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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Fred R. Bell
In an attempt to capture the spirit of the old days, a family climbs about a Cades Cove barn.
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.
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
Children anxiously line up to go back a few years with Elsie Burrell at the one-room schoolhouse in Little Greenbrier.
Clair Burket
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.
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.
