With a view to development, a company has bought up and owns in fee 20,000 acres of coal lands and some seven thousand of iron ore in the valley and along the foot-hills on the southern slope of the mountain. They have selected and platted as a town site over sixteen hundred acres of beautiful valley land, lying on both sides of Big Creek where it cuts through the mountain, 1200 feet above the sea-level. But here again one comes upon the process of town-making at a still earlier stage of development. That is, the town exists only on paper, and improvement has not yet begun. Taken now, it is in the stage that Middlesborough, or Big Stone Gap, was once in. So that it should not be thought any the less real because it is rudimentary or embryonic. A glance at the wealth tributary to this point will soon dispel doubt that here in the future, as at the other strategic mountain passes of the Cumberland, is to be established an important town. Only consider that the entire 20,000 acres owned by the Big Creek Gap Company are underlain by coal, and that the high mountains between the Pine and Cumberland contain vertical sections of greater thickness of coal-measure rocks than are to be found anywhere else in the vast Appalachian field; that Walnut Mountain, on the land of the company--the western continuation of the Black Mountain and the Log Mountain of Kentucky--is 3300 feet above sea, and has 2000 feet of coal-measures above drainage; and that already there has been developed the existence of six coals of workable thickness above drainage level, five of them underlying the entire 20,000 acres, except where small portions have been cut away by the streams. The lowest coal above drainage--the Sharpe--presents an outcrop about twenty feet above the bed of the stream, and underlies the entire purchase. It has long been celebrated for domestic use in the locality. An entry driven in about sixty feet shows a twelve-inch cannel-coal with a five-inch soft shale, burning with a brilliant flame, and much used in Powell's Valley; also a bituminous coal of forty-three-inch thickness, having a firm roof, cheaply minable, and yielding a coke of over 93 per cent. pure carbon. The next coal above is a cannel-coal having an outcrop on the Middle Fork of Big Creek of thirty-six inches, and on the north slope of the mountains, six miles off, of thirty-eight inches, showing a persistent bed throughout. Above this is the Douglass coal, an entry of forty feet into which shows a thickness of fifty inches, with a good roof, and on the northern slope of the mountains, at Cumberland River, a thickness of sixty inches. This is a gas coal of great excellence, yielding also a coke, good, but high in sulphur. Above the Douglass is an unexplored section of great thickness, showing coal stains and coals exposed, but undeveloped.