historic wolf gap
Wolf Gap is named after a legend, and also after a real historic place.
The original “Wolf Gap” was a gap in the hills, the low point “path of least resistance” for a historic road leading into an agricultural community tucked into the hills.
If you’re standing at this QR marker, at the high point of the West Loop trail, you can look due West across the field and see the silhouette of the geographic gap in the hills that is Wolf Gap’s namesake.
Legend tells that a white wolf protected this gap, chasing away coon hunters and their dogs who might venture into the area. The name “Wolf Gap” was associated with this geographic feature by the mid-1800s, and the legend persisted into the 20th century.
The Wolf Gap Road led from the Old Stage Road (historically the main North-South route from Pulaski to Elkton until the creation of the Elkton-Pulaski Turnpike in 1842) and traveled southwest to connector to the historic Conway community on the Elkton-Pulaski Turnpike (present-day US Highway 31).
The historic Wolf Gap Road was also known at times as the Ash Hopper Road (perhaps due to the steep-sided hills which resembled the steep sides of an ash hopper used to make lye). It was also known locally as Negrotown Road as it was primarily an African-American community. At various times all three names were used on maps, census records, and deeds records: Wolf Gap Road, Ash Hopper Road, and Negrotown Road.
Before the Civil War, the Wolf Gap area was populated with white farmers and some enslaved laborers. The area was never agriculturally productive enough for large-scale plantation agriculture or the high enslaved populations that accompanied it - as was found in the flatter and more fertile areas of the county.
Lewis & Fannie McCollum, from the collection of Lena Brown Prince
After the end of Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the area quickly became a stronghold of the Black population - the 1870 census shows that 24 of the 32 households in the Wolf Gap neighborhood were Black families, and this trend continued for decades.
Many of these African-American residents worked as sharecroppers on white-owned land, though others such as Lewis McCallum and William Anderson became significant Black landowners and farmers in the Wolf Gap neighborhood.
By the late 1800s the Wolf Gap neighborhood was very connected to other thriving rural communities like Conway, Midbridge, Center Point, Tarpley, Pisgah, Bryson, and Elkton. Wolf Gap residents had access to a wood shop, a cooper, a dry goods store, physicians, multiple churches, and multiple schools.
Historic Wolf Gap is in the center of this image, taken from the 1878 D.G. Beers Map of Giles County. Note that map only marks white households, schools, and churches. Click here for the full map, available from the Tennessee State Library & Archives.
Today the road is entirely on private property, but its path has been mapped by local historians and researchers working to understand the lives of the people who lived at Wolf Gap in the past.
Like so many rural agricultural communities, particularly Black communities, the Wolf Gap neighborhood gradually lost its population over the first half of the 20th century as people chose to relocate. As part of the nationwide demographic shift known as the Great Migration, the African-American families who had called Wolf Gap home for generations would choose to live in cities like Nashville, Louisville, or Indianapolis as they sought better economic opportunity and more racial equality. The final resident of the Wolf Gap community, Fannie McCollum Anthony, lived there for her entire adult life. Fannie raised children at Wolf Gap with her husband Lewis McCollum, then remaining there with her second husband Foster Anthony until her death in 1951. Fannie is buried at the New Center Point Cemetery just around the corner from modern Wolf Gap.