_Over another fire, Mrs. Kate Duckett and daughter Tennie of Coopers
Creek make hard soap. Mrs. Duckett stirs the lard with a wooden paddle
as Tennie fans the fire with a hawk wing before dipping into the
kettle with a gourd scoop. It was a five-hour process._
]
The war’s severest hardships followed in the wake of the outliers, or
the bushwhackers. These scavengers favored no cause. As the war dragged
on, they ambushed and raided, stealing meat from the smokehouse, corn
from the crib, and farm animals from barn and pasture. Scarcity and
want became commonplace throughout the mountains. In North Carolina’s
Madison County, a group of citizens broke into a warehouse and laid
claim to a valuable commodity, salt. Economic want enflamed political
emotions. In Tennessee’s Sevier County, controversial “Parson”
Brownlow, Methodist circuit-rider turned newspaper editor turned
politician, sought refuge in the shadow of the Smokies with Unionist
sympathizers when Knoxville came under Confederate control.
A well-known army unit operated in the Smokies: Col. William Thomas’
Confederate 69th-N.C., known as Thomas’ Legion of Indians and
Highlanders. “Little Will,” as he was affectionately called, had become
the effective spokesman in Washington and at the state level for the
eastern remnant of the Cherokee. When the Civil War came and he chose
to stay with the South, the Cherokees chose to stay with him. For a
while, they secured mineral supplies for the Confederacy, including
alum and saltpeter for gunpowder. The Legion guarded Alum Cave in
the Smokies. Under Thomas’ direction, his unit also worked on the
Oconaluftee Turnpike.
In December 1863, after Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside had secured Knoxville
for the Union, Col. William J. Palmer and the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry
attacked Thomas’ camp near Gatlinburg. After a short battle, Thomas
and his troops retreated across the mountains into North Carolina.
One month later, Confederate Gen. Robert P. Vance decided to remedy
the situation in the mountains. With 375 cavalry, 100 infantry, and
artillery, he marched from Asheville, joined Thomas and 150 Indian
troops in Quallatown, and crossed the Smokies during a bitterly cold
spell. While Thomas remained in Gatlinburg, Vance proceeded toward
Newport, camped on Cosby Creek deep in the Smokies, and was
surprised there by none other than Colonel Palmer and his 15th-Pa.
In the resulting rout, General Vance was captured along with about
everything else: men, horses, medical supplies, food, ammunition. In
February, Thomas and his Legion were engaged once more, in the Great
Smoky Mountains near the mouth of Deep Creek. The result was another
defeat, this time by the 14th Illinois Cavalry under Maj. Francis
Davidson.
Thomas and his Legion did not win mighty military victories for the
Confederacy; Governor Vance even accused Thomas’ command of being “a
favorite resort for deserters.” But it appears that this strange little
mountain force did act as a deterrent against wholesale raids in the
Smokies by Federal sympathizers, and to some extent, raids by marauding
bushwhackers. As for “Little Will” himself, mental disorder in later
years brought him his own personal civil war and its losing battles. He
died in a North Carolina hospital.
An equally well-known force in the Great Smokies during the war was
a band of Union raiders led by Col. George W. Kirk. One contemporary
called him “Kirk of Laurel,” referring to a remote watershed in Madison
County where the colonel often camped. Kirk’s most effective march
into the Smokies came near the close of the war, in the early spring
of 1865. With 400 cavalry and 200 infantry he entered the mountains
through East Tennessee’s Cocke County, via Mt. Sterling, and marched
into Cataloochee. Turning aside a Confederate company there, he went
on to Waynesville, then proceeded to Soco Valley and back across the
Smokies.
Kirk raided, released Federal prisoners, skirmished with home guards,
and scattered general fear throughout the mountains. In fact, his main
achievement for his cause lay in diverting Confederate troops and
keeping them scattered on the home front rather than mobilized on the
battlefields where they were desperately needed. Try as they might,
the Confederates could not find enough of the “silver-greys” or the
“seed-corn”--as those too old and too young for regular service were
called--to totally protect their homeland from Kirk’s men, or from
renegade bushwhackers who had no cause but plunder and pillage.
As the Civil War drew toward its final convulsion, the mountain area
engaged in a more familiar struggle for survival. Food was scarce,
soda and salt almost non-existent. Women leached lye from wood ashes
and made soda. There was no substitute for salt; when available, it
cost a precious dollar a pound. Bitter enmities divided families,
communities, and counties. Life had never been easy in the mountains;
now it was rigorously difficult. And the people in this land of “make
do or do without” learned new ways to make do. Continuing old habits
and traditions up their isolated coves and along their steep hillsides,
they created a life that was distinctive, rugged, and adapted to its
natural surroundings.
One historian, John Preston Arthur, has described the mountain woman’s
day as follows:
“_Long before the pallid dawn came sifting in through chink and window
they were up and about. As there were no matches in those days, the
housewife ‘unkivered’ the coals which had been smothered in ashes the
night before to be kept ‘alive’ till morning, and with ‘kindling’ in
one hand and a live coal held on the tines of a steel fork or between
iron tongs in the other, she blew and blew and blew till the splinters
caught fire. Then the fire was started and the water brought from
the spring, poured into the ‘kittle,’ and while it was heating the
chickens were fed, and cows milked, the children dressed, the bread
made, the bacon fried and then coffee was made and breakfast was ready.
That over and the dishes washed and put away, the spinning wheel, the
loom or the reel were the next to have attention, meanwhile keeping a
sharp lookout for the children, hawks, keeping the chickens out of the
garden, sweeping the floor, making the beds, churning, sewing, darning,
washing, ironing, taking up the ashes, and making lye, watching for
the bees to swarm, keeping the cat out the milk pans, dosing the
sick children, tying up the hurt fingers and toes, kissing the sore
place well again, making soap, robbing the bee hives, stringing
beans for winter use, working the garden, planting and tending a few
hardy flowers in the front yard, such as princess feather, pansies,
sweet-Williams, dahlias, morning glories; getting dinner, darning,
patching, mending, milking again, reading the Bible, prayers, and so on
from morning till night; and then all over again the next day._”
[Illustration:
Joseph S. Hall
_Mrs. Clem Enloe of Tight Run Branch was 84 years old when Joseph S.
Hall photographed her in 1937. “I was told that if I took her a box
of snuff, she would let me take her picture.” That’s the snuff in
her blouse. She didn’t give in so easily on everything. She refused
to observe the park’s fishing regulations and fished every season of
the year. She was filling a can with worms when Hall approached. “See
that,” she said pointing to the can, “I use them for fishing and I’m
the only one in this park who’s allowed to.”_
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_The one-room log schoolhouse at Little Greenbrier, like the somewhat
larger Granny’s College at Big Greenbrier, provided the basics in
reading, writing, and arithmetic._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_And judging by the smiles of Margaret Tallent and Conley Russell, the
place was lots of fun._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Herman Matthews conducts a class in the school’s last year of
operation, 1935. He was the only teacher who had completed college._
]
Emergencies of health and sickness affected the daily routines.
“Doctor-medicine” might have its place, but home remedies were
considered most reliable--and available. A doctor with his saddlebag
of pills and tonics might be a day’s ride or more away from the
patient. But nature’s medicine chest lay almost at the doorstep. Plants
in swamp and meadow, leaves and bark and roots of the forest: all
healed many ailments. From ancient Cherokee wisdom and through their
own observations and testing, mountain people learned the uses of
boneset, black cohosh, wild cherry, mullein, catnip, balm of gilead,
Solomons-seal, sassafras, and dozens of other herbs and plants.
While they found one school and laboratory in the woods and hills
around them, the people of the Great Smoky Mountains also worked to
provide themselves with more orthodox classrooms. Continuing customs
that had begun before the War, the residents of many little communities
“made-up” a school. This meant that they banded together, and each
contributed to a small fund to pay a teacher’s salary for the year.
The “year” was usually three months. John Preston Arthur left a vivid
memoir of his experience in one of these so-called “old-field” schools,
which were located on land no longer under cultivation:
“_In lieu of kindergarten, graded and normal schools was the Old-Field
school, of which there were generally only one or two in a county,
and they were in session only when it was not ‘croptime.’ They were
attended by little and big, old and young, sometimes by as many as a
hundred, and all jammed into one room--a log cabin with a fireplace
at each end--puncheon floor, slab benches, and no windows, except
an opening made in the wall by cutting out a section of one of the
logs, here and there. The pedagogue in charge (and no matter how
large the school there was but one) prided himself upon his knowledge
of and efficiency in teaching the three R’s--readin’, ’ritin’ and
’rithmetic--and upon his ability to use effectively the rod, of which
a good supply was always kept in stock. He must know, too, how to make
a quill pen from the wing-feather of a goose or a turkey, steel and
gold pens not having come into general use. The ink used was made from
‘ink-balls’--sometimes from poke-berries--and was kept in little slim
vials partly filled with cotton. These vials, not having base enough to
stand alone, were suspended on nails near the writer. The schools were
paid from a public fund, the teacher boarding with the scholars._”
During the latter 1800s, free schools began to replace subscription
schools. But the quality and methods of education did not appear
to change drastically. Across the Smokies, in East Tennessee’s Big
Greenbrier Cove, Granny’s College provided the rudiments of public
education for many students and was an example of similar schools in
the Great Smokies region. Lillie Whaley Ownby remembered the house
which was turned into a school:
“_Granny College was built before the Civil War by Humphry John Ownby.
This house was two big log houses, joined together by a huge rock
chimney and a porch across both rooms on both sides of the house. The
houses were built of big poplar logs. The rooms were 18×20 feet and
both rooms had two doors and two windows. The floor was rough, hewn
logs. There was a huge fireplace in it. The living room had a partition
just behind the doors and a cellar about 8×10 feet._”
After Mrs. Ownby’s father had acquired the old log building, he went to
Sevierville, the county seat, and proposed to the school superintendent
that he would furnish this house if the county would supply a teacher
for Big Greenbrier children. This was agreeable, and Granny’s College,
as it was locally known, came into being.
“_The men made benches, long enough for three or four to sit on. The
back was nailed up on some blocks and the children used the wall for a
back rest. There was no place for books except on the benches or floor.
Dad furnished wood for the fire. The boys carried it in and kept the
fire going. Everyone helped in keeping the house clean and keeping
water in the house._”
Church as well as school was a personalized part of family and
community life in a way not known in more formal, urban situations.
Each fulfilled not only its own specific function, spiritual or
intellectual, but also satisfied social needs. The doctrine was
strictly fundamentalist; the dominant denominations were Baptist and
Methodist, although the Presbyterian influence was also present,
especially in the schools that were founded with both money and
teachers drawn from other regions of the country.
Each summer, Methodist camp meetings brought families together under
the long brush arbors for weeks of sociable conversation and soulful
conversion. The visiting ministers’ feast of oratory was matched only
by the feast of victuals prepared by housewives over the campfires as
they cooked and exchanged family news, quilt patterns, recipes, and
“cuttings” from favorite flowers and shrubs.
Baptists were the most numerous denomination. They divided themselves
into many categories, among others the Primitives, the Freewills, the
Missionaries, and one small group called the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit.
Their rules were strict: no violins in church, no dancing anywhere.
To be “churched,” or turned out of the congregation, was heavy
punishment--and not infrequent.
One aspect of church that incorporated an important feature of mountain
life was its singing. In ancient Ireland and Wales songsters had been
accompanied on the harp. Settlers had brought the Old Harp song book
of early hymns and anthems with them from the British Isles, and on
down the valleys and across the mountains into these remote byways.
The notes of this music were not round but shaped, and shape, rather
than placement on a staff, indicated the note. This method simplified
reading the music; and as the unaccompanied, usually untrained, singers
took their pitch from a leader, they proceeded in beautiful harmony,
usually in a minor key.
The mournful sound of minor chords was also familiar in the ballads
common throughout the hills. Death and unrequited love were their
recurring themes, whether they reached back to England and the Scottish
borders, as in “Lord Thomas and Fair Elender,” or recounted some
local contemporary affair. Beside their blazing hearths during long,
lonely winter evenings, or at jolly gatherings or through lazy summer
Saturday afternoons, mountain people remembered the past and recorded
the present as they sang, altering and adding to the ballads which had
been taught to them and which in turn would be handed on to another
generation.
And among those visitors who would begin to search the mountains during
the approaching 20th century, the folk song collectors and the ballad
seekers could find here a repository of rare, pure music--much of
it now forgotten even in its own homeland. The visitors would find a
way of life that might seem static but which was, indeed, changing.
For the early pioneers had yielded to the authentic mountaineer. His
log cabin was being replaced by sash-sawn lumber in a frame house.
Extensive apple orchards and corn crops yielded the basic ingredients
not only for fruit and bread but for the luxuries of a brandy and
whisky known also as moonshine, white lightning, Old Tanglefoot.
[Illustration:
_Pages 88-89: Butchering was a chore shared by nearly everyone in a
family. Here, the Ogles--Earl, Horace, Collie, and Willard--butcher a
hog as they get ready for a long winter._
National Park Service
]
Hunting and fishing, which had been necessities for the first settlers,
eventually turned into sport as well. Buffalo, elk, wolves, beavers,
passenger pigeons, and a variety of other game disappeared early and
forever, leaving only the memory of their presence in names like
Buffalo Creek, Elk Mountain, Wolf Creek, Beaverdam Valley, Pigeon
River. But deer, black bear, fox, raccoon and other animals remained
to challenge the mountain man and his dogs. The relationship between
a hunter and his hounds was something special. A dog shot or stolen
could be cause for a lifelong feud. Names of individual dogs--Old Blue,
Tige, Big Red--were cherished by their owners, as were certain breeds.
The Plott dogs, named after the bear hunters who bred them in Haywood
County’s Balsam range, were famous for their tenacity and strength in
hunting bear.
One of the sharpest condemnations that could be laid on a mountain man
concerned the hunting dogs. An early resident of Roaring Fork above
Gatlinburg was a “hard, cruel man,” despised by his neighbors and in
turn despising them. He had frightened children and cut a fellow “till
he like to bled to death.” Finally--and most devastatingly--it was
agreed that “he was the type of fellow that would pizen your dog.”
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Three children look on as he works at his shaving horse on a stave.
His coopering equipment includes a draw knife, crow cutter, jointing
plane, stave gauge, and barrel adze._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_At his blacksmith shop Messer shapes a small metal piece, one of many
he turned out just to keep his farm running._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Here is Messer the tanner, scrubbing the pelt side of a hide with a
scythe blade after taking it out of the vat and removing the spent
bark with a long-handled strainer._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_In the mountains you had to work hard at being self-sufficient. And
some men did better than others. One such man was Milas Messer of Cove
Creek. Setting barrel staves to the hoop takes a bit of coordination,
but Messer makes it look easy._
]
Livestock raising was important throughout the Great Smoky Mountains.
Stock laws had not yet been passed, and rail fences were built to
keep cattle, horses, hogs, or sheep _out_ of gardens, fields, and
yards rather than _in_ pastures, pens, and feedlots. Animals roamed
the fields and woods. Hogs fattened themselves on the mast of nuts
and roots from the great chestnut, oak, and hickory forests; cattle
grazed on the grassy balds in summertime. By mid-May, farmers in the
coves and valleys had driven their cattle into the high places of the
Smokies. Once every three weeks or so thereafter, they returned to salt
and “gentle” them, thus keeping them familiar with their owners. In
October, before the first snowfall, the cattle were rounded up. If the
season had been good, livestock drives to near or distant markets began.
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Salt licks are among the few remaining pieces of evidence of the
great herding activity that once flourished in the Smokies. Notches
were cut into logs or chiseled into rocks so the salt wouldn’t be
wasted as it would be if placed on the ground. The salt was good for
the cattle, and the regularity of the procedure helped to keep them
from becoming completely wild._
]
During both the roundup and the drive, livestock marks played a
critical role of identification. These were devised by each farmer--and
acknowledged by his neighbors--as the “brand” signifying ownership.
These might be various “crops,” “knicks,” and “notches:” an “underbit”
(a crop out of the under part of the ear), or a “topbit” or a
“swallow-fork” cut in the skin below the neck, or a combination of them
all. If several kinds of animals were included on a livestock drive,
there was a settled rule of procedure. Cattle led the way, followed by
sheep, then hogs, and finally turkeys, which were usually the first
to start peering toward the sky and searching for the night’s resting
place.
All of these plodding, grunting, gobbling creatures were kept in
order with the help of one or two good dogs. If a hunter’s dogs were
valuable, a livestock drover’s dogs were invaluable. “Head’em,” the
drover called, and his dogs brought recalcitrant animals into line,
nipping the slow to hurry and curious to remain orderly.
During a long day’s drive to the county seat, or a several weeks’
journey to the lowlands of the Carolinas or Georgia, men and beasts
surged forward in a turmoil of shouting and noise, dust and mud,
autumn’s lingering heat and sudden chills. But on these journeys,
the men left their small mountain enclaves for a brief glimpse of
the larger world. They returned home not only with bolts of cloth
and winter supplies of salt and coffee, but also with news and fresh
experiences.
And accounts of these experiences were related in a language that was
part of the mountaineer’s unique heritage. That language revealed
a great deal about the people; it was strong and flexible, old yet
capable of change, sometimes judged “ungrammatical” but often touched
with poetry. In a later century, students and collectors would come
here seeking the Elizabethan words, the rhythmic cadences of this
speech. It harkened back to a distant homeland.
The mountain person’s “afeard” for afraid, or “poke” for paper
bag, were familiar to Shakespeare. In Chaucer could be found the
mountaineer’s use of “holpt” for helped, and such plurals as “nestes”
and “waspes.” Webster confirmed that “hit” was Saxon for it, and the
primary meaning of “plague” was anything troublesome or vexatious
(the mountain man might well say someone was plaguing him). The habit
of turning a noun into a verb often added strength to an otherwise
dull sentence: “My farm will grow enough corn to bread us through the
winter,” or, when speaking of the heavy shoes that were brogans, “Those
hunters just brogued it through the rough places.”
The daily poetry and humor of the mountain language was caught in
the names of places--Pretty Hollow Gap, Charlie’s Bunion, Fittified
Spring, Miry Ridge, Bone Valley--and in descriptive words like “hells”
and “slicks” for the tangled laurel and rhododendron thickets. It was
present in the familiar names of plants: “hearts-a-bustin’-with-love,”
“dog-hobble,” “farewell summer.” And the patterns of their quilts,
pieced with artistic patience and skill, bore names such as “tree of
life,” “Bonaparte’s March,” and “double wedding ring.”
Thus, the mountain people adapted their language, as they had their
lives, to the needs and beauty of this land they called home. And
contrary to what might seem the case, these later residents were a more
nearly distinctive group than that which had first come. The pioneers
had been a fairly heterogeneous group, but as the years passed, those
with itching feet and yearning minds moved on to other frontiers.
Restless children wandered west in search of instant gold and eternal
youth. In time, those remaining behind became a more and more cohesive
group, sharing a particular challenge, history, folklore, economy,
dream. Their lives were gradually improving. They had earned the
privilege and joy of calling this their homeland.
Spinning and Weaving
[Illustration:
National Park Service
]
[Illustration: National Park Service]
Like Homer’s Penelope, like the Biblical spinners and weavers, like
their sisters at the wheel and loom in many times and places, women of
the Great Smokies simultaneously fulfilled the need for sturdy cloth
and a need for creating esthetic designs and pleasing patterns. Frances
Goodrich, who spent four decades helping to preserve and honor the
region’s handicrafts, wrote:
“Hardly any other subject arouses so much enthusiasm and interest
in a circle of mountain women as does the subject of weaving and
its kindred arts. This is true whether the participants in the talk
are themselves weavers or only their kinsfolk. Such work has for
generations taken the place of all other artistic expression, and
everyone, at least in the days of which I am telling, knew something by
experience or by watching the work or by hearsay and tradition, of this
fine craft.
... In the younger women who were learning to weave and keeping at it,
I could see the growth of character. A slack twisted person cannot make
a success as a weaver of coverlets. Patience and perseverance are of
the first necessity, and the exercise of these strengthen the fibers
of the soul.... One who has had to do with hundreds of mountain girls
... has told me that never did she find one to be of weak and flabby
character whose mother was a weaver: there was always something in the
child to build on.”
Turning animal and vegetable fibers into cloth necessitated several
steps. The fibers had to be washed and then carded, or straightened,
with wire-toothed implements. Then the women combed the carded fibers
and rolled them onto a rod called a distaff, hence the distaff side of
the family. In the next step, Aunt Rhodie Abbott (above) stretches,
twists, and winds the fibers with a spinning wheel in Cades Cove.
The women then dyed some of the yarn. In the last step, Becky Oakley
(above) weaves the yarn into cloth on a loom. Then the women had to turn
the cloth into clothes and other things.
[Illustration:
_In some places the Little River Lumber Company, and other logging
firms, sent logs cascading down the mountain sides in intricately
constructed chutes._
Little River Lumber Company
]
The Sawmills Move In
A people and their style of life do not change drastically in one year
or two years or three. The year 1900, then, does not define a time
when thousands living in the Great Smokies suddenly abandoned their
19th-century ways and traditions and bounded into the modern world.
Real transition would come only with the upheavals of the succeeding
decades, only as a result of America’s industrialization and two world
wars and the arrival of a national park. Yet the beginning of a new
century did inject one major new element into the lifestream of the
Great Smoky Mountains: the lumber companies and their money.
The people who lived here had logged before. A man might operate a
family enterprise along some hillside or in a low-lying cove, using
a few strong-armed relatives or neighbors to help cut and move the
choicest timber of the forest. Andy Huff, for example, established
a small sawmill in Greenbrier Cove in 1898. Leander Whaley had cut
yellow-poplar, buckeye, and linden from the upper cove--along Ramsey
Prong--during the 1880s. These and a few other individual loggers
felled the largest and most accessible of ultra-valuable woods such as
cherry, ash, walnut, hickory, and the giant yellow-poplar, or “tulip
tree.” They used steady, slow-plodding oxen to drag the heavy logs to
mill, then hauled the lumber to markets and railroads in stout-bedded
wagons drawn by four mules, double-teamed.
But the virgin timber soon attracted a wider attention. In 1901, a
report on the Southern Appalachians from President Theodore Roosevelt
to Congress concluded simply that “These are the heaviest and most
beautiful hardwood forests of the continent.” Of the Great Smokies in
particular, the report noted that besides the hardwoods the forest
contained “the finest and largest bodies of spruce in the Southern
Appalachians.” Lumber entrepreneurs were equally impressed. In that
same year, three partners paid about $9.70 per hectare for the
34,400-hectare ($3/85,000-acre) bulk of the Little River watershed.
Some 20 years later, Col. W. B. Townsend moved from Pennsylvania and
took control of Little River Lumber Company.
On the North Carolina slopes of the Smokies, companies purchased land
in swaths stretching from ridge to ridge, staking off watersheds like
so many claims. In 1903, W. M. Ritter Lumber Company set up its
operations along Hazel Creek. A year later, Montvale Lumber Company
moved into the adjacent Eagle Creek area. To the west of Montvale
would, in time, lie the Kitchin mill and its Twentymile Creek domain;
to the east of Ritter, Norwood Lumber Company embraced the reaches of
Forney Creek. And looming beside and above them all stood the 36,400
timbered hectares (90,000 acres) of the Champion Coated Paper Company,
an area that included Deep Creek and Greenbrier Cove and the headwaters
of the Oconaluftee River.
The companies needed men to cut the trees, skid the logs, work
the animals, saw the lumber, lay the roads. They called upon the
mountaineers who still owned small tracts in Cades Cove and Cataloochee
and lower Greenbrier and throughout the Smokies; or they allowed some
workers who had sold forested land to stay in their homes, though
now on company property; or they brought in hired hands from outside
and housed them and their families in dormitory-like buildings and
readymade “towns.” These mushrooming mill villages--Elkmont on
the Little River, Crestmont on Big Creek, Proctor on Hazel Creek,
Ravensford and Smokemont and Fontana--provided a booming cash market
for homegrown food and, as soon as the money changed hands, imported
products.
More often than not, residents of the Great Smoky Mountains drove to
and from market in covered wagons that protected their goods. Because
the drive to an outside market such as Waynesville, Newport, or
Maryville might take two or even three days, local families sold what
they could to the loggers and sawmill men. They set up honey and apple
stands along the roads and offered grapes in season. They supplied
stores with butter and eggs. Children could trade in one egg for a
week’s supply of candy or firecrackers.
A businesslike atmosphere filtered through the quiet of the Smokies.
Though wolves and panthers had largely disappeared by 1910, fur buyers
and community traders enjoyed a brisk exchange in mink, raccoon, fox,
and ’possum hides. Oak bark and chestnut wood, called “tanbark” and
“acid wood” because they were sources of valuable tannic acid, brought
$7 per cord when shipped to Asheville or Knoxville. As the sawmills
flourished, makeshift box houses of vertical poplar and chestnut planks
gave way to more substantial weatherboarded homes of horizontal lengths
and tight-fitting frames. Slick, fancy, buggy-riding “drummers” peddled
high-button shoes and off-color stories. The spacious Wonderland Park
Hotel and the Appalachian Club at Elkmont, and a hunting lodge on
Jake’s Creek graced the once forbidding mountainsides.
Undergirding this development was a growing cash base: peaches
and chestnuts, pork and venison, wax and lard--translated into
money--brought flour and sugar, yarn and needles, tools and ammunition.
Yet in the midst of this new-found activity, many clung to their old
habits. Children still found playtime fun by sliding down hills of
pine needles and “riding” poplar saplings from treetop to treetop.
Hard-shell Baptist preachers, such as the hunter and “wilderness
saddle-bagger” known as “Preacher John” Stinnett, still devoted long
spare hours, and sometimes workdays as well, to reading The Book: “I
just toted my Bible in a tow sack at the handle of my bull tongue and
I studied it at the turn of the furrow and considered it through the
rows.”
But whatever the immediate considerations of the hour happened to be,
logging was the order of the day. From the Big Pigeon River, all the
way to the Little Tennessee, the second generation of timber-cutters
had moved into the Smokies on a grand scale.
The companies, with their manpower, their strategically placed
sawmills, and their sophisticated equipment, produced board feet of
lumber by the millions. The rest of the country, with its increased
demands for paper and residential construction, absorbed these millions
and cried for more. By 1909, when production attained its peak in the
Smokies and throughout the Appalachians, logging techniques had reached
such an advanced state that even remote stands of spruce and hemlock
could be worked with relative ease. Demand continued unabated and even
received a slight boost when World War I broke out in 1914.
[Illustration:
_Pages 100-101: Sawmills, such as this one at Lawson’s Sugar Cove,
were quickly set up in one location and just as quickly moved to
another as soon as the plot was cleared._
National Park Service
]
High volume covered high costs. The Little River Lumber Company,
perhaps the most elaborate logging operation in the Smokies, cut a
total of two billion board feet. Cherry, the most valuable of the
woods, with its exquisite grain and rich color, was also the scarcest.
Yellow-poplar, that tall, straight tree with a buoyancy that allowed it
to float high, turned out to be the most profitable of all saw timber.
Coniferous forests, the thick, dark regions of pungent spruce and
hemlock, yielded a portion of the company’s output.
Extraction of such proportions was not easy. Timber cruisers combed the
forests, estimating board feet and ax-marking suitable trees. Three-man
saw teams followed the cruisers. One, the “chipper,” calculated the
fall of the tree and cut a “lead” in the appropriate side. Two sawyers
then took over, straining back and forth upon their crosscut saw until
gravity and the immense weight of the tree finished their job for
them. The work was hard and hazardous. Sometimes, if the lead were
not cut properly, the trunk would fall toward the men; sudden death
or permanent injury might result from the kickback of a doomed tree’s
final crash, or from a moment’s carelessness.
To remove the felled timber, larger companies laid railroad tracks far
up the creeks from their mills. At the eastern edge of the Smokies, for
instance, one such terminus grew into the village of Crestmont, which
boasted a hotel, two movie theaters, and a well-stocked commissary.
Such accommodations seemed a distant cry indeed from the upper branches
of Big Creek, gathering its waters along the slopes of Mt. Sterling,
Mt. Cammerer, and Mt. Guyot. Workers from improbable distances--even
countries “across the waters,” such as Italy--teamed with the mountain
people to push a standard gauge track alongside the boulder-strewn
streams. Bolted onto oaken ties that were spaced far enough apart to
discourage foot travel, the black rails drove ahead, switched back to
higher ground, crossed Big Creek a dozen times before they reached the
flat way station of Walnut Bottoms.
Dominated by powerful, blunt-bodied locomotives, the railroads gave
rise to stories that were a flavorful blend of pathos and danger.
“Daddy” Bryson and a fireman named Forrester were killed on a sharp
curve along Jake’s Creek of Little River. Although Forrester jumped
clear when the brakes failed to hold, he was buried under an avalanche
of deadly, cascading logs. There were moments of comedy as well as
tragedy. In the same river basin, Colonel Townsend asked engineer Noah
Bunyan Whitehead one day when he was going to stop putting up all that
black smoke from his train. Bun answered: “When they start making white
coal.”
Railroads could reach only so far, however. The most complex phase of
the logging process was “skidding,” or bringing the felled logs from
inaccessible distances to the waiting cars. As the first step, men
armed with cant hooks or short, harpoon-like peavies, simply rolled the
logs down the mountainsides. Such continuous “ball-hooting,” as it was
called, gouged paths which rain and snow etched deeper into scars of
heavy erosion. Sometimes oxen and mules pulled, or “snaked,” the timber
through rough terrain to its flatcar destination. Horses soon replaced
the slower animals and proved especially adept at “jayhooking,” or
dragging logs down steep slopes by means of J-hooks and grabs. When
the logs gained speed and threatened to overtake them, the men and
nimble-footed horses simply stepped onto a spur trail; the open link
slipped off at the J-hook and the logs slid on down the slope under
their own momentum.
Even more ingenious skidding methods were devised. Splash-dams of
vertical hemlock boards created reservoirs on otherwise shallow, narrow
streams. The released reservoir, when combined with heavy rains,
could carry a large amount of timber far downstream. In the mill
pond, loggers with hobnailed boots kept the logs moving and uncorked
occasional jams. Another method devised to move virgin timber down
steep slopes was the trestled flume. The large, wooden graded flumes
provided a rapid but expensive mode of delivery. One carried spruce off
Clingmans Dome.
There were, finally, the loader and skidders. The railroad-mounted
steam loader was nicknamed the “Sarah Parker” after “a lady who must
have been real strong.” The skidder’s revolving drum pulled in logs by
spectacular overhead cables. Loaded with massive timber lengths, these
cables spanned valleys and retrieved logs from the very mountaintops.
[Illustration:
Little River Lumber Company
_Massive steam-powered skidders pulled logs in off the hills to a
central pile. Then the loaders took over and put the logs on trains,
which carried them to the mills._
]
To coordinate all of these operations efficiently required skill and
judgment. The lumber companies devised numerous approaches to the
problem of maximum production at lowest cost. They contracted with
individuals; Andy Huff, for example, continued to run a mill at the
mouth of Roaring Fork and paid his men a full 75 cents for a 16-hour
day. The corporations sometimes worked together; in one maneuver,
Little River helped Champion flume its spruce pulpwood to the Little
River railroad for shipment to Champion’s paper mill at Canton, North
Carolina. Haste and carelessness could lead to shocking waste. When one
company moved its operations during World War I, 1.5 million board feet
of newly cut timber was left to rot at the head of Big Creek.
The ravages of logging led to fires. Although fires were sometimes set
on purpose to kill snakes and insects and to burn underbrush, abnormal
conditions invited abnormal mishaps. Parched soil no longer held in
place by a web of living roots, dry tops of trees piled where they had
been flung after trimming the logs, and flaming sparks of locomotives
or skidders: any combination of these caused more than 20 disastrous
fires in the Smokies during the 1920s. A two-month series of fires
devastated parts of Clingmans Dome, Siler’s Bald, and Mt. Guyot. One
holocaust on Forney Creek, ignited by an engine spark, raced through
the tops of 24-meter (80-foot) hemlocks and surged over 5 kilometers
(3 miles) in four hours. A site of most intense destruction was in the
Sawtooth range of the Charlie’s Bunion area.
Despite the ravages of fire, erosion, and the voracious ax and saw, all
was not lost. Some two-thirds of the Great Smoky Mountains was heavily
logged or burned, but pockets of virgin timber remained in a shrinking
number of isolated spots and patches at the head of Cataloochee, the
head of Greenbrier, and much of Cosby and Deep Creek. And as the 1920s
passed into another decade, the vision of saving what was left of this
virgin forest, saving the land--saving the homeland--grew in the lonely
but insistent conscience of a small number of concerned and convincing
citizens.
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_George Washington Shults and some neighbors snake out large trunks
with the help of six oxen. Sometimes the lumber companies would hire
such local people to handle a specific part of the operation. Today we
call the process subcontracting._
]
[Illustration:
Little River Lumber Company
_Of the many kinds of trees logged in the Great Smokies, the largest
and most profitable were the yellow-poplars, more commonly known as
tulip trees. A man could feel pretty small standing next to one of
them._
]
[Illustration:
Little River Lumber Company
_The great scale of the logging machinery was like nothing the Smokies
had seen before. Long trains carried loads of huge tree trunks to
sawmills after the flat cars were loaded by railroad-mounted cranes._
]
[Illustration:
_Conducting a preliminary survey of the park’s boundaries in 1931 are
(from left) Superintendent J. Ross Eakin, Arthur P. Miller, Charles E.
Peterson, O. G. Taylor, and John Needham._
George A. Grant
]
Birth of a Park
Logging dominated the life of the Great Smoky Mountains during the
early decades of the 20th century. But there was another side to
that life. Apart from the sawmills and the railroads and the general
stores, which were bustling harbingers of new ways a-coming, the higher
forests, the foot trails, and the moonshine stills remained as tokens
of old ways a-lingering. One person in particular came to know and
speak for this more primitive world.
Horace Kephart was born in 1862 in East Salem, Pennsylvania. His Swiss
ancestors were pioneers of the Pennsylvania frontier. During his
childhood, Kephart’s family moved to the Iowa prairie, where his mother
gave him a copy of the novel _Robinson Crusoe_ by Daniel Defoe. In
the absence of playmates on the vast Midwest grassland, young Kephart
dreamed and invented his own games, fashioned his own play swords and
pistols out of wood and even built a cave out of prairie sod and filled
it with “booty” collected off the surrounding countryside.
Horace Kephart never forgot his frontier beginnings. He saved his
copy of _Robinson Crusoe_ and added others: _The Wild Foods of Great
Britain_, _The Secrets of Polar Travel_, Theodore Roosevelt’s _The
Winning of the West_. Camping and outdoor cooking, ballistics and
photography captured his attention and careful study.
Kephart polished his education with periods of learning and library
work at Boston University, Cornell, and Yale. In 1887 he married a
girl from Ithaca, New York, and began to raise a family. By 1890, he
was librarian of the well-known St. Louis Mercantile Library. In his
late thirties, Kephart grew into a quiet, intense loner, a shy and
reticent man with dark, piercing eyes. He remained an explorer at
heart, a pioneer, an individual secretly nurturing the hope of further
adventures.
Opportunity arrived in a strange disguise. Horace Kephart’s largely
unfulfilled visions of escape were combined with increasingly prolonged
periods of drinking. Experience with a tornado in the streets of St.
Louis affected his nerves. As he later recalled:
“... _then came catastrophe; my health broke down. In the summer of
1904, finding that I must abandon professional work and city life, I
came to western North Carolina, looking for a big primitive forest
where I could build up strength anew and indulge my lifelong fondness
for hunting, fishing and exploring new ground._”
[Illustration:
George Masa
_Horace Kephart, librarian-turned-mountaineer, won the hearts of the
Smokies people with his quiet and unassuming ways. He played a major
role in the initial movement for a national park._
]
He chose the Great Smokies almost by accident. Using maps and a compass
while he rested at his father’s home in Dayton, Ohio, he located the
nearest wilderness and then determined the most remote corner of that
wilderness. After his recuperation he traveled to Asheville, North
Carolina, where he took a railroad line that wound through a honeycomb
of hills to the small way station of Dillsboro. And from there, at
the age of 42, he struck out, with a gun and a fishing rod and three
days’ rations, for the virgin mountainside forest. After camping for a
time on Dick’s Creek, his eventual wild destination turned out to be a
deserted log cabin on the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek.
His nearest neighbors lived 3 kilometers (2 miles) away, in the equally
isolated settlement of Medlin. Medlin consisted of a post office, a
corn mill, two stores, four dwellings, and a nearby schoolhouse that
doubled as a church. The 42 households that officially collected
their mail at the Medlin Post Office inhabited an area of 42 square
kilometers (16 square miles). It was, as Kephart describes it:
“... _the forest primeval, where roamed some sparse herds of cattle,
razorback hogs and the wild beasts. Speckled trout were in all the
streams. Bears sometimes raided the fields and wildcats were a common
nuisance. Our settlement was a mere slash in the vast woodland that
encompassed it._”
But it was also, for Horace Kephart, a new and invigorating home. He
loved it. He thrived in it. At first he concentrated his senses on
the natural beauty around him, on the purple rhododendron, the flame
azalea, the fringed orchis, the crystal clear streams. Yet as the
months passed, he found that he could not overlook the people.
The mountain people were as solidly a part of the Smokies as the
boulders themselves. These residents of branch and cove, of Medlin
and Proctor and all the other tiny settlements tucked high along the
slanting creekbeds of the Great Smoky Mountains, these distinctive
“back of beyond” hillside farmers and work-worn wives and wary
moonshine distillers lodged in Kephart’s consciousness and imagination
with rock-like strength and endurance.
Initially silent and suspicious of this stranger in their midst,
families gradually came to accept him. They approved of his quietness
and his even-handed ways, even confiding in him with a simple
eloquence. One foot-weary distiller, after leading Kephart over
kilometers of rugged terrain, concluded: “Everywhere you go, it’s
climb, scramble, clamber down, and climb again. You cain’t go nowheres
in this country without climbin’ both ways.” The head of a large family
embracing children who spilled forth from every corner of the cabin
confessed: “We’re so poor, if free silver was shipped in by the carload
we couldn’t pay the freight.”
Kephart came to respect and to wonder at these neighbors who combined a
lack of formal education with a fullness of informal ability. Like him,
many of their personal characters blended a weakness for liquor with a
strong sense of individual etiquette. He heard, for example, the story
of an overnight visitor who laid his loaded gun under his pillow; when
he awoke the next morning, the pistol was where he had left it, but the
cartridges stood in a row on a nearby table.
He met one George Brooks of Medlin: farmer, teamster, storekeeper,
veterinarian, magistrate, dentist. While Brooks did own a set of
toothpullers and wielded them mercilessly, some individuals practiced
the painful art of tooth-jumping to achieve the same result. Uncle
Neddy Carter even tried to jump one of his own teeth; he cut around the
gum, wedged a nail in, and made ready to strike the nail with a hammer,
but he missed the nail and mashed his nose instead.
None of these fascinating tales escaped the attention of Horace
Kephart. As he regained his health, the sustained energy of his probing
mind also returned. Keeping a detailed journal of his experiences,
he drove himself as he had done in the past. He developed almost an
obsession to record all that he learned, to know this place and people
completely, to stop time for an interval and capture this mountain way
of life in his mind and memory. For three years he lived by the side
of Hazel Creek. Though he later moved down to Bryson City during the
winters, he spent most of his summers 13 kilometers (8 miles) up Deep
Creek at an old cabin that marked the original Bryson Place.
Kephart distilled much of what he learned into a series of books. _The
Book of Camping and Woodcraft_ appeared in 1906 as one of the first
detailed guidebooks to woodsmanship, first aid, and the art we now call
“backpacking,” all based on his personal experience and knowledge.
There is even a chapter on tanning pelts. But the most authoritative
book concerned the people themselves. _Our Southern Highlanders_,
published in 1913 and revised nine years later, faithfully retraces
Kephart’s life among the Appalachian mountain folk after he “left the
tame West and came into this wild East.” And paramount among the wilds
of the East was the alluring saga of the moonshiner.
[Illustration:
Laura Thornborough
_Wiley Oakley, his wife, and children gather on the porch of their
Scratch Britches home at Cherokee Orchard with “Minnehaha.” Oakley
always said, “I have two women: one I talk to and one who talks to
me.”_
]
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_Oakley was a park guide before there was a park. And in that role
he nearly always wore a red plaid shirt. He developed friendships
with Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller and became known as the “Will
Rogers of the Smokies.”_
]
In Horace Kephart’s own eyes, his greatest education came from the
spirited breed of mountain man known as “blockade runners” or simply
“blockaders.” These descendants of hard-drinking Scotsmen and Irishmen
had always liked to “still” a little corn whisky to drink and, on
occasion, to sell. But as the 1920s opened into the era of Prohibition,
the mountain distiller of a now contraband product reached his heyday.
He found and began to supply an expanding, and increasingly thirsty
market.
Stealth became the keynote in this flourishing industry. Mountaineers
searched out laurel-strangled hollows and streams that seemed remote
even to their keen eyes. There they assembled the copper stills
into which they poured a fermented concoction of cornmeal, rye, and
yeast known as “sour mash” or “beer.” By twice heating the beer and
condensing its vapors through a water-cooled “worm” or spiral tube,
they could approximate the uncolored liquor enjoyed at the finest New
York parties. And by defending themselves with shotguns rather than
with words, they could continue their approximations.
In this uniquely romantic business, colorful characters abounded on
both sides of the law. Horace Kephart wrote about a particular pair
of men who represented the two legal extremes: the famous moonshiner
Aquilla Rose, and the equally resilient revenuer from the Internal
Revenue Service, W. W. Thomason.
Aquilla, or “Quill,” Rose lived for 25 years at the head of sparsely
populated Eagle Creek. After killing a man in self-defense and hiding
out in Texas awhile, Rose returned to the Smokies with his wife and
settled so far up Eagle Creek that he crowded the Tennessee-North
Carolina state line. Quill made whisky by the barrel and seemed to
drink it the same way, although he was occasionally seen playing his
fiddle or sitting on the porch with his long beard flowing and his
Winchester resting across his lap. His eleventh Commandment, to “never
get ketched,” was faithfully observed, and Quill Rose remained one
of the few mountain blockaders to successfully combine a peaceable
existence at home with a dangerous livelihood up the creek.
W.W. Thomason visited Horace Kephart at Bryson City in 1919. Kephart
accepted this “sturdy, dark-eyed stranger” as simply a tourist
interested in the moonshining art. While Thomason professed innocence,
his real purpose in the Smokies was to destroy stills which settlers
were operating on Cherokee lands to evade the local law. He prepared
for the job by taking three days to carve and paint a lifelike
rattlesnake onto a thick sourwood club. During the following weeks,
he would startle many a moonshiner by thrusting the stick close and
twisting it closer.
When Kephart led the “Snake-Stick Man” into whiskyed coves in the
Sugarlands or above the Cherokee reservation, he found himself
deputized and a participant in the ensuing encounters. More often
than not, shots rang out above the secluded thickets. In one of these
shootouts, Thomason’s hatband, solidly woven out of hundreds of strands
of horsehair, saved this fearless revenuer’s life.
[Illustration:
_Aquilla Rose stands proudly with his mowing machine outside his home
near Eagle Creek. He didn’t stand that still when revenuers came
around._
National Park Service
]
All the wonders of the Great Smoky Mountains--the nature, the people,
the stories, and the battles and the jests--affected Horace Kephart
mightily. This man whose own life had been “saved” by the Smokies began
to think in terms of repaying this mountain area in kind. For during
his years on Hazel Creek and Deep Creek and in Bryson City, he saw the
results of the “loggers’ steel,” results that caused him to lament in
a single phrase, “slash, crash, go the devastating forces.” In 1923 he
summarized his feelings about the lumber industry:
“_When I first came into the Smokies the whole region was one superb
forest primeval. I lived for several years in the heart of it. My
sylvan studio spread over mountain after mountain, seemingly without
end, and it was always clean and fragrant, always vital, growing new
shapes of beauty from day to day. The vast trees met overhead like
cathedral roofs.... Not long ago I went to that same place again. It
was wrecked, ruined, desecrated, turned into a thousand rubbish heaps,
utterly vile and mean._”
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_When the Civilian Conservation Corps moved into the Smokies in the
1930s, young men from the cities saw moonshine stills firsthand.
Here one pretends to be a moonshiner and hangs his head low for the
photographer._
]
[Illustration:
_Grace Newman sits enraptured as Jim Proffit plays the guitar._
Burton Wolcott
]
Kephart began to think in terms of a national park. He and a Japanese
photographer friend, George Masa, trekked the Smokies and gathered
concrete experience and evidence of the mountains’ wild splendor. At
every opportunity, Kephart advocated the park idea in newspapers, in
brochures, and by word of mouth. He proudly acknowledged that “I owe
my life to these mountains and I want them preserved that others may
profit by them as I have.”
The concept of a national park for these southern mountains was not a
new one in 1920. Forty years earlier, a retired minister and former
state geologist, Drayton Smith, of Franklin, North Carolina, had
proposed “a national park in the mountains.” In 1885, Dr. Henry O.
Marcy of Boston, Massachusetts, had discussed future health resorts in
America and had considered “the advisability of securing under state
control a large reservation of the higher range as a park.” By the turn
of the century, the Appalachian National Park Association was formed in
Asheville, North Carolina, and publicized the idea of a national park
somewhere in the region, not specifically the Great Smokies. When the
Federal Government seemed to rule out this possibility, the Association
devoted the bulk of its time and effort to the creation of national
forest reserves.
But people like Horace Kephart knew the difference between a national
park that safeguarded trees and a national forest that allowed logging.
In 1923, a group supporting a genuine Great Smokies park formed in
Knoxville, Tennessee. Mr. and Mrs. Willis P. Davis, of the Knoxville
Iron Company, in the summer of that year had enjoyed a trip to some
of the country’s western parks. As they viewed the wonders preserved
therein, Mrs. Davis was reminded of the natural magnificence near her
own home. “Why can’t we have a national park in the Great Smokies?” she
asked her husband.
Back in Knoxville, Mr. Davis began to ask that question of friends
and associates. One of these was Col. David C. Chapman, a wholesale
druggist, who listened but did not heed right away:
“_Not until I accidentally saw a copy of President Theodore
Roosevelt’s report on the Southern Appalachians did I have any idea of
just what we have here. In reading and rereading this report I learned
for the first time that the Great Smokies have some truly superlative
qualities. After that I became keenly interested in Mr. Davis’ plan and
realized that a national park should be a possibility._”
The Davises and Chapman led the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains
Conservation Association. Congressmen and Secretary of the Interior
Hubert Work were contacted. Work endorsed the project, and two years
later Congress passed an act authorizing associations in Tennessee and
North Carolina to buy lands and deed them to the U.S. Government.
Problems immediately presented themselves. The citizens would have
to buy this park. Unlike Yellowstone and other previous land grants
from the Federal Government, the Smokies were owned by many private
interests and therefore presented a giant challenge to hopeful fund
raisers. To further complicate matters, no group had the power to
condemn lands; any property, if secured at all, would have to be
coaxed from its owner at an appropriately high price. Finally, and
most discouragingly, park enthusiasts faced an area of more than 6,600
separate tracts and thousands of landowners.
Yet events conspired to give the park movement a sustaining drive. The
lumber companies had made the people of the Smokies more dependent
on money for additional food, modern-day clothing, and new forms of
recreation. World War I and the coming of the highways had instilled
a restlessness in the mountain people, a yearning for new sights and
different ways of living. Some began to echo the sentiments of one
farmer who, after realizing meager returns for his hard labor on rocky
fields, looked around him and concluded, “Well, I reckon a park is
about all this land is fit for.”
Determined leadership overcame obstacles large and small. Behind
Chapman’s professorial appearance--his wire-rimmed glasses and
three-piece suits and unkempt hair--was a man who had been a colonel
in World War I, a man who had resolved to make the dream of a national
park into a reality. Along with Chapman as the driving force, associate
director of the National Park Service Arno B. Cammerer provided the
steering and the gears. Cammerer’s marked enthusiasm for incorporating
the Great Smokies into the national park system added a well-placed,
influential spokesman to the movement. By spring of 1926, groups in
North Carolina and Tennessee had raised more than a million dollars.
Within another year, the legislatures of the two states each had
donated twice that amount.
With $5 million as a nest egg, park advocates turned to the actual
buying of lands. Cammerer himself defined a boundary which included the
most suitable territory and which, as it turned out, conformed closely
to the final boundary. Chapman and his associates approached individual
homeowners. Sometimes they received greetings similar to one on a
homemade sign:
“_Col. Chapman. You and Hoast are notify. Let the Cove People Alone.
Get Out. Get Gone. 40 m. Limit._”
The older mountain people clung desperately to what they had. Even
though the buyers were prepared to issue lifetime leases for those who
wanted to stay, they found it difficult to remove this resolute band
from their homeland.
Many of the Smokies’ residents--the younger, more mobile, more
financially oriented ones--accepted the coming of the park with a
combination of fatalism and cautious hope. Gradually they acknowledged
the fact that a park and its tourist trade might be a continuing asset,
whereas the prosperity from logging had proved at best only temporary.
After John D. Rockefeller, Jr., through the Laura Spelman Rockefeller
Memorial Fund, doubled the park fund with a much-needed gift of an
additional $5 million, renewed offers of cash completely melted many
icy objections.
The lumber companies followed suit, but for higher stakes. Champion
Fibre, Little River, Suncrest, Norwood, and Ritter were among the 18
timber and pulpwood companies that owned more than 85 percent of the
proposed park area. They fought to stay for obvious economic reasons,
yet they were prepared to leave if the price was right. Little River
Lumber Company, after considerable negotiation with the state of
Tennessee and the city of Knoxville, sold its 30,345 hectares (75,000
acres) for only $8.80 per hectare ($3.57 per acre).
The vast holdings of Champion Fibre Company were at the very heart of
the park, however, and the results of the company’s resistance to a
national park were central to success or failure of the whole movement.
Champion’s 36,400 hectares (90,000 acres) included upper Greenbrier,
Mt. Guyot, Mt. LeConte, the Chimneys, and a side of Clingmans Dome,
crowned by extensive forests of virgin spruce. This splendid domain
was the cause of hot tempers, torrid accusations, rigid defenses, and
a hard-fought condemnation lawsuit. In the end, however, on March
30, 1931, Champion Fibre agreed to sell for a total of $3 million,
a sum which took on added appeal during the slump of the disastrous
Depression.
Four days after this agreement, Horace Kephart died in an automobile
accident near Cherokee, North Carolina. An 8-ton boulder was later
brought from the hills above Smokemont to mark his grave in Bryson City.
Only a few years earlier Kephart had said:
“_Here to-day is the last stand of primeval American forest at its
best. If saved--and if saved at all it must be done at once--it will be
a joy and a wonder to our people for all time. The nation is summoned
by a solemn duty to preserve it._”
And it was, indeed, preserved. The Federal Government in 1933
contributed a final $2 million to the cause, establishing the figure
of $12 million as the grand total of money raised for the park. On
September 2, 1940, with land acquisition almost completed, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Great Smoky Mountains National Park
“for the permanent enjoyment of the people.”
The park movement’s greatest victory, coming as it did at Kephart’s
death, lent a special significance to his life. For his experience
symbolized the good effects that a national park in the Great Smoky
Mountains could create. These mountains and their people inspired him
to write eloquently of their truth and endurance; his own health seemed
to thrive in the rugged, elemental environment of the Smokies. Perhaps
most important of all, he discovered here the impact of what it can
mean to know a real home. Having found a home for himself, he labored
tirelessly for a national park to give to his fellow countrymen the
same opportunity for wonder and renewal and growth.
[Illustration:
George A. Grant
_An early morning fog cloaks the dense vegetation and rolling hills at
Cove Creek Gap. Such scenes inspired many people to rally around the
idea of purchasing land for a park._
]
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_Those attending a meeting March 6, 1928, when a $5 million gift from
the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial was announced, included (front
from left) former Tennessee Gov. Ben W. Hooper, Willis P. Davis,
E. E. Conner, David C. Chapman, Gov. Henry H. Horton, John Nolan,
Knoxville Mayor James A. Fowler, (back from left) Kenneth Chorley,
Arno B. Cammerer, Wiley Brownlee, J. M. Clark, Margaret Preston, Ben
A. Morton, Frank Maloney, Cary Spence, and Russell Hanlon._
]
[Illustration:
_John Walker, the patriarch of a large self-reliant family, admires
cherries he raised at his home in Little Greenbrier._
Jim Shelton
]
The Past Becomes Present
As early as 1930, citizens and officials across the United States had
begun to realize that a new additional park would indeed encompass
and preserve the Great Smoky Mountains. Hard-working Maj. J. Ross
Eakin, the first superintendent of the park, arrived at the beginning
of the next year from his previous post in Montana’s Glacier National
Park and was quickly introduced to the cold, mid-January winds of the
Great Smokies and some of the controversies that had arisen during
establishment of the park.
At first, Eakin and his few assistants limited their duties to
the basics; they marked boundaries, prevented hunting, fought and
forestalled fire. But as the months passed, as the park grew in size
and its staff increased in number, minds and muscles alike tackled the
real problem of shaping a sanctuary which all the people of present and
future generations could enjoy.
Help came from an unexpected quarter. The economic depression that had
gripped the country in 1930 tightened its stranglehold as the decade
progressed. In the famous “Hundred Days” spring of 1933, a special
session of Congress passed the first and most sweeping series of
President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. The Civilian Conservation
Corps, created in April, established work for more than two million
young men. CCC camps, paying $30 a month for work in conservation,
flood control, and wilderness projects, sprang up.
As far as the young, struggling Great Smoky Mountains National Park was
concerned, this new CCC program could not have come at a better time.
Through the Corps, much-needed manpower converged by the hundreds on
the Smokies from such places as New Jersey, Ohio, and New York City.
Supervised by Park Service officials and reserve officers from the U.S.
Army, college-age men first set up their own camps--17 in all--and
then went about that old familiar labor in the Smokies, landscaping
and building roads. In addition, they constructed trails, shelters,
powerlines, fire towers, and bridges.
Some of their tent-strewn camps were pitched on old logging sites with
familiar names like Smokemont and Big Creek. Others, such as Camp No.
413 on Forney Creek, were more remote but no less adequate. Ingenuity,
sparked by necessity, created accommodations which made full use of
all available resources. At Camp Forney, for instance, there was a
barracks, a messhall, a bathhouse, and an officers’ quarters. Water
from clear, cold Forney Creek was piped into the kitchen; food was
stored in a homemade ice chest. The residents of the camp, seeing no
reason why they should rough it more than necessary, added a library, a
post office, and a commissary in their spare time.
The CCC men, their ages between 18 and 25, did not forget recreation.
As teams organized for football, baseball, boxing, wrestling, and
soccer, the hills resounded with unfamiliar calls of scores and
umpires’ decisions, while the more familiar tussles of boxing and
wrestling raised echoes of old partisan matches throughout the hills.
At times, these young workers answered the urge to ramble, too. One of
them later recalled his days as a radio man on the top of Mt. Sterling:
“_It was seven miles steep up there, and sometimes I’d jog down about
sundown and catch a truck for Newport. That’s where we went to be with
people. The last truck brought us back after midnight._”
A minor problem sometimes arose when the CCC “outsiders” began dating
local girls; farming fathers sometimes set fires to give the boys
something else to do during the weekends. The conflict of cultures was
thrown into a particularly sharp light when a Corps participant shot a
farmer’s hog one night and shouted that he had killed a bear!
On the whole, however, the Civilian Conservation Corps program in the
Great Smoky Mountains was a major success. In one or two extremely
rugged areas of the park, retired loggers were hired in 10-day shifts
to hack out or even drill short trail lengths. The rest of the
965-kilometer (600-mile) trail system, together with half a dozen
fire towers and almost 480 kilometers (300 miles) of fire roads and
tourist highways, was the product of the CCC. When Superintendent Eakin
evaluated the work of only the first two years of the CCC’s operation,
he equated it with a decade of normal accomplishment.
Through these and similar efforts, which included almost 110 kilometers
(70 miles) of the famous Appalachian Trail, the natural value of the
Great Smoky Mountains became a recognized and established lure for
thousands, eventually millions, of visitors. But there was another
resource that remained untapped, a challenge to the national park
purpose and imagination. This resource was first overlooked, then
neglected, and finally confronted with respect. The resource was the
people and their homes.
Many previous owners of park land had received lifetime leases that
allowed them to live on in their dwellings, work their fields, and cut
dead timber even while tourists streamed through the Smokies. Some
of the lessees, such as those living near Gatlinburg, saw a new era
coming, thrusting back the street-ends until motels and restaurants
and craft shops pushed against an abandoned apple orchard or a 10-plot
cemetery or a deserted backyard laced with lilacs. These rememberers of
an earlier time relinquished their lands in the park, more often than
not resettling within sight of the mountain range and the homeland they
had just left.
Yet a few lessees, those living further up the valleys, deeper into
the mountains, or isolated from the well-traveled paths, these few
folks stayed on. The Walker sisters of Little Greenbrier Cove were
representative of this small group.
John Walker, their father, was himself the eldest of his parents’ 15
children. In 1860, at the age of 19, he became engaged to 14-year-old
Margaret Jane King. The Civil War postponed their wedding, and John,
an ardent Unionist who had enlisted in the First Tennessee Light
Artillery, spent three months in a Confederate prison and lost 45
kilograms (100 pounds) before he was exchanged and provided with a
pension. In 1866, they were finally married. After Margaret Jane’s
father died, the young couple moved into the King homestead in Little
Greenbrier.
They had eleven children: four boys, seven girls. John remained a
strong Republican and Primitive Baptist; he liked to boast that in a
long and fruitful lifetime he had spent a total of 50 cents on health
care for his family (two of his sons had once required medicine for the
measles). Margaret Jane was herself an “herb doctor” and a midwife,
talents which complemented John’s skills as a blacksmith, carpenter,
miller, farmer. Once, as Margaret Jane was chasing a weasel from her
hens, the reddish-brown animal bit her thumb and held on; she calmly
thrust her hand into a full washtub, where the weasel drowned in water
stained by her blood.
[Illustration:
Joseph S. Hall
_Columbus “Clum” Cardwell of Hills Creek, Tennessee, worked in the CCC
garage at Smokemont. That experience led to a 23-year career as an
auto-mechanic at the national park._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E Exline
_Little Greenbrier Cove was known to some people as Five Sisters Cove
because of the Walker sisters’ place just above the schoolhouse. The
Walkers had their garden and grape arbors close to the house for handy
tending._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E Exline
_Inside, everything was neat as a pin with coats, hats, baskets, guns,
and what-have-you hanging on the newspaper-covered walls._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E Exline
_Sitting on the front porch are (from left) Polly, Louisa, and Martha.
Also on the porch is a loom made by their father (see page 120) and a
spinning wheel._
]
The children grew up. The three older boys married and moved away. The
youngest, Giles Daniel, left for Iowa and fought in World War I. Sarah
Caroline, the only one of the daughters ever to marry, began her life
with Jim Shelton in 1908. Hettie Rebecca worked for a year or two in
a Knoxville hosiery mill, but the Depression sent her back home. When
Nancy Melinda died in 1931, the original home place was left in the
hands of five sisters; Hettie, Margaret Jane, Polly, Louisa Susan, and
Martha Ann.
They lived the self-sufficiency of their ancestors. They stated simply
that “our land produces everything we need except sugar, soda, coffee,
and salt.” Their supplies came from the grape arbor, the orchard, the
herb and vegetable garden; the sheep, hogs, fowl, and milch cows; the
springhouse crocks of pickled beets and sauerkraut; the dried food and
the seed bags and the spice racks that hung from nails hammered into
the newspaper-covered walls of the main house. The material aspects of
their surroundings represented fully the fabric of life as it had been
known in the hundreds of abandoned cabins and barns and outbuildings
that dotted the landscape of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
And the Walker sisters were not about to give up their way of life
without a struggle. In a poem, “My Mountain Home,” Louisa expressed the
family’s feelings:
“_There is an old weather bettion house
That stands near a wood
With an orchard near by it
For all most one hundred years it has stood_
“_It was my home in infency
It sheltered me in youth
When I tell you I love it
I tell you the truth_
“_For years it has sheltered
By day and night
From the summer sun’s heat
And the cold winter blight._
“_But now the park commesser
Comes all dressed up so gay
Saying this old house of yours
We must now take away_
“_They coax they wheedle
They fret they bark
Saying we have to have this place
For a National park_
“_For us poor mountain people
They dont have a care
But must a home for
The wolf the lion and the bear_
“_But many of us have a title
That is sure and will hold
To the City of peace
Where the streets are pure gold_
“_There no lion in its fury
Those pathes ever trod
It is the home of the soul
In the presence of God_
“_When we reach the portles
Of glory so fair
The Wolf cannot enter
Neather the lion or bear_
“_And no park Commissioner
Will ever dar
To desturbe or molest
Or take our home from us there._”
[Illustration:
Joseph S. Hall
_Before leaving for Lufty Baptist Church, Alfred Dowdle and his family
of Collins Creek pose for Joseph S. Hall, who was studying linguistics
in the Smokies for the Park Service._
]
In January of 1941, however, the Walker sisters relented a little and
sold their 50 hectares (123 acres) to the United States for $4,750
and a lifetime lease. Partly because of this unique situation, this
special lifestyle, park officials delayed any well-defined program to
recreate and present a vanishing culture. When the _Saturday Evening
Post_ “discovered” the Walker sisters in 1946, tourists in the Smokies
flocked to the Walker home as if it were a museum of Appalachia.
The sisters themselves tolerated the visitors, even sold mountain
“souvenirs.” But the years passed, three of the sisters died, and in
1953 Margaret Jane and Louisa wrote to the park superintendent:
“_I have a request to you Will you please have the Sign a bout the
Walker Sisters taken down the one on High Way 73 especially the reason
I am asking this there is just 2 of the sister lives at the old House
place one is 70 years of age the other is 82 years of age and we can’t
receive so many visitors. We are not able to do our Work and receive so
many visitors, and can’t make sovioners to sell like we once did and
people will be expecting us to have them...._”
The park, of course, cooperated and helped the sisters until Louisa,
the last, died in 1964.
Increasingly the park recognized the value of the human history of
the Smokies. Out of that recognition came interpretive projects and
exhibits at Cades Cove, Oconaluftee, Sugarlands, and a variety of other
sites which showed and still show the resiliency and the creativity of
the Appalachian mountaineer.
The same mix of problem, potential, and progress has made itself felt
on the Eastern Band of the Cherokees. Their population within the
Qualla Boundary doubled from approximately 2,000 in 1930 to more than
4,000 forty years later. This increase has only pointed more urgently
to the economic, social, and cultural challenges confronting the
Cherokees.
By 1930, the inhabitants of the Qualla Boundary had reached a kind of
balance between the customs of the past and the demands of the present.
Most families owned 12 or 16 hectares (30 or 40 acres) of woodland,
with a sixth of that cleared and planted in corn, beans, or potatoes.
A log or frame house, a small barn and other outbuildings, and the
animals--a horse, a cow, a few hogs, chickens--rounded out the Cherokee
family’s possessions, which about equalled those of the neighboring
whites. The Eastern Band itself was unified by two main strands: first,
the land tenure system by which the more than 20,230 Qualla hectares
(50,000 acres) could be leased, but not sold, to whites; and second,
the lingering social organization of the clan.
These clans, which largely paralleled the five main towns of Birdtown,
Wolftown, Painttown, Yellow Hill, and Big Cove, stabilized the
population into groups and offered, through such methods as the dance,
an outlet for communication and expression. Through the Friendship
dance, for example, young people could meet each other. The Bugah dance
depended upon joking and teasing among relatives. And the revered
Eagle dance celebrated victory in the ball games between Cherokee
communities.
The whirlwind changes of the mid-20th century tipped whatever balance
the Cherokees had gained. The Great Depression, World War II, and the
explosion of tourism and mobility and business opportunity brought
inside the Qualla Boundary both a schedule of modernization and a table
of uncertainty. The dance declined in importance. Surrounding counties
seemed to take better advantage of the new trends than these natives
who had been cast into a political no-man’s-land.
By the 1950s, the Eastern Band could look forward to a series of
familiar paradoxes: relatively poor education; a wealth of small
tourist enterprise and a dearth of large, stable industry; an
unsurpassed mountain environment and an appalling state of public
health. A 1955 survey of health conditions, for instance, found that
90 percent of 600 homes in seven Cherokee districts had insufficient
water, sewage, and garbage facilities. More than 95 percent of the
housing was substandard. Diseases springing from inadequate sanitation
prevailed.
The situation changed and is still in the process of change. The
Eastern Band could not and cannot allow such oversight, such
undercommittment. The Qualla Boundary Community Action Program
sponsored day-care centers in several Cherokee communities. In the
years surrounding 1960, three industries manufacturing products
from quilts to moccasins located at Cherokee and began to employ
hundreds of men and women on a continuing, secure basis. A few years
later, community action turned its efforts to the housing problem;
as the program drove ahead, 400 homes were either “constructed or
significantly improved,” reducing the percentage of substandard houses
to about 50 percent. As for living facilities, the percentages have
been exactly reversed: 90 percent of homes now have septic tanks and
safe water.
The Cherokee Boys’ Club, a nonprofit organization incorporated in 1964,
has improved the quality of life within the Qualla Boundary. The club’s
self-supporting projects include a complete bus service for Cherokee
schools and garbage collection for the North Carolina side of the
Smokies. Along with the Qualla Civic Center, the Boys’ Club serves a
useful socializing function as the modern equivalent to past dances and
rituals.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Dances are associated with certain traditional Cherokee games.
Separate groups of women and lacrosse-like players are about to begin
a pre-game dance in 1888._
]
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Nine men celebrate a game victory with an Eagle Dance in 1932._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Samson Welsh shoots arrows with a blow gun at the Cherokee Indian
Fair in 1936._
]
Perhaps the soundest of the native Cherokee businesses is the Qualla
Arts and Crafts Mutual. Since 1947, the Qualla Co-op has marketed
the work of hundreds of Indian craftsmen. Magnificent carvings of
cherry and walnut and baskets of river cane and honeysuckle preserve
the skills and art of the past and symbolize the performance and the
promise of the Eastern Band of the Cherokees.
The Tennessee portion of the Great Smoky Mountains has seen its share
of major accomplishments through imagination and hard work. One such
accomplishment is Gatlinburg’s Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts,
known as the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School during the early years of
the century.
In 1910, Gatlinburg comprised a half-dozen houses, a couple of general
stores, a church, and scant educational facilities. Perhaps 200
families lived in the upper watershed of the Little Pigeon River,
and these families looked to Gatlinburg for trading, visiting, and
whatever learning they could reasonably expect to receive during
their lifetimes. In that year, the national sorority of Pi Beta Phi
decided to establish a needed educational project somewhere in rural
America; after discussing a possible site with the U.S. commissioner
of education, who suggested Tennessee, and the state commissioner, who
chose Sevier County, and the county superintendent, who pointed to the
isolated community of Gatlinburg, the group picked this little village
in the shadow of the Great Smokies as the area in which they would work.
On February 20, 1912, Martha Hill, a neatly dressed and determined
young brunette from Nashville, opened school in an abandoned Baptist
church at the junction of Baskins Creek and the Little Pigeon River.
Thirteen suspicious but willing pupils, their ages ranging from 4
to 24, offered themselves for instruction. At first, attendance was
irregular, but by Christmastime, a celebration at the schoolroom drew
a crowd of 300. Miss Hill, herself tired and a bit ill from spending
exhausting hours nursing several sick neighbors, had to be brought to
the party by wagon from a cottage she had leased for $1.50 per month.
The winter warmed into spring and the one-room school grew into a
settlement school. Workers from Pi Beta Phi organized a sewing club
for girls, a baseball club for boys. Martha Hill gathered some books
together to form the nucleus of a library. Students built barns and
chicken houses on land bought with sorority and community contributions.
During the next two years, achievements small and large piled upon each
other. The library expanded to almost 2,000 books; school enrollment
swelled to well over 100. Pi Phi sank a second well, tended a fruit
orchard, took the children on their first trip to Maryville. The people
of Gatlinburg began to accept the school both in spirit and in fact.
Activities branched out into other fields. In the fall of 1920,
nurse Phyllis Higinbotham, an experienced graduate of Johns Hopkins,
converted the old cottage into a hospital. Endowed with both unswerving
dedication and unending friendliness, “Miss Phyllis” walked and rode
from house to house, trained midwives, taught hygiene, and persuaded
doctors from Knoxville and Sevierville to keep occasional office hours
in Gatlinburg. In 1926, after firmly establishing a model rural health
center, Phyllis Higinbotham became state supervisor of public health
nurses for Tennessee.
As time passed, the county and the burgeoning town assumed greater
responsibility for the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School’s crucial progress
in the vital areas of health and education. But the broad-based school
was by no means undermined. Almost as soon as it had arrived in
Gatlinburg, Pi Phi had begun offering adult courses in home economics,
agriculture, weaving, and furniture making. These courses formed the
basis for a true cottage industry which in the late 1920s benefitted
more than 100 local families. And when the coming of the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park assured a constant wave of tourism, the
products of folk culture in the Smokies rode the crest of that wave.
The present-day Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, located upon a
peaceful estate in the heart of commercial Gatlinburg, attests to the
imagination of a generous group, the cooperation of a chosen community,
and the lasting good works of both. Like Qualla, like the CCC camps,
like the park today, and, most of all, like the Walker place, Arrowmont
signifies the profound beauty that can result when people practice a
simple respect for their homeland.
Handicrafts
Woods and meadows, fields and mines and swamps, every part of the
natural scene yielded some material that could be transformed into
a handcrafted article of usefulness and beauty. From the trees
came richly grained lumber for furniture and musical instruments,
sturdy timber for tools and utensils, and softer wood for whittling
“play-pretties” and purely decorative objects. Wood-working, even
sculpture, became one of the outstanding skills of mountain artisans.
All the crafts involved in textile design and production were part of
the region’s history: weaving and spinning, quilting and braiding and
hooking, making dyes from roots, barks, vegetables, herbs. Baskets were
woven from oak and hickory splits, from river cane, and honeysuckle
vines.
Cherokee and mountaineer alike shared designs and shapes for
the baskets made from different materials for uses ranging from
egg-gathering to household storage.
[Illustration:
Laura Thornborough
]
[Illustration: Alan Rinehart]
And, as illustrated by Mrs. Matt Ownby (above) and Mack McCarter
(above), basketmaking was something done by both men and women. Clay,
fashioned on rude, homemade potter’s wheels of the earlier days,
provided pots and pitchers of primitive handsomeness and daily utility.
Broomcorn and sedge offered materials for rough but effective brooms.
Leather crafts arose from the need for harnesses on mules and horse,
and shoes on people. Skinning, treating, tanning were just the first
steps of a long, demanding process of turning raw hide into usable
leather. The use of corn shucks illustrated with special clarity the
mountain person’s inventiveness in utilizing everything he raised or
acquired. Corn shucks could make a stout chair-bottom or a captivating
little mountain doll. Nimble fingers turned the husks into a dozen
different articles. In his _Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands_,
Allen H. Eaton wrote in 1937: “We must try to find the qualities of
excellence which these people have developed before insisting that
they accept our formula for living, thinking, and expression....
Better certainly, if we know, as those who have worked and lived in
the Highlands have had a chance to know, what are the standards and
the ideals to which the people cling. But even that experience should
not be necessary for us to understand and to cherish the spirit of the
young highlander who, after expressing gratitude to the missionary who
had come in to help build a school, said with characteristic mountain
frankness, ‘Bring us your civilization, but leave us our own culture.’”
[Illustration:
Alan Rinehart
_Claude Huskey and Mack McCarter make chairs at one of the shops in
Gatlinburg in the 1930s._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_John Jones was the miller in the late 1930s at the Mingus Creek Mill
in Oconaluftee._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Tom and Jerry Hearon, along with John Burns, hew a log trough with a
broad ax and adze._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_With a mallet and ax, Tom and Jerry Hearon split logs into bolts from
which to make shingles._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Dave Bohanan feeds cane between the rollers as he makes sorghum
molasses._
]
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_A Smokies resident builds a flat bed for his sourwood sled._
]
[Illustration:
_A visit to the cabin of John and Lurena Oliver takes a family back to
yesteryear in Cades Cove._
Fred R. Bell
]
Coming Home
Tremont. This Tennessee valley of the Middle Prong of the Little River
does not differ widely from Deep Creek or Greenbrier or Cosby or most
of the other branches and hollows of the Smokies. Each, including
Tremont, penetrates the hills, divides them like a furrow, and protects
its own rocky, racing stream with a matting of thick, green growth.
Nearby Cades Cove and North Carolina’s Cataloochee might guard a few
hectares of lush, hill-cradled pasture or farmland, but even these are
stamped with the clear, cool air and feel of the Great Smoky Mountains.
So Tremont is representative. And, perhaps because of this, it is a
symbol--a symbol of both the mystery and the clarity of the mountains
which give it a name. There is, for example, the legend of a small boy
who wandered into the backcountry above the “Sinks” and was lost for
two days. Uncle Henry Stinnett, a worried neighbor, searched in vain
for the boy until he dreamed, on the second night, of a child sleeping
near a log on a familiar ridge. Henry Stinnett renewed the search, and
the boy was indeed found asleep “under the uprooted stump of a tree.”
And side by side with such a strange vision exists its opposite: the
unforeseen. In August of 1947, a young woman was sunbathing on the
boulders of the river. While she enjoyed the rays of the warm sun
downstream, the high upper reaches of the prong were being flooded by
the swollen, flash attacks of a hidden cloudburst. Within minutes, the
woman drowned in a hurtling wall of water.
Yet there is also a clarity here that offsets the unknown. It is a
quality of outlook, a confidence of ability and expectation for the
future as immense as the mountains which inspire it. But it is an
awareness grounded in the facts of history and anecdote and the crisp,
fresh sounds of children’s voices.
“Black Bill” Walker knew about children; he had more than 25 himself.
A double first cousin to the father of Little Greenbrier’s Walker
sisters, “Black Bill” or “Big Will” Walker moved into the lonely
valley in 1859. He was only 21 years old then, and his name was simply
William. He was accompanied by his strong 19-year-old wife, Nancy.
His mother was a Scot, a member of the McGill clan. His father, Marion,
was another of those multitalented frontiersmen: miller, cattleman,
orchardist, bear hunter, saddlebag preacher. William took up where
his parents left off. He became the leader, the ruler of the community
he had started. He was rumored to have been a Mormon, although
denominations mattered little in the wilderness. He and Nancy raised
seven children. Later wives bore him approximately 20 more.
[Illustration:
_Legend has it that Black Bill Walker once went into a cave after a
bear and came out alive--with the hide. The story is probably true,
for he did many things on a grand scale. He was the patriarch not only
of a large family, but of a community._
National Park Service
]
He milled his own corn and built log cabins for each of his families.
He fashioned an immense muzzle-loading rifle, nicknamed it “Old Death,”
and handled it with rare skill. Horace Kephart, in a 1918 magazine
article, tells of a conversation he had with the 80-year-old hunter:
“_Black Bill’s rifle was one he made with his own hands in the log
house where I visited him. He rifled it on a wooden machine that was
likewise of his own make, and stocked it with wood cut on his own land.
The piece was of a little more than half-ounce bore, and weighed 12½
pounds ... the old hunter showed me how he loaded...._
“‘_My bullets are run small enough so that a naked one will jest slip
down on the powder by its own weight. When I’m in a hurry, I pour in
the powder by guess, wet a bullet in my mouth, and drop it down the
gun. Enough powder sticks to it to keep the ball from falling out
if I shoot downhill. Then I snatch a cap from one o’ these strings,
and--so._’
“_The old man went through the motions like a sleight-of-hand
performer. The whole operation of loading took barely ten seconds._”
After Black Bill’s own children had grown, he went to the nearby town
of Maryville and requested and received a school in the valley for
children yet to come. He governed his settlement, yet he was not merely
a governor. He was a remarkable man, an individualist who also built a
community.
After Black Bill’s death in 1919, life in Tremont continued as before.
Families still ate turkey and pheasant, squirrel and venison, sweet
potatoes and the first greenery of spring, onions. Children’s bare feet
remained tough enough to break open chestnut burrs. Mothers continued
to put dried peaches in a jar full of moonshine, let it sit a day or
two, and test their peach brandy with a sip or two. And on Christmas,
fathers and sons “got out and shot their guns” in celebration.
Intervals of violence interrupted the daily routine. Farmers with
cattle and sheep freely roaming the ridges sometimes made it hard
for others to grow corn and similar crops. A hunter’s bear and ’coon
dogs might kill some sheep. One “war” ended with a fire on Fodder Stack
Mountain that raced down into Chestnut Flats and killed a number of
sheep. No humans died, but the sheep men killed all the hunting dogs in
the vicinity.
[Illustration:
H. C. Wilburn
_“It is point blank aggravating, I can’t walk a log like I used to,”
Aden Carver told H. C. Wilburn as he crossed Bradley Fork in October
1937 at the age of 91._
]
By the early 1920s, change was creeping into the valley. The Little
River Lumber Company persuaded Black Bill’s children to do what
he would not do: sell the timber. From the mid-twenties to the
mid-thirties, more than 1,000 workers lived in the logging town
of Tremont, patronized the Tremont Hotel, and hauled away tens of
thousands of the virgin forest’s giants.
With the Great Smoky Mountains National Park came the CCC. The Civilian
Conservation Corps camp on the old lumber site, together with a Girl
Scout camp that would last until 1959, signaled a retreat--and a
progression--from the extractive industry of the past. Although the
CCC disbanded during World War II, a modern-day CCC arrived in 1964.
The Job Corps combined conservation work, such as trail maintenance
and stream cleaning, with training in vital skills of roadbuilding,
masonry, and the operation of heavy machinery.
Then, in 1969, Tremont entered a new era. The previous years of
innovation seemed to prepare the secluded valley for a truly fresh and
creative effort in education. The Walkers would have been proud of what
came to be the Environmental Education Center.
The Center draws on both original and time-tested techniques to teach
grade school children basic awareness and respect for the natural
world around them. Because its achievements are both fundamental and
effective, and because it treats a splendid mountain area as a lasting
and deserving homeland for plants and animals and human beings, the
story of Tremont culminates this history of the Great Smoky Mountains.
For here is one of the ways the Smokies can be best used: as a wild
refuge and a living laboratory where young people may discover the
deeper meaning of the park’s past and why, for the future, there is a
park at all.
The Environmental Education Center, administered by Maryville College
from 1969 through 1979 and since then by Great Smoky Mountains Natural
History Association, evolved through planning by both the park and
nearby county school systems. One of the rangers, Lloyd Foster, became
so attached to the ideas being presented that he obtained a leave of
absence from his work, persistently promoted the project, and became
Tremont’s first director. Experienced teachers such as Elsie Burrell
and Randolph Shields helped Foster convert talk into action, rhetoric
into experience.
The center soon offered a real alternative to conventional and
overcrowded schools caught in the midst of industrialization.
Teacher-led or parent-supervised classes from a multitude of states and
cities organized themselves, paid a base fee for each member, and came
to the valley for one week during the year. Within months, Tremont was
teaching elementary students at the rate of thousands per year. The
organizers retained their informal, camp-like approach to interested
groups and added to the original dining room and two dormitories an
audiovisual room and a laboratory complete with powerful microscopes.
As the program expanded, children could fulfill their imaginative
promptings in an art room, or build a miniature skidder in the crafts
room, or turn to a library of extensive readings.
As the idea of environmental education at Tremont and elsewhere spread
by word of mouth, volunteers from across the country arrived and aided
those already at work. High school and college students participated in
and still attend weekend conferences on the activities and the progress
of the Center.
They learn, first of all, fundamental concepts that are expressed
simply: “You don’t have to have a lot of fancy buildings to do a good
program,” or “You know, sometimes we teach a lot of theory and we don’t
really get down to--I guess you’d call it the nitty-gritty,” or even
“Now don’t chicken out, the way some of you did last time, step in the
water.”
They learn of “quiet hour,” when, at the beginning of the week, each
child stakes out a spot for himself in the woods, beside the stream,
wherever choice leads. For an hour each day, in sun or rain, everybody
seeks his or her own place and is assured of peace and privacy. A girl
writes a poem to her parents; a fourth-grader contemplates on a rock
by the water; and almost everyone who observes the quiet hour looks
forward to it eagerly each day.
[Illustration:
Fred R. Bell
_In an attempt to capture the spirit of the old days, a family climbs
about a Cades Cove barn._
]
[Illustration:
_Pages 142-143: Members of the Tilman Ownby family of Dudley Creek,
near Gatlinburg, gather for a reunion in the early 1900s. Many of
their descendants still live in the Smokies area today._
National Park Service
]
They learn about the highly effective lessons that are scattered
throughout the week, lessons such as “man and water,” “stream ecology,”
“continuity and change.” Imaginative gatherings become not the
exception but the rule: “Sometimes we take a group of children, divide
them into members of a make-believe pioneer family, and take them up
into a wilderness area, an area which is truly pristine, almost a
virgin forest. And we let the kids imagine that they are this pioneer
family, and that they are going to pick out a house site.” In one game
called “succession,” a boy from blacktopped, “civilized” Atlanta might
search along a road for signs of life on the pavement, then in the
gravel, then in the grass, then within the vast, teeming forest. And a
day’s trip to the Little Greenbrier schoolhouse gives the children of
today a chance to experience what it was like when the Walker sisters
and their ancestors sat on the hard wooden benches and learned the
three R’s and felt the bite of a hickory switch.
It may seem odd that modern children should enjoy so much a trip to
school. But enjoy it they do, for as they fidget on the wooden benches
or spell against each other in an old-fashioned “spelldown” or read a
mid-1800s dictionary that defines a kiss as “a salute with the lips,”
they enter into a past place and a past time. For a few minutes, at
least, they identify with the people who used to be here in these
Smokies--not “play-acting” but struggling to survive and improve their
lives.
The schoolhouse itself is old, built in 1882 out of poplar logs and
white oak shingles. Its single room used to double as a church for the
community, but now the two long, narrow windows on either side open out
onto the protected forest of the park. A woman stands in the doorway,
dressed in a pink bonnet and an old-fashioned, ankle-length dress. She
rings a cast iron bell. The children, who have been out walking on
this early spring morning, hear the bell and begin to run toward it.
Some of them see the school and shout and beckon the others. In their
hurry, they spread out and fill the clearing with flashes of color and
expectation. The woman in the doorway is their teacher.
[Illustration:
_Children anxiously line up to go back a few years with Elsie Burrell
at the one-room schoolhouse in Little Greenbrier._
Clair Burket
]
They have spanned a century and longer. They now live in more worlds
than one, because they have come to the place where their spirit lives.
It is again homecoming in the Great Smoky Mountains.
[Illustration: