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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Smithsonian Institution
Nine men celebrate a game victory with an Eagle Dance in 1932.
Charles S. Grossman
Samson Welsh shoots arrows with a blow gun at the Cherokee Indian Fair in 1936.
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.
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.