Cumberland Falls
Interesting facts
- Moonbows were once seen regularly at Niagara Falls too, but light pollution there now washes them out.
- When the falls stood far downstream it carried more water, because the Laurel and Rockcastle rivers join the Cumberland between that site and today's.
- The largest flow ever recorded at the falls came on 28 January 1918, at about 59,600 cubic feet per second.
- In March 1930 Kentucky's legislature overrode Governor Flem Sampson's veto in order to accept the du Pont family's gift of the falls.
- In 1927 some 200 labourers spent nine weeks building a Kiwanis-sponsored trail from Corbin, yet in 1929 the roads were still fit only for saddle horses.
- Hydroelectric schemes threatened the falls again in the 1950s and were once more defeated by the Cumberland Falls Preservation Association.
- Indigenous peoples regarded both Cumberland Falls and nearby Eagle Falls as sacred places.
- In 2016 two professional whitewater kayakers deliberately paddled over the falls and were charged with misdemeanour trespassing.
- Hollywood filmed here on location for The Kentuckian (1955) with Burt Lancaster and Raintree County (1957) with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
- The video game Red Dead Redemption 2 includes a waterfall inspired by the real one and gives it the same name, Cumberland Falls.
Why it is worth it
On clear nights around the full moon, the mist rising from Cumberland Falls in southeastern Kentucky can catch the moonlight and throw a pale arc across the gorge: a moonbow. The phenomenon appears here with a regularity known nowhere else in the Western Hemisphere, helped by steep gorge walls that keep the wind from scattering the spray and a wide valley that lets in plenty of moonlight. Kentucky's parks service even publishes the dates when one is likely.
By day the falls is a broad curtain of water on the Cumberland River, about 68 feet (21 m) high and 125 feet (38 m) wide, pouring over a ledge of resistant sandstone into a wide plunge pool. Its nicknames, the Little Niagara or the Niagara of the South, reflect its rank: it is the largest waterfall by volume in the eastern United States south of Niagara. It has not always stood here. Geologists believe the falls began about 45 miles downstream at the Pottsville Escarpment near Burnside and has been eating its way upstream ever since, carving a gorge up to 400 feet deep and losing height as it retreats; in time it will wear itself away altogether.
People have lived around the falls for some 10,000 years, and Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Creek peoples all knew the area. The explorer Thomas Walker is credited with naming it in 1750 after the Duke of Cumberland. A cabin built by the first settlers, Lewis and Mary Renfro, served as a hospital during the Civil War, and a hotel stood here from the 1870s. In the late 1920s a plan to divert the river through a tunnel for hydroelectric power threatened the falls; preservationists persuaded the industrialist T. Coleman du Pont to buy the land, and after his death his family gave it to Kentucky in 1930. The state park opened in 1931; the surrounding country lies within the Daniel Boone National Forest.
Getting there
Cumberland Falls lies on the border of McCreary and Whitley counties in Cumberland Falls State Resort Park, Kentucky. The town of Corbin is about 20 miles (32 km) by road to the northeast and Williamsburg about 18 miles to the southeast. The nearest airport is McGhee Tyson Airport (TYS) near Knoxville, Tennessee, about 118 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Cumberland Falls, sometimes called the Little Niagara, the Niagara of the South, or the Great Falls, is a waterfall on the Cumberland River in southeastern Kentucky. Spanning the river at the border of McCreary and Whitley counties, the waterfall is the central feature of Cumberland Falls State Resort Park and is part of the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves designated Wild River System.
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