Chattanooga

The Cherokee lived along this stretch of the Tennessee River, and in 1816 John Ross, who later became principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, established the landing that still bears his name. In 1838 the United States Army used Ross's Landing as one of three emigration depots where Cherokee were held before being forced west on the Trail of Tears; the next year the community at the landing was incorporated as the city of Chattanooga. The name is believed to come from a Creek word meaning "rock rising to a point", perhaps a reference to Lookout Mountain.

Railways made the town. The railroad from Atlanta arrived in 1850, other lines followed, and by the Civil War Chattanooga was a junction the Confederacy could not afford to lose. In September 1863 the Union army was beaten at Chickamauga, just south in Georgia, and besieged in the city; in November Ulysses S. Grant's forces broke out, taking Lookout Mountain in the "Battle Above the Clouds" and storming Missionary Ridge, which opened the road to Atlanta. The battlefields became the country's first national military park in 1890.

After the war Chattanooga grew into an iron and manufacturing city — the first Coca-Cola bottling franchise was set up here in 1899 — and in 1941 Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo Choo" made its name known worldwide. In 1969 the federal government declared that it had the dirtiest air in the nation. From the 1980s business and civic leaders planned a new riverfront; the Tennessee Aquarium opened in 1992, the Walnut Street Bridge reopened for walkers in 1993, and the city later built a municipal gigabit internet network, earning the nickname Gig City. Volkswagen opened an assembly plant on the city's east side in 2011.

Chattanooga's identity is built on the river and the mountains around it. The Tennessee River Gorge, the sandstone cliffs of the Cumberland Plateau and the ridges inside the city limits make it a centre for rock climbing, trail running, paddling and mountain biking, and outdoor sport is as much a part of local life as college football is elsewhere in Tennessee. The Riverbend Festival has brought music to the waterfront every summer since the early 1980s, and the Ironman triathlon turns the river and the Riverwalk into a race course each year.

The city was the birthplace of the blues singer Bessie Smith, who busked on its streets as a child, and the cultural centre named for her keeps her story alongside that of Black Chattanooga. The Tivoli Theatre and the Chattanooga Symphony and Opera carry the formal arts, and the Hunter Museum's collection covers American art from the colonial period to today. The Choo Choo song, MoonPies and the See Rock City barns are the pieces of popular culture the rest of the country associates with the city, and residents wear them lightly.

Manners are Southern: strangers greet one another, "y'all" is standard, and churches of many denominations fill on Sunday morning. Pride in the turnaround from the polluted city of the 1960s is strong and openly expressed, and the gigabit network and the arrival of Volkswagen are told as parts of the same story. The Civil War is present in the landscape rather than argued over, in the monuments of the national military park on Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain.

About 185,000 people live in the city and roughly 560,000 in the metropolitan area, which spills across the state line into Georgia. The economy rests on manufacturing — the Volkswagen plant, which builds electric vehicles alongside its SUVs, and suppliers around it — together with the insurance company Unum, the Tennessee Valley Authority's offices, hospitals, a University of Tennessee campus and a cluster of technology start-ups that the gigabit network helped to attract. Tourism has grown steadily since the aquarium opened.

Most residents live in car-dependent neighbourhoods on the ridges and in the valleys around the centre: the older streets of St. Elmo and Highland Park, the hilltop suburbs on Signal and Lookout Mountains, and the sprawl of Hixson, East Brainerd and Ooltewah beyond. The Southside and North Shore have drawn younger households into flats and renovated houses, and housing costs have risen as people have moved in. About 23 per cent of the city's residents live below the poverty line, and schools and public transport are long-standing political topics.

The day begins early; commuters cross the river on the Market Street and Olgiati bridges, and the lunch hour fills the restaurants of Main Street. Evenings and weekends are spent outdoors in good weather — on the Riverwalk, on Stringer's Ridge, on the climbing walls and paddling routes of the gorge — and in the breweries of the Southside. Summer haze and ozone, flooding on the creeks that drain the ridges and traffic on the interstate bridges are the everyday complaints.

Chattanooga's best-known food is a snack: the MoonPie, two round graham biscuits with marshmallow between them, dipped in a flavoured coating, made by the family-owned Chattanooga Bakery and sold with an RC Cola as the traditional working man's lunch across the South. The city was also the first to bottle Coca-Cola, in 1899, which is why the drink is tied to Chattanooga in local memory even though it was invented in Atlanta.

Otherwise the table is east Tennessee's: slow-smoked pork barbecue with a tomato-based sauce, fried chicken, catfish, biscuits with sausage gravy, grits and sweet tea, with meat-and-three lunch plates — one meat and three vegetable sides, which may include macaroni and cheese — in diners across town. The Southside's restaurants have added Southern cooking with modern touches, wood- fired pizza, Mexican and Asian kitchens, and the city has a dense cluster of craft breweries. The Chattanooga Market on Sundays is the place to find local peaches, tomatoes, honey, cheese and baked goods from the farms of the valley and the plateau.

On the North Shore, Frazier Avenue's cafés and ice cream shops draw families from the riverside parks, and downtown's Market and Broad Streets serve the aquarium crowds with barbecue, burgers and brewpub fare.