Traveling the Great Loop

Oct. 25; mile 158.5; Days run: 10 miles

Since 2021, Stacey Huntingford has owned and operated the Clifton Marina. In her former life, she had managed a call centre for a major cell phone company located in California. After being with the company for 18 years, the company merged with another and she retired to do something different. “One evening, after a couple of bottles of wine”, she confessed, “My husband and I decided to open a bar somewhere on the water.” Looking for available sites, they stumbled upon an advertisement announcing that Clifton Marina was for sale; they came to look. “I arrived here dressed all California-like with my 2 shih tzu dogs in tow. The small marina was in bad shape: blue tarps hung from the roofs and the 30-year-old pontoons needed either replacing or some serious updating. The workboat had an old Evinrude 30 hp engine on it. The previous owner, who was 80 plus years old, had owned the marina for 25 years.”  

Over a period of several months, Stacey returned several times to get a feel of the place; how active the marina was, how many boats stopped there and what changes she would make if she were to purchase it.

“It was dead of winter when I made my visits in 2019, the town of Clifton and the marina were like a ghost town. I had always wanted to own a restaurant; the current owner served hotdogs and hamburgers out of a crock pot on a patio.” Stacey’s plan was to return to California for about a month and come be back mid-march. She would learn the business and computer systems while in California before taking it over.

She still recalls the day she heard a weather report covering the Clifton area while living at her California residence. It was February 24th; due to the heavy rainfall that had already fallen earlier that month along with the already unusually wet winter season, widespread flash flooding and river flooding was occurring.

She called the owner of the marina. “Is there anything I can do from here?” “I can’t talk to you now,” Mr. Green said excitedly, and hung up. She immediately booked a flight to Nashville, but when she arrived to the marina, she couldn’t access the site due to the high water level.

From a distance, she could see that the water level had reached the gas tanks and Mr Green and a welder, were in a run-about installing 4-foot extensions onto the supports underneath the tanks to prevent gas from escaping from the vents and polluting the river. 

Stacey decided it was time to leave California and come to Clifton and live in an RV located on the property. She could get familiar with the area and determine what needed doing at the marina. She thought, that in a months time, she would be ready to take over the marina. But Mr. Green suddenly announced that he was leaving. The current situation was more than he wanted to deal with.

 Stacey called her in-laws, “I need help. Can you get here in 3 days? I can’t do this on my own!”

Stacey lived in the RV with her mother and father in-law, until she officially took over the marina in May. “I went from dressing California style and using makeup to dressing everyday in blue jeans.

After making improvements to the marina, a tornado blew through early this year causing more damage. Local dikes gave way, resulting in flooding which caused those same gas tanks to float off their supports even though they had been filled the week before. Miraculously, when the water level receded, the tanks landed back onto the same supports! “If I hadn’t filled those tanks up, they would not be here today.”
During the reconstruction of the marina, the basin was dug out to accommodate more boats.

Today, the marina has 74 slips; most are houseboats or pontoon boats and include 3 liveaboards. The rest are weekenders from Nashville and Memphis (2 hours away) and Florence (1.5 hours). “All the slips are full except for 2 that we keep for emergencies . “Traveling that river is no joke,” she says. “Sometimes people need help.”

Concerned for our safety and comfort, she continues: “Monday night is going to be 23 F /-5 C degrees. Keep your lines dry because once they’re wet, they never dry in that weather, and they are very hard to handle when tying up.  Get yourself a pair of waterproof gloves, you’ll need them. A cold front in the Pacific northwest is coming straight this way.” (The next day, Washington received 3 feet of snow.)

A local couple that we met in the tavern, and who live on the Clifton bluff overlooking the Tennessee River, said that they enjoy watching the traffic on the river: tows pushing loads of coal, scrap metal, dry material for making asphalt, and rocket ships headed for Cape Canaveral. Rockets are manufactured in Decatur near Chattanooga, he said. During the flood in 2019, their basement filled with 6 feet / 2 metres of water. “My wife loves looking down onto those barges and watching them go by from our porch”, he confirmed. “After the water receded enough for the towboats to get underneath the bridge again, we would be sitting on our porch and the tows would be going by at eye level! We even saw a camper van floating down the river!”

The marina offered a courtesy car for visiting boaters; a car with brake pads! We borrowed the car to provision but the only store that sold ‘groceries’ was a  Dollar General.

Stacy suggested we walk up town and pointed towards the marina’s back gate. “When you come back’” she notes, “The combination lock has been installed upside down to deter drunks that might have learned the combination.”

Stacey owns the two storey building, (pictured on the far right), on Clifton’s Main street. She renovated it to include two top floor ‘hotel’ suites, and office space on the main floor. The building on the far left is a tavern. It was closed for the season when we were there. County bylaws dictate that Wayne county is a ‘moist county’. Liquor is prohibited, but Monday to Saturday, packaged beer and wine can be sold between 6:00 a.m. and midnight.
The Clifton Marina Bar and Restaurant, supported by floating pontoons on the Tennessee River, is instead, regulated under the Tennessee Valley Authority. It is the only location in the county allowed to sell single serving mixed drinks.

After Ulysses S. Grant took Fort Donelson, (Tennessee, 1862), Clifton  saw significant military activity when troops and their horses used the Clifton ferry to cross the Tennessee River.  (Dec. ’62: 2100 Confederate soldiers were transported across the river). The Union army’s mounted infantry had set up camp  behind this Presbyterian Church, which Confederate troops had earlier used as a hospital. You can still see bullet holes in the outside walls of the church from efforts to control the River’s crossing location.

 Stacey, was a wealth of information. “Riverboats use to arrive delivering loads of raw cotton to the town’s Landing area. It was unloaded bushel by bushel, stored in a warehouse and then transported to the cotton gin. Once ginned, it was carried to the sweatshop, a 90,000 square-foot one-story building located in the middle of Clifton. Clothing was manufactured there and then shipped to Michigan and Alabama by steam ship.”

Just outside of Clifton, a sawmill produces staves for Brown-Forman Corp. of Louisville, Ky., the company that owns Jack Daniel’s; (staves form the barrel body and end pieces of the barrel).

 According to Darrell Davis, senior operations manager for the Brown-Forman mills, “The color of Jack Daniel’s and more than half of our whiskey’s flavor is derived from the barrel.” Brown-Forman barrel wood comes from American white oak trees in Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia. “White Oak allows the whiskey to go into, but not penetrate all the way through the wood.”

While in town, we scanned the horizon for a ‘mountain’ as Stacey had referred to it. There was a building there that held some history that we wanted to see.

No more than a few feet of elevation above the rest of the town, we caught sight of the upper part of a building that Stacey said manufactured Pigg-O Stats, a pediatric immobilizer used when x-raying children. Jalmar (Jimmy) Pigg, ( who has since past), invented (1960s), and held the patent to, the immobilizer that is still in use today in most pediatric hospitals and medical centres in U.S. hospitals.

 To reach the building, we past Clifton residences…

Before I Go:

It appears that Stacey can do anything. After sketching this design, ( I bet she can sing too, and play an instrument; maybe she makes musical instruments!), she had it printed onto t-shirts and sells them at the marina. She also had the design tattooed onto her arm. ( Maybe she tattooed herself!)

The design reflects some the important things in her life. “The TriStar of Tennessee, an iris – the state flower, beavers that live here and damage our docks, but they’re part of our life; birds that hang out with us, a deer that we named Christmas; he comes to our front door, plays with the dog, puts her paws up on our car when we return, but she doesn’t except food from us. She had a baby this year. We pray a lot for her during hunting season. Last year, Wayne County did not allow deer hunting. A lot of the deer have a disease that render them uneatable.”

In 2020, Stacey became the Commissioner for the city of Clifton.