UMBRELLA ROCK, LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN, EATON & CO.

$45.00

Quantity Available: 1

Item Code: 2024-5075

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Call 717-334-0347,
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A horizontal cabinet card view backmarked, “S.S. Eaton & Co. / Point Lookout Gallery. / LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN, / TENN.” Above this is a period pencil notation: “Umbrella Rock / Lookout Mountain / Tenn / 1700 ft above the Tenn River.” The image is mounted on a black card with gilt caption at bottom. This was and is a popular tourist spot from which one can see seven states. It got its start as a popular photo venue during the Civil War as one of the impressive natural features near Lookout Point, an exposed rock ledge at the northern end of 85-mile long Lookout Mountain, which had been occupied by Confederates along with Missionary Ridge in the siege of Chattanooga, where they bottled up Union forces under Rosecrans after the battle of Chickamauga. The mountain was actually not very defensible when Grant sent Hooker against it on November 24, 1863, as a preliminary to Sherman’s planned assault on Missionary Ridge the next day. Confederate commanders made a poor job of it to boot and on the night of November 24 as the fighting quieted down, they began withdrawing from it. In the meantime a small party of the 8th Kentucky scaled the cliffs to display their regimental flag on the point for all to see on the morning of November 25.

Union troops went on to carry Missionary Ridge, sending Bragg’s Confederate troops into retreat, but it was the romance of the “Battle Above the Clouds” that seemed to carry the public imagination and R. M. Linn a mapmaker and photographer with the army who seems to have been the first to grasp the commercial potential of the spot, leasing the area to set up his “Gallery Point Lookout,” photographing countless soldiers and civilians posed on the rocky outcropping some 1700 or 1800 feet above the Tennessee River in the background, and also selling them views impressive stock photos of that scene and other natural wonders in the area like Umbrella Rock. Linn died in 1874, but the gallery was continued by his brother J.B. Linn until 1886. We assume Eaton acquired it, or took over its name, at that point, or soon thereafter. The structures visible below and to its right are likely on the top of the Point Hotel, built in 1888.  [SR][ph:m]

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