Concealed History of The Chattanooga Tennessee Underground

The Chattanooga Tennessee Underground is a fascinating part of the city’s history. It’s essentially a below-ground area underground that no one can conclusively identify when it was built or who built it much less why it’s there.

In the 1970s, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga professor Jeff Brown started discovering what would later be known as “Chattanooga Tennessee Underground”. He noticed buildings that had doorways leading to nowhere and storefronts located at basement level that appeared to have been first floors previously.

The theory is that between 1875 and 1905, the city built up its roads and turned the first floor stories of buildings into basements to escape flooding, disease, and yellow fever. After the mudflood of 1867, the city continued to experience bouts of flooding and so citizens turned first floors of buildings into basements to prevent further flood damage.

The only concrete evidence of this happening are newspaper articles that were released showing city leaders’ plans to raise the street levels by 3 to 15 feet. [Chattanooga Tennessee Underground?] According to those same newspaper articles, 40 blocks of downtown Chattanooga were raised, and this prompted the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933, which resulted in the Chickamauga Dam being built. It helped regulate water levels to prevent the downtown area from flooding.

The Lovemans building downtown is said to be the “ground zero” of Chattanooga Tennessee Underground. The 130-year-old building is made from cinder block, bricks, and limestone, with outer walls that have the same mysterious doorways and windows that Jeff Brown discovered.

Despite the intriguing clues and theories, there is very little documentation available and the exact method and materials used to raise the city are still disputed. This makes the Chattanooga Tennessee Underground a captivating mystery of urban archaeology.

Explore the history of Chattanooga as Jamal Williams and Kay Blevins go beneath the streets of downtown to find Underground Chattanooga in this three part series.

The Narrative
Chattanooga Tennessee Underground

VIDEO SOURCE
WDEF News 12