Cross Mountain, in Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains, is the highest mountain in the state outside the Blue Ridge Province, with its summit at The Flag Pole on the Anderson-Campbell county line. Long before permanent settlement, Cherokee people occupied this land, and longhunters explored it in the 1750s and 1760s. Its rich coal deposits shaped the region after a railroad spur reached Slatestone Hollow near Briceville in 1888 and large-scale mining began. The mountain is most closely associated with the Cross Mountain Mine disaster of December 9, 1911, when an explosion killed 84 of 89 miners underground, leaving it a place of both natural prominence and tragic industrial memory.