Homecoming
It is summer now, a time for coming home. And on an August Sunday in the mountain-green valley they call Cataloochee, the kinfolk arrive. They come from 50 states to gather here, at a one-room white frame Methodist church by the banks of the Big “Catalooch.” The appearance of their shiny cars and bulky campers rolling along the paved Park Service road suggests that they are tourists, too, a tiny part of the millions who visit and enjoy the Great Smoky Mountains each year. Yet these particular families represent something more. A few of them were raised here; their ancestors lived and died here.
They are celebrating their annual Cataloochee homecoming. Other reunions, held on Sundays throughout the summer, bring together one-time residents of almost every area in the park. Some of the places instantly recall bits of history: Greenbrier, once a heavily populated cove and political nerve-center; Elkmont, where a blacksmith named Huskey set out one winter to cross the Smokies and was discovered dead in a bear trap the next spring; and Smokemont on the beautiful Oconaluftee River, at one time the home of the Middle Cherokee and the very heart of that Indian Nation.
These are special days, but they observe a universal experience as old as Homer’s Ulysses, as new as the astronauts’ return from the moon: homecoming. It is an experience particularly significant in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Here, at different times and in different ways, people of various races and heritage have reluctantly given up hearth and farm so that today new generations can come to this green kingdom of some 209,000 hectares (517,000 acres) and rediscover a natural homeland which is the heritage of all.
Beginning on Canada’s Gaspé Peninsula as a limestone finger only 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) wide, the Appalachian mountain system that dominates eastern America slants about 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles) southwest across New England and the Atlantic and border states into northern Georgia and Alabama, culminating in the grandeur and complexity of the Great Smoky Mountains. This range, which marks the dividing line between Tennessee and North Carolina, is high; its 58-kilometer (36-mile) crest remains more than 1,500 meters (4,900 feet) above sea level. It is ancient—the Ocoee rocks here are estimated to be 500-600 million years old—and its tall peaks and plunging valleys have been sculpted by nature through the action of ice and water during long, patient centuries. The odd and fantastic courses of the rivers here indicate that they are older than the mountains. The Great Smokies are a land of moving waters; there is no natural lake or pond in this area, but there are some 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) of streams with more than 70 species of fish. A generous rainfall, averaging as much as 229 centimeters (90 inches) per year in some localities and 211 centimeters (83 inches) atop Clingmans Dome, nourishes a rich variety of plantlife: more than 100 species of trees, 1,200 other flowering plants, 50 types of fern, 500 mosses and lichens, and 2,000 fungi. The mixed hardwood forest and virgin stands of balsam and spruce are the special glories of the Smokies.
Many of the species of birds that make the Smokies their home do not have to leave to migrate; by migrating vertically, from the valleys to the mountaintops in summer and back down in winter, they can experience the equivalent of a journey at sea level from Georgia to New England. Animals large and small find this a congenial home, and two, the wild boar and the black bear, are especially interesting to visitors. The former shuns people, but the latter is occasionally seen along trails and roadsides throughout the Smokies.
When the Great Smoky Mountains were added to the National Park System in 1934, a unique mission was accomplished: more than 6,600 separate tracts of land had been purchased by the citizens of Tennessee and North Carolina and given to the people of the United States. Previously, most national parks had been created from lands held by the Federal Government. The story of the Great Smokies is, therefore, most especially and significantly, a story of people and their home. Part of that story is captured in microcosm on an August Sunday in a secluded northeastern corner of the park: Cataloochee.
History is what the homecoming is about. The people of Cataloochee worship and sing and eat and celebrate because they are back. And being back, they remember. They walk up the narrow creeks, banked by thick tangles of rhododendron and dog-hobble, to the sites of old homesteads. They watch their small children and grandchildren wade the water and trample the grass of once-familiar fields. They call themselves Caldwell, Palmer, Hannah, Woody, Bennett, Messer. For exactly a century—from the late 1830s and the coming of the first permanent white settlers to the later 1930s and the coming of the park—men and women with these names lived along Cataloochee Creek. But these pioneers were not the first to inhabit a valley that they called by an Indian name.
Alan Rinehart
With their trusty mule and sourwood sled, Giles and Lenard Ownby haul wood for making shingles.
By “Gad-a-lu-tsi,” the Cherokees meant “standing up in ranks.” As they looked from Cove Creek Gap at the eastern end of the valley across toward the Balsam Mountains, they used that term to describe the thin stand of timber at the top of the distant range. Later, the name became “Cataloochee,” or the colloquial “Catalooch,” and it referred to the entire watershed of the central stream.
The Cherokees liked what they saw. They hunted and fished throughout the area and established small villages along one of their main trails. The Cataloochee Track, as it came to be known, ran from Cove Creek Gap at the eastern edge of the present-day park up over the Smokies and down through what is now the Cosby section of eastern Tennessee. It connected large Indian settlements along the upper French Broad River in North Carolina with the equally important Overhill Towns of the Tennessee River.
By the early 1700s, Cataloochee formed a minor portion of the great Cherokee Nation whose towns and villages extended from eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina into northern Georgia. But as time went on, and as the white settlements pushed westward from the wide eastern front, the Cherokees lost dominion over this vast area. In 1791, at the treaty of Holston, the Cherokees gave up Cataloochee along with much of what is now East Tennessee. Five years later the state of North Carolina granted 71,210 hectares (176,000 acres), including all of Cataloochee, to John Gray Blount—brother to William Blount, governor of the Territory South of the Ohio River, as Tennessee was then called. Blount kept the land for speculation, but it eventually sold for less than one cent per hectare. Now that the Cherokees had relinquished the land, no one else seemed to want it. Even the famous Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury, first sent as a missionary to America in 1771, apparently wavered in his spirit when confronted with the Cataloochee wilderness. In his journal in 1810 he lamented:
“At Catahouche I walked over a log. But O the mountain height after height, and five miles over! After crossing other streams, and losing ourselves in the woods, we came in, about nine o’clock at night.... What an awful day!”
During the 1820s, only a few hunters, trappers, and fishermen built overnight cabins in the area. Then in 1834, Col. Robert Love, who had migrated from Virginia, fought in the Revolutionary War, and established a farm near the present city of Asheville, purchased the original Blount tract for $3,000. To keep title to the land, Love was required to maintain permanent settlers there. He encouraged cattle ranging and permitted settlers choice locations and unlimited terms, and by the late 1830s several families had moved into Cataloochee. Probably the first settler to put down roots was young Levi Caldwell, a householder in his early twenties seeking a good home for his new family. The rich bottomlands and abundant forests of Cataloochee offered that home, and before Levi Caldwell died in 1864 at the age of 49, he and his wife “Polly” (Mary Nailling) had 11 children. Levi was a prisoner during the Civil War, and two of his sons, Andrew and William Harrison, fought on different sides. Because he had tended horses for the widely feared band of Union soldiers called Kirk’s Army, Andy received a $12 pension when the war was over. William, who might have forgiven and forgotten his differences with the Union as a whole, was never quite reconciled to his brother’s pension.
Although he was older than Levi Caldwell by a full 21 years, George Palmer arrived later at Catalooch. The Palmers had settled further northeast in the North Carolina mountains, on Sandy Mush Creek, and seemed content there. But when George decided to start over, he and his wife, also named Polly, took their youngest children, Jesse and George Lafayette, and crossed the mountains south into Cataloochee. They began again.
Edouard E. Exline
Cataloochee and Caldwell—the names are nearly synonymous. The Lush Caldwell family once lived in this sturdy log house with shake roof and stone chimneys on Messer Fork. At another time, this was the home of the E. J. Messers, another of Cataloochee’s predominant families.
Other families trickled in. As elsewhere in Southern Appalachia, buffalo traces and old Indian trails and more recent traders’ paths gradually became roads and highways penetrating the thick forests and mountain fastnesses. In 1846, the North Carolina legislature passed an act creating the Jonathan Creek and Tennessee Mountain Turnpike Company, which was to build a road no less than 3.7 meters (12 feet) wide and no steeper than a 12 percent grade. Tolls would range from 75 cents for a six-horse wagon down to a dime for a man or a horse and one cent for each hog or sheep. After a full five years of deliberation and examining alternatives, the company selected a final route and constructed the highway with minor difficulty. The road fully utilized the natural contours of the land and was at the same time a generally direct line. It followed almost exactly the old Cherokee Trail.
The Cataloochee Turnpike was the first real wagon road in the Smokies. It opened up a chink in the area’s armor of isolation. Travel to and from the county seat still required the better part of three days, however. Two of the rare 19th century literary visitors to these mountains—Wilbur Zeigler and Ben Grosscup, whose book The Heart of the Alleghanies, appeared in 1883—entered Cataloochee along this road. Their reaction provides a pleasant contrast to that of Bishop Asbury; they speak of the “canon of the Cataluche” as being “the most picturesque valley of the Great Smoky range:”
“The mountains are timbered, but precipitous; the narrow, level lands between are fertile; farm houses look upon a rambling road, and a creek, noted as a prolific trout stream, runs a devious course through hemlock forests, around romantic cliffs, and between laureled banks.”
During the 1840s and 1850s, some 15 or 20 families built their sturdy log cabins ax-hewn out of huge chestnuts and poplars, and then built barns, smokehouses, corncribs, and other farm shelters beside the rocky creeks. George Palmer’s son Lafayette, called “Fate” for short, married one of Levi Caldwell’s daughters and established a large homestead by the main stream. Fate’s brother, Jesse, married and had 13 children; 6 of these 13 later married Caldwells.
Pages 22-23: These proud people all dressed up in their Sunday best are members of the George H. Caldwell family.
H. C. Wilburn
They ate well. The creek bottomlands provided rich soil for tomatoes, corn and beans, cabbage and onions, potatoes and pumpkins. Split rail fences were devices to keep the cattle, hogs, and sheep out of the crops; the animals themselves foraged freely throughout the watershed, fattening on succulent grasses and an ample mast of acorns and chestnuts. Corn filled the cribs, salted pork and beef layered the meathouse, and cold bountiful springs watered the valley.
The Civil War erupted in 1861. Although Cataloochee lay officially in the Confederacy, this creek country was so remote, so distant from the slave plantations of the deep South, that no government dominated. Raiding parties from both sides rode through the valley, killing and looting as they went. Near Mt. Sterling Gap at the northern end of the watershed, Kirk’s Army made a man named Grooms play a fiddle before they murdered him. The people of Catalooch kept his memory alive throughout the century by playing that ill-starred “Grooms tune.”
But the war was only an interlude. Five years after its end, Cataloochee was estimated to have 500 hogs, sheep, milch cows, beef cattle, and horses; some 900 kilograms (2,000 pounds) of honey; and about 1,250 liters (1,320 quarts) of sorghum molasses. Sizable apple crops would begin to flourish during the next decade, and by 1900 the population of the valley would grow to over 700. Producing more than they themselves could use, these farmers began to trade with the outside world. They took their apples, livestock, chestnuts, eggs, honey, and ginseng to North Carolina markets in Fines Creek, Canton, and Waynesville, and to Tennessee outlets in Cosby, Newport, and Knoxville. With their cash money, they changed forever the Cataloochee of the early 1800s.
They sold honey and bought the tools of education. Using the tough, straight wood of a black gum or a basswood, a farmer hollowed out a section of the trunk with a chisel. He then slid a cross-stick through a hole bored near the bottom. Upon transplanting a beehive into the trunk and leaving an entrance at the bottom, he covered the top with a solid wooden lid and sealed it airtight with a mixture of mud and swamp-clay. In August, especially after the sourwoods had bloomed and the bees had built up a store of the delicately flavored honey, the beekeeper took a long hooked honey knife, broke the sealing, and cut out squares of the light golden comb to fill ten-gallon tins. He never went below the cross-stick; that honey was left for the bees. An enterprising family might trade 10 tins of honey in a season. And at the market, they would turn that honey into school supplies for the coming year: shoes, books, tablets, and pencils.
Like many others in the Smokies, Dan Myers of Cades Cove kept a few bees. He apparently was a little more carefree than some about the tops of his bee gums, or hives. Some old boards or scraps of tin, with the help of a couple of rocks, sufficed, whereas most people sealed their wooden tops with a little mud.
Charles S. Grossman
There were too few families on Big Cataloochee for both a Methodist and a Baptist church. In 1858 Colonel Love’s son had deeded a small tract there for the Palmers, Bennetts, Caldwells, and Woodys to use as a Methodist meetinghouse and school. Since then, the Messers and Hannahs and several others had formed a community of their own 8 kilometers (5 miles) north, across Noland Mountain, along the smaller valley of the Little Cataloochee. They built a Baptist church there in 1890.
But the differences were not great. One of the Big Cataloochee’s sons became and remained the high sheriff of sprawling Haywood County with the well-nigh solid support of the combined Cataloochee vote. Running six times in succession and against a candidate from the southeastern part of the county, he was rumored to have waited each time for the more accessible lowlands to record their early returns. Then he simply contacted a cousin, who happened to be the recorder for Cataloochee, who would ask in his slow, easy voice, “How many do you need, cousin?”
The preacher came once a month. He stayed with different families in the community and met the rest at church. More informal gatherings, such as Sunday School and singings, took place each week. And during late summer or fall, when crops were “laid by” and there was an interval between spring’s cultivation and autumn’s harvest, there came the socializing and fervor of camp meeting. A one-week or ten-day revival was cause for school to be let out at 11 o’clock each morning. The children were required to attend long and fervent services. But between exhortations there were feasts of food, frolicking in nearby fields and streams, and for everyone an exchange of good fellowship.
Besides these religious gatherings, women held bean-stringings and quilting bees, men assembled for logrollings or house-raisings to clear new lands and build new homes. One of the few governmental intrusions into Cataloochee life was the road requirement. During the spring and fall, all able-bodied men were “warned out” for six days—eight if there had been washout rains—to keep up what had become the well-used Cataloochee Turnpike. If a man brought a mule and a bull-tongue plow instead of the usual mattock, he received double time for ditching the sides of the road. This heavy work gave the men both a chance to talk and something to talk about. But any of them would still have said that the hardest job of the year was hoeing corn all day on a lonely, stony hillside.
By the early 1900s, Cataloochee had become a mixture of isolation from the outside world and communication with it. Outside laws had affected the valley; in 1885 North Carolina passed the controversial No Fence law, which made fences within townships unnecessary and required owners to keep cattle, sheep, horses, and hogs inside certain bounds. But other laws were less heeded; local experts have estimated that 95 percent of Cataloochee residents made their own whisky. Several families subscribed to a newspaper—“Uncle Jim” Woody took The Atlanta Constitution—and almost everyone possessed the “wish-book:” a dog-eared mail order catalog. But no one in Little Cataloochee bought an automobile.
The valley thrived on local incidents. A man shot a deputy sheriff and hid out near a large rock above Fate Palmer’s homestead; Neddy McFalls and Dick Clark fed him there for years. Will Messer, a master carpenter and coffinmaker over on Little Catalooch, had a daughter named Ola. Messer was postmaster, and the post office acquired her name. Fate Palmer’s shy son, Robert, became known as the “Booger Man” after he hid his face in his arms and gave that as his name to a new teacher on the first day of school.
George Palmer, son of Jesse and brother to Sheriff William, devised a method of capturing wild turkeys. He first built a log enclosure, then dug a trench under one side and baited it with corn. The next morning 10 turkeys, too frightened to retrace their steps through the trench, showed up inside the enclosure. But when George stepped among them and attempted to catch them, the turkeys gave him the beating of his life. Thereafter he was called “Turkey George.” And his daughter, Nellie, lent her name to one of the two post offices on Big Catalooch.
“Turkey George” Palmer of Pretty Hollow Creek in Cataloochee used to tell people that he had killed 105 bears. Most of them he trapped in bear pens.
Edouard E. Exline
Yet the simplicity of life could not insulate the Cataloochee area from “progress.” As the 20th century unfolded, scattered individual loggers gave way to the well organized methods of large company operations. Small-scale cutting of yellow-tulip poplar and cherry boomed into big business during the early 1900s. Suncrest Lumber Company, with a sawmill in Waynesville, began operations on Cataloochee Creek and hauled out hardwood logs in great quantities. Although the spruce and balsam at the head of the watershed were left standing, the logging industry, with its capital, manpower, and influence, vastly altered the valley.
With the late 1920s came an announcement that the states of North Carolina and Tennessee had decided to give the Great Smoky Mountains to the nation as a park. The residents of Cataloochee were incredulous. They were attached to this homeplace; they still referred to a short wagon ride as a trip and called a visit to the county seat a journey. But the park arrived, and the young families of the valley moved away, and then the older ones did the same. Gradually they came to understand that another sort of homeland had been established. And the strangers who now visit their valleys and creeks can look about and appreciate the heritage these settlers and their descendants left behind.
The old families still come back. They return to this creek on the August Sunday of Homecoming. In the early morning hours they fill the wooden benches of tiny Palmer’s Chapel for singing and preaching and reminiscing; at noon they share bountiful food spread on long plank tables beside clear, rushing Cataloochee Creek; in the mellow afternoon they rediscover the valley. For what lures the stranger is what lures the old families back. They come to sense again the beauty and the permanence and even the foggy mystery of the Great Smokies. And this that beckons them back is that which beckoned the Indian discoverers of these mountains hundreds of years ago.