Fifty-five years ago, people were talking about Tennessee’s new ski resort.
It’s probably not the one you think it was.
In 1967, a group of Crossville investors led by physician Richard Evans acquired 10,000 acres of mountaintop land near Crab Orchard and cleared enough of it for ski slopes and a golf course. Even though the place was called Haley Mountain, they called their resort “Renegade Mountain.” They built a restaurant, lodges for people to sleep in and a lift to take skiers to the top of the slope.
Starting in February of 1969, the public began snow skiing there.
Over the years, Renegade Mountain changed hands many times. In 1970, it was purchased by Crossville banker Millard Oakley, who later sold it to out-of-state investors, who later sold it to German investors.
All the owners came to the same conclusion: Even though the mountains of Cumberland County are higher than most people realize and even though it snows a lot more at the top of those mountains than it does in Nashville, that’s still not enough to support a profitable season of snow skiing.
“You need a lot of snow to have a reliable ski resort, and we just didn’t have it,” says Crossville real estate agent Glenn McDonald, who was once the general manager at Renegade. “We had machines that made snow, but you really need real snow.
“On those times when it did snow a lot, we were overwhelmed.”
Renegade Mountain was probably inspired by the ski resort at Gatlinburg, which opened in 1962 and became known as Ober Gatlinburg in 1976. The original concept of Renegade was to sell $1,000 memberships to a massive resort that offered snow skiing, golf, hunting, horseback riding, ice skating, tennis and an Olympic-sized pool. “Chill mountain streams that are stocked with rainbow trout,” one ad promised. “As for hunting, there are 6,000 acres of private hunting preserves stocked with deer, wild boar, even black bear.”
“You need a lot of snow to have a reliable ski resort, and we just didn’t have it. We had machines that made snow, but you really need real snow.”
– Glenn McDonald
Unfortunately, when people showed up in 1969 and 1970, the place didn’t live up to the hype. Some of the amenities described in the ads such as the skating rink and the Olympic-sized pool were never built.
However, that didn’t stop a generation of Tennesseans from acquiring wonderful memories at the 2,680-foot-high Renegade Mountain. “Around 1978, I took a physical education class at Tennessee Tech where we had to ski at Renegade every Thursday night,” said Donna Kay Campbell, a Nashville native who now lives in Virginia. “It took me five weeks before I could ski down the hill without falling, but that class gave me a lifelong love of skiing!”
Cumberland County resident Melinda Hedgecoth has a less graceful but more amusing story about Renegade Mountain. “I was pretty athletic back in those days, but for some reason I couldn’t master this skill and even fell repeatedly off the T-bar as I tried to ride it back up the mountain,” she recalls. “I think the ski instructor was disgusted with me, for he had to catch me as I was barreling down the mountain heading for Crab Orchard the hard way! It was like something out of ‘Laverne and Shirley’!
“Needless to say, that was my first and last attempt at skiing!”
Since a business model focused on snow skiing wasn’t working, Renegade’s German owners eventually decided to focus on golf. “The Schuster brothers spent a lot of money on the golf course,” says Crossville attorney Joe Looney, who represented the German bank that owned the business in the 1990s. In fact, the Renegade Mountain golf course (renamed Cumberland Gardens) was considered one of the best in the state throughout the 1980s and 1990s. However, with the Fairfield Glade and Lake Tansi courses nearby, the mountaintop course suffered from competition. Also, the high elevation, steep terrain and rocky soil of Renegade Mountain made golf course upkeep challenging and expensive.
The ski slopes shut down in 1988, and the bank took over the property and business about two years later. The ski lodge burned down on Nov. 13, 2000 — in a blaze where arson was suspected but never proven. The golf course closed in 2008.
Today, nature has taken over Renegade Mountain’s former ski slope and golf course. There are, however, condos, chalets and houses that were built in the 1970s and 1980s on the road that leads to the former resorts — plus several residential lots that have never been sold.
The residents of those condos, chalets and houses are part of the unincorporated community of Renegade Mountain — “quite possibly the best place to live in Tennessee,” as its residents claim on its website.
“My wife and I have moved 20 times throughout the U.S. and the world since being married, and we still see some amazing animal, weather or geological events occurring on Renegade Mountain that we have never seen or experienced before,” says John Moore, a resident of Renegade Mountain. “It truly is a magical and unique place to live.”
