 Lacking a railroad, Taylor and Crate used a series of splash dams to move logs in controlled floods downstream to the Little Tennessee, where they would then be floated to the Tennessee River and eventually to a sawmill in Chattanooga.Taylor and Crate never managed to turn a profit, however, and left the valley in 1898.In 1904, Horace Kephart, a librarian from St. Louis, arrived in Hazel Creek with plans to study the wilderness areas of the Southern Appalachian highlands.