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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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:
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.
“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.”
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:
Grace Newman sits enraptured as Jim Proffit plays the guitar.
Burton Wolcott
“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).
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.
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.
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.
John Walker, the patriarch of a large self-reliant family, admires cherries he raised at his home in Little Greenbrier.
Jim Shelton