We Hiked 11 Miles to See the Serpent Wall

Teena and I Hiked the Entire Length of the Volunteer Trail at Long Hunter State Park to See a Very Special Stone Wall

In this video, Teena and I made a long hike through the forests of Long Hunter State Park (near Nashville) to see an old stone wall — because it could be potentially much older than most people think.

At the end of the Volunteer Trail runs an extraordinary historic stone wall, It’s 1,000-feet long and to most eyes it looks like a terrific example of a well-built property wall constructed by an early homesteader, potentially up to 200 years ago. And that’s what state park websites will tell you about the wall.

But to the trained eye of Dan Pezzoni, an architectural historian based in Lexington, Virginia, this wall is much older and built by other hands.

He suggests that the wall was built by Native Americans prior to the arrival of European settlers and long hunters, and that it’s a ceremonial wall containing powerful serpent imagery.

A place of big and powerful magic?

Serpents were important to a great variety of ancient cultures globally, including Native Americans. In this video, Mr. Pezzoni details the many reasons that he believes this wall to be an ancient Native American construction, and in my own video, I showed one or two examples that illustrate his thinking.

With the overwhelming length of this wall, and the amount of serpent imagery involved, this may have been a place considered very important to Native Americans.

A timeline of the video below will help you get directly to the sections that interest you most.

00:00 Trailhead / Starting the Hike
02:49 Fossils on the Shore of Percy Priest Lake
05:26 Arrival at the Old Stone Wall
07:35 Snakes in the Stonework
07:51 the Serpent’s Head
08:20 My Black and White Photographs