity to meet him when I hiked up Sandy Mush Bald (the highest point in Madison County, N.C.) on July 4, 2016.
 Dr. Adler told me that he used to make weekly climbs up Le Conte to deliver mail to the lodge, and before Huff sold the lodge he considered Dr. Adler as his possible replacement. Dr. Adler is confident that he has made over a hundred hikes up Le Conte, though he doesn't have an exact count.

Jack Huff's family at the Lodge in 2011

In 1953, Huff strapped on the chair for this photo in the Nashville Tennessean.

Today, the chair is displayed at the Museum of East Tennessee History in Knoxville.