There have been lots of changes at scenic Mountain Creek.
photo by John Shearer
Mountain Creek may be full of apartments now, but for years it was packed with cattle, horses and pigs on the numerous farms owned by families such as the Bibles, the Beans, the Andersons, the Longs, the Taylors, the Marlers and the Godseys.
The quiet rural existence began changing in the 1960s, first from the noisy protests against annexation by the residents and later from the loud hammering of contractors building homes, apartments and retail facilities.
The beginning of the end for Mountain Creek as a predominantly rural community began in 1966, when talk of annexation began. The annexation push had come from the local Lockheed plant, which was located in the facility now owned by Komatsu.
That manufacturing plant was opened in early 1952 by North American Royalties (then Wheland/Gordon Street Inc.) to make 90 mm guns and other munitions for the Korean War. The building was sold to Lockheed in 1966, and aircraft parts and armament components for airplanes such as the C-130 and the C-141 began being manufactured there.
As a new resident in the Mountain Creek area, Lockheed was interested in getting superior utility services, so it told the city of Chattanooga it would like to be annexed into the city. Needless to say, this set off reverberation within the community as loud as a C-130 preparing for takeoff.
Most of the residents were against the annexation idea, but the city fathers thought it made a lot of sense, as Mountain Creek was a potentially new growth area not far from downtown. It was actually closer to town than Brainerd, which was the city’s most popular suburb at the time.
Also, construction on the stretch of Corridor J north of the Signal Mountain Road exit was to begin in 1967, so officials believed development would come to the area. However, delays put off the highway’s completion until 1990.
Also entering the thinking was the fact that Red Bank-White Oak, as the city of Red Bank was then called, had pinpointed Mountain Creek for possible annexation. After the Chattanooga annexation talk surfaced, residents of the new Spring Valley subdivision under development approached Red Bank officials about being annexed.
A large and vocal crowd turned out at the old City Hall meeting room to protest the annexation in 1966, but Mayor Ralph Kelley and others voted for it. A suit to block the move was later filed by roughly 120 Mountain Creek residents, but Chancellor Ray Brock let the annexation stand in Chancery Court a year later.
The area annexed ran from Moccasin Bend up Pineville Road through Baylor School and up the Mountain Creek valley to Reads Lake Road. (The northern part of Mountain Creek was annexed in 1972).
Besides the fact that the annexation idea originated with an assembly plant, another unusual aspect was that Mountain Creek, which then had only 1,200 people, was the only predominantly rural community ever annexed by the city of Chattanooga up until that time. Most of the time, communities are taken in after they are further developed.
As an enticement to the annexation, city officials had promised that Mountain Creek would receive superior services and amenities, and developments would be better planned.
After the annexation, the community began changing, and apartments began springing up where pasture thistle once did. In fact, they became seemingly more representative of the valley than the community’s numerous black walnut trees. The first facility was the Mountain Creek Apartments, which opened the first unit of what was described as the largest garden apartment complex in the city in the spring of 1971.
Soon following were Quail Hollow, the Montclair golf course (now
The Quarry) and apartment/condominium development, Fontaine Village (now Fontaine Woods), the Morrison Springs Apartments, Creek Meadows (now Signal View) and others.
But not all zoning requests were approved. In the late 1970s, a request for a large development in the area where Red Bank Elementary and Scenicland School are now located was voted down.
By 1978, Mountain Creek’s population was almost 5,000 people, four times what it was in 1966. A newspaper story about Mountain Creek that year quoted one man as saying that traffic in the area during rush hour was “a suicide” run and that the planning policy had scarred the Mountain Creek valley.
In late 1979 and early 1980, work was completed on Four Squares. A unique shopping center that focused more on specialty shops, it was patterned after the Old Town Shopping Mall in Dallas. It featured a three-screen movie theater and Chattanooga’s only hibachi-style Japanese restaurant, Kanpai of Tokyo.
Built where a shopping center had originally been planned when Spring Valley was built, Four Squares later ran into financial problems, and it is now primarily an office complex.
Among the later developments, Red Food (now Bi-Lo) opened in 1979, K mart opened in 1981, Mountain Creek Manor (now Grand Court 1) opened in 1986, and Food Lion opened in 1989.
The Lockheed plant, which was the scene of a memorable strike not long after it opened, was taken over by Koehring-Lorain as a crane assembly plant in 1972. In 1985, Komatsu began assembling heavy construction equipment in the facility.
Despite all the development in Mountain Creek, hints of its pastoral past remain. A large cattle farm remains undeveloped on the southern end, and several of the churches and modest homes on Runyan Drive have large lots, creating space for deer, rabbits and other wildlife. Hawks can also be seen circling overhead.
To help preserve some of the open space, a group called Friends of Mountain Creek was formed in 2000. The group hopes to raise money or get governmental funds to build a greenway trail along Mountain Creek and possibly preserve the large farm, which offers scenic vistas of Signal Mountain.