South Prong 3 · South Prong miles 5¼ to 7½ above the junction

Little Pine Creek and Pine Creek

In Reach B, The South Prong · on Plate A15

Pine Creek

Creek · right bank · South Prong mile 7.2 · Plates A1, A15

Pine Creek is the ’s largest tributary. It drains about 27 square miles, close to what the prong itself drains above their meeting, and runs about twelve miles from its head near Sterling, a former Frisco station in the country north of Willow Springs named for John Sterling, an Illinois man who entered land there. Joe Fisher ran a sawmill near Sterling in the early 1880s (Chapter 5). Esling Hollow, a valley whose name is unexplained, joins it from the south at the mouth of its largest side , which drains nearly four square miles. The creek was named for its pines, which grew along the banks by one account and along the ridge by another (Chapter 18).

The lowest eight miles of Pine Creek flow all year. The state scheduled the replacement of the 1932 Route 137 bridge over it for March to June 2026. Near the mouth of Rebel Hollow, Rebel Road crosses it on a one-lane concrete slab of 1950. Around 1998 the Willow Springs landfill held a state discharge permit on one of its branches (Chapter 17). Most of the small share of public land in the South Prong country is national forest in this drainage.

Oak Ridge School stood near Pine Creek. Between Pine Creek and the prong stood the Solid Rock Church, the Pleasant Grove Church and its cemetery, and Pine Creek School, named for the creek.

Spout Spring Hollow and Spout Spring. Spout Spring Hollow joins Pine Creek about four miles above its mouth. Its spring is on a hillside north of King’s Mountain, near Willow Springs. In the late 1930s it was a good-sized spring that bubbled in a strong stream from the side of the hill, and its owner, Harrison Godsey, had piped the water up the hill to his house, so that it was sometimes called Godsey Spring. King’s Mountain is a high point on the divide with streams running off it in every direction; its other sides drain to the Eleven Point (Chapter 18). Maps of 1850 and 1855 call it King’s Mount. Some people held that a man named King lived there in the early days and others that the name came from the height alone, and a borrowing from the Revolutionary battle of King’s Mountain, in South Carolina, has also been suggested. About a mile east is a smaller rise, which by the late 1930s had been named Queen’s Mountain as its sister. In the 1930s the spring’s water was said to run through Spout Spring Hollow to the Jacks Fork in Shannon County. On the map the hollow joins Pine Creek in Texas County, and the spring’s exact position has not been fixed.

Rebel Hollow comes into Pine Creek about a mile and a half above its mouth, near the Rebel Road crossing. The name is said to date from the Civil War; how it arose is not recorded. Pine Creek also takes in several sizable branches with no recorded name.

Flinger Branch

Branch · left bank · South Prong mile 7.0 · Plates A1, A15

Flinger Branch, a branch of about a mile and a half from the northwest, enters almost opposite Pine Creek and drains nearly two square miles. It is given both as a branch that runs water all the time and as one that may stop flowing in dry weather. The name is unexplained.

Little Pine Creek, Big Spring Creek and Big Spring

Creek and spring · right bank · South Prong mile 6.0 · Plates A1, A15

Little Pine Creek drains about ten square miles from the south, runs about six miles and carries water all year. Its upper branches lie in northern Hutton Valley Township in Howell County, and Big Spring Creek is the short run from Big Spring into it. The took its name from the Hutton Valley post office, in a village laid out in 1873 and named for a Mr. Hutton, the first settler of that valley, who came about 1841.

In the late 1930s Howell County people gave the name Big Pine Creek to a stream in northern Hutton Valley Township that flowed into the Jacks Fork in Texas County, for the large pine timber of that region. They also called its branch, Big Spring Creek, Little Pine Creek, to tell it from the larger stream, and Pine Creek was a separate stream again. On today’s map Big Spring Creek is a branch of Little Pine Creek and there is no Big Pine Creek. The likeliest reading is that the old Big Pine Creek is the present Little Pine Creek, and that “Little Pine” passed from the branch to the main stream early: the 1948 topographic map already letters the main stream Little Pine Creek in Texas County, shows no Big Pine Creek, and letters Big Spring a little south of the county line. A Mountain View resident calls Big Spring Creek “Pine Creek.” Moore’s Hollow, named for Hugh and Thomas Moore, brothers who lived there by 1867, ran into the old Big Pine Creek and so probably lies somewhere in this drainage.

Big Spring gave the branch its name. It lies a little over the Howell County line, at the short run of Big Spring Creek. In the late 1930s it was a spring of ordinary size that supplied good water to most of the community. Measured before 1974 at 1.41 cubic feet a second, it has also been put at about a million gallons a day (Chapter 12). It is no relation to the Big Spring on the Current River.

A small unnamed branch comes in from the north on the opposite bank about a quarter mile below.

Dixon Ford

Former crossing · lower South Prong · Plate A15 (not marked)

Dixon Ford, also called Dixon Crossing, was a crossing on the lower prong, below Route 137. Who Dixon was has not been traced. A Mountain View resident remembered it as “a great place to hang out at the river,” with “a couple of good places to play in the water and get some sun,” and as a place where a float could start, until its new owners closed it to the public (Chapters 8, 11 and 20). It is private land.