Editing Spencer, Tennessee (section)

=== Fall Creek Falls State Park History ===
In 1937, the U.S. government began purchasing the badly eroded land around Fall Creek Falls. The following year, the [[Works Progress Administration]] and the [[Civilian Conservation Corps]] began the work of restoring the forest and constructing park facilities. The [[National Park Service]] transferred ownership of the park to the State of Tennessee in 1944.

Millikan's Overlook is named after [[Glenn Allan Millikan|Glenn Millikan]], who was head of the Department of [[Physiology]] at [[Vanderbilt University School of Medicine]] and son of [[List of Nobel laureates|Nobel Laureate]] [[Robert Andrews Millikan|Robert A. Millikan]]. Millikan was killed by a falling rock on May 25, 1947, while rock climbing "Buzzard's Roost," the cliff beneath the overlook.

In 2006, the State of Tennessee purchased 12,500 acres (51 km<sup>2</sup>) of land along the White-Van Buren County line, in the vicinity of Bledsoe State Forest. The purchase was part of an effort to create an unbroken corridor of publicly owned land between Fall Creek Falls State Park and [[Scott's Gulf]], a few miles to the north in [[White County, Tennessee|White County]].

The Fall Creek Falls Inn and Conference Center offered 144 guest rooms and over 5,000 square feet (460 m<sup>2</sup>) of banquet space in five conference rooms, which accommodated up to 400 people. The buildings were designed with a [[brutalist architecture]], having a combination of dark brick, and gray [[concrete]] with an exposed aggregate of smooth white, beige, tan, and brownish river stones. Built in the 1960s, with a rooms-only annex in the 1970s, they were closed in early April 2018 and [[Demolish|demolished]] later that year, after [[Tennessee Governor]] [[Bill Haslam]] pushed for [[privatization]] and potential [[Concessionaire|concessionaires]] refused to bid on serving the older facilities at the state's resort parks.

Cost overruns and underestimates, and a tight [[labor market]] in such a rural area, led to a need for more money from the [[Tennessee General Assembly]] in 2019, in turn allowing construction to resume in the autumn. It is expected to finally reopen in late summer or early autumn of 2021, with only 75 to 95 guest rooms, at a cost of slightly over $40 million (up from $29 million originally). It is currently unknown how much nightly room rates will be increased.

Both counties objected to the long-term closure of the inn due to the significant loss of [[Lodging tax|lodging taxes]] and [[Sales tax|sales taxes]], as well as employees who would be left without a job or forced to relocate or commute long distances to other state parks, even when the closure and reconstruction were expected to be far shorter. Proposals to build on the opposite side of the lake before closing the original inn were declined, largely to due to the lack of sufficient [[sewerage]] facilities there.