Three states meet on the ridge just above Harrogate, and for a century and a half before the railways, the notch in that ridge was the main door to the American West. Cumberland Gap, a natural pass through the long wall of Cumberland Mountain, carried buffalo, then Native American hunters and war parties, and from 1775 the Wilderness Road that Daniel Boone and his axemen blazed into Kentucky. Hundreds of thousands of settlers walked or rode through it. Harrogate, a town of a few thousand on the Tennessee side, sits right at its southern foot.
The town is best known for Lincoln Memorial University, founded in the 1890s by a former Union officer who, the story goes, had been urged by Lincoln to do something for the loyal mountain people of East Tennessee. Its Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum holds one of the largest collections of Lincoln and Civil War material in the country, and it is a quiet, surprising place to spend an hour.
The Cumberland Gap National Historical Park covers the gap and the ridges on both sides. Since 1996, US 25E has passed under the mountain through a twin tunnel, and the old road over the gap has been removed and the trace restored to something like its pioneer appearance, which you can walk. For riders, the essential part is the road up to the Pinnacle Overlook on the Kentucky side: a narrow, steep, twisting climb with tight hairpins and a length restriction for long vehicles, ending at a viewpoint that looks over three states and straight down into Middlesboro, a town built inside an ancient meteorite crater.
Harrogate and Middlesboro, six kilometres away through the tunnel, have plenty of fuel, food and lodging, and the tiny village of Cumberland Gap, tucked against the mountain, has a few cafes in old brick buildings and a lovely sleepy main street. Roads around here range from fast four-lane on 25E to the twisty mountain lanes heading east into Virginia along Powell Valley. Weather can change quickly on the ridge, with fog in the morning and storms in the summer afternoons, and the Pinnacle road can close in ice. Spring and October are the finest times, when the forest on the mountain wakes up or burns red.