Lookout Mountain

The Battle Above the Clouds was fought where nobody could see it. On November 24, 1863, ten thousand Union soldiers under Joseph Hooker swept up the slopes of Lookout Mountain through fog so thick that the armies below heard the battle without seeing it — the roar of musketry coming out of a cloud bank on the mountaintop, which is how the fight got its name. The Confederates who had besieged Chattanooga from the summit for two months were driven off by dark; the next day the Union broke the siege completely on Missionary Ridge.

The battle's pivot was a farmhouse. Robert Cravens, a Chattanooga ironmaster who enslaved at least twelve people and opposed secession while supporting the Confederacy, had built his house on a bench of flat land halfway up the mountain — exactly where the Confederate line of defense ran. His family lived a siege inside a siege for a month, Confederate officers quartered in their rooms, enlisted men camped in the yard, until the shelling finally drove them out. The Union assault went through his orchard; the house became a headquarters and then a hospital. Cravens rebuilt it in 1866 and it still stands — the oldest structure on the mountain.

Lookout Mountain became a tourist attraction before the war was even over — Union soldiers and civilians rode up for the view, and a photographer set up a studio at the point to take portraits of soldiers against the drop. The mountain that watched a siege became the place where the siege's survivors went to see what they'd fought over.