Qualla: Reelfoot Lake

Reelfoot Lake: Introduction

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On a winter night in 1811, the ground beneath northwest Tennessee cracked open. The New Madrid earthquakes -- among the most powerful ever to strike North America, with shocks felt as far as Quebec -- buckled the landscape, reversed the flow of the Mississippi River, and swallowed an entire river valley. Where the Reelfoot River once meandered toward the Mississippi, the earth subsided by as much as six meters in places, and floodwaters rushed in to fill the void. By the time the shaking stopped in 1812, a new body of water had appeared on the map. Reelfoot Lake, covering some 15,000 acres of northwest Tennessee, remains the only large natural lake in the state -- and the only one born of catastrophe.

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Reelfoot Lake: A Landscape Shaken Into Being

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 1811-12 New Madrid earthquakes were centered around New Madrid, Missouri, just across the Mississippi River. They reshaped landforms across a vast region, creating waterfalls where none had existed and permanently altering the course of rivers. Henry Rutherford's 1785 land su...

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Reelfoot Lake: The Legend of Chief Kolopin

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A legend -- not claimed by the Chickasaw Nation Historical Society -- tells of a prince born with a deformed foot who walked with a rolling gait. His people called him Kolopin, meaning Reelfoot. When the young chief determined to marry a Choctaw princess, her father refused. The ...

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Reelfoot Lake: Night Riders and the Battle for Common Waters

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For decades after the earthquakes, local farmers and fishermen treated the lake as a shared resource. But in the early 1900s, a group of investors organized as the West Tennessee Land Company and began buying up shoreline, threatening to privatize access. In the spring of 1908, r...

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Reelfoot Lake: Cypress Cathedral

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today Reelfoot Lake sprawls across parts of Lake and Obion Counties, much of it swamp-like, with bayou-like ditches connecting open basins -- the largest called Blue Basin. The water is shallow, averaging just five and a half feet deep with a maximum of about eighteen feet, and b...

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Reelfoot Lake: Reel to Reel

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Reelfoot Lake's eerie beauty has drawn Hollywood three times: as a filming location for the 1957 drama Raintree County, the 1967 Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night, and 1998's U.S. Marshals. Fourteen miles away in Union City, Discovery Park of America tells the story of the l...

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