To read more about Stinking Creek and Campbell County click on link: www.tngenweb.org/  .Click on Campbell county, then under "recently updated", click on Campbell county and beyond, scroll to S and find "Stinking Creek traces it's name etc."

A poem from a visitor

Home     Black Pine Cabin    Fox Fire Cabin

Well you don't have to be Stephen Hawking to the see the problem with this theory.  As the temperature started rising so did the aroma of the now bloated and decaying animals.  Legend has it, from that winter on, with their noses tightly pinched, the native American Indians of the area referred to it as "STINKING CREEK" and it just stuck.  Everything but the smell that is!

Stinking Creek is as beautiful as any other mountain stream in the Cumberland Chain.  Whether fishing, canoeing or just exploring, you and your family will, like everyone else, fall in love with the legendary "STINKING CREEK" of East Tennessee.

During an unusually harsh winter, very extreme for the region, many of the animals belonging to the local settlers and farmers along Sugar Creek, with little or no shelter, froze to death.  Without the bull dozers and backhoes we have at our disposal today to bury the animals, the farmers were faced with the problem of what to do with hundreds of frozen carcasses (that, on today's market would be frozen entrees).  I can almost hear Jeff Foxworthy jump up and yell, "hey ya'll watch this!" as he dragged his frozen animals to the banks of Sugar Creek while explaining his ingenious idea.  "You see, this spring when the creek rises all of these here dead animals will just float on down stream... End of problem".  

According to local legend, about two hundred years ago this area, because of a large quantity of Sugar Maple trees, was known by the sweet name of "Sugar Creek".  The early settlers to the area would harvest large quantities of maple sap from the trees and boil it down to make syrup.  As I am told, it was also used in the production of MOON SHINE, strictly for medicinal purposes you understand. 

The Stinking Creek area in the Cumberland Mountain chain, in my opinion, is the best kept secret of East Tennessee.  This is of course largely due to the name.