Chuckey is an unincorporated community in Greene County, Tennessee.[1] It is located on the Nolichucky River, from which its name is derived. The community is the site of a post office and is assigned zip code 37641.
The defunct East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad formerly had a station in Chuckey.[2] The current brick train depot, built by the Southern Railway in 1906,[2] is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Several farms in Chuckey that date from the community's earliest settlement in the 18th century are included in the Earnest Farms Historic District, also listed on the National Register.
The first U.S. truffle orchard to successfully produce commercial quantities of culinary-quality black Périgord truffles is located in Chuckey. Tom Michaels, who had written a Ph.D thesis on truffle cultivation, started cultivating truffles in the area in 2000 after observing that the area's limestone soil was similar to the soil of the Périgord region of France, where black truffles are native.[2][3] In 2007, the first year that truffles were harvested from the orchard, it included 2,500 hazelnut trees growing on 20 acres (8 hectares) of land. Thirty pounds (14 kilograms) of truffles were produced in the first year.[4]
In the 1890s and early 1900s, Chuckey was home to aviation pioneer Edward Chalmers Huffaker (1856–1937). Trained as an engineer, Huffaker's 1895 paper, "The Value of Curved Surfaces in Flight," gained the attention of aviation enthusiast Octave Chanute, who helped Huffaker secure employment at the Smithsonian Institution. Huffaker worked with the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1901, but left after only one month due to consistent disagreement.[5][6]
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