Catoosa Wildlife Management Area

Catoosa and several other WMAs are closed to entry between sunset and sunrise in order to reduce the effect of the activities that are considered incompatible to established wildlife management practices.

The healthy deer herd regularly produces trophy bucks for hunters, and wild turkey numbers are growing fast.

Artifacts found in caves and rock shelters suggest Mississippian and later Cherokee hunters camped here but never established permanent dwellings.

[1] In the eighteenth century, longhunters came to hunt game, and English, Scots-Irish and German settlers settled in small hamlets mostly in the valleys.

[5] The white settlers visited the high country occasionally to mine coal and harvest timber before major industry came to the area with the first lumber mill in the 1870s.

[1] By 1911, two coal and lumber companies had formed a syndicate that exploited the region until the main bridges on their rail lines were destroyed by a flood in 1929.

In 1940 the Crossville Exchange Club appointed a committee to encourage the state to purchase some of the abandoned land for a wildlife management area.