The Mountain Goat Trail is a rails-to-trails project, following the route of an historic railroad that, from 1856 to 1985, the carried coal and passengers over the Cumberland Plateau and down to the main Nashville-to-Chattanooga line in Cowan. It was called the Mountain Goat because its climb onto the Plateau was, at the time, one of the steepest railroad ascents in the world.

In 1853, Major A.E. Barney, a civil engineer, was commissioned to designed a spur rail line to carry coal from the mines of the Plateau to market, beginning in Sewanee and, over time, extending to Tracy City, Coalmont, Gruetli-Laager, and Palmer.

In its heyday, the Mountain Goat line ran 3 or 4 trains a day with both coal and passenger cars. It stopped running passenger cars in 1971 and freight trains in 1984. CSX officially abandoned the line in 1985 and removed the tracks in 1986.

In the early 2000s, the Mountain Goat Trail Alliance was formed to transform nearly 40 miles of the former rail bed into a paved, multi-modal trail.