Overview
No Business took its name from its own creek in the gorge country now within Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, Tennessee — a name tradition credits to a settler's verdict that anyone had 'no business' trying to live in so hard a hollow — yet families did, from the early 1800s, farming the narrow bottoms in a community that reached scores of households before isolation won: the last residents left around 1960, and the national area now preserves chimney falls, stone walls and cemetery plots reached by backcountry trail. Its telling is hiker-borne: lights like cabin windows in the dark gorge, woodsmoke where no fire burns, voices and an axe's rhythm from empty bottoms, and figures at the old home sites — undocumented, atmospheric, the kind of stories deep hollows keep. The community's real families and their cemeteries deserve the visit's respect. Present No Business as Appalachian persistence first — a century and a half of hard farming — its after-lights the gorge's own telling. Trail access per Big South Fork rules.