The Appalachians at Their Best

At first glimpse there appear to be two Smokies: the mountains’ wild nature, and the folk life. The mind calls up both the sweeping mountain vistas whose peaks succeed peaks to the far horizon and the rustic cabins and barns set off with the split rail fences of 19th-century mountain life. The mountains are everywhere, punctuated by restored settlements, by Cades Cove, Mingus Mill, Cataloochee, and Little Greenbrier. But this is not the full story for there are many, many Great Smokies, a double fistful of which may be just for you. There are as many Great Smokies as there are people who come here intent on discovering their secrets: the folklorist’s and amateur historian’s Smokies; the trout angler’s Smokies; the Smokies of the backpacker, day-tripper, and trail walker; the botanist’s, ecologist’s, and birder’s Smokies; and the automobile tourist’s Smokies. Take your pick.

You can walk into the Smokies, into the heart of the wilderness. You can drive through the Smokies, through the jewels in the crown of the Appalachian highlands. You can enter them through North Carolina or through Tennessee. But you can also enter them through any strong interest you may have, for there are as many Smokies as there are ways you can see them. And one good way to see them is through the eyes of a native son whose love for these mountains is exceeded only by his love for people. Such is Glenn Cardwell.

Glenn Cardwell took his aging mother and father down to the Noah “Bud” Ogle cabin just after the National Park Service finished restoring it. Glenn works for the park and would conduct nature walks at the cabin, so he wanted to see what his folks would say. They used to live nearby and his mother’s Aunt Cindy and her husband, Noah, built the cabin just off Cherokee Orchard Road out of Gatlinburg.

“Well I’ll tell you,” Glenn said, “my mother got to reminiscing not one step off the parking lot and stopped at every rock and spot in the yard and told a tale. It must’ve taken the better part of an hour just to get her through the yard and down to the porch.”

Glenn’s mother took one look at the porch and said, “They put the step

Walking back to the car she stopped dead in her tracks and said despairingly, “What have they done to Cindy’s rock?”

Glenn had no idea what she meant although he could see the road cut close to a big boulder. The road had been relocated but Glenn recalled nothing unusual about the rock.

His mother, still staring, repeated her question. Glenn’s father shrugged, “Looks to me like somebody blowed hell out of it.”

“I still couldn’t figure out what was bothering my mother,” Glenn said.

But now, in the 1980s, he will tell you that everyone in the Smokies had scaffolds in their yards back in Aunt Cindy’s day for drying fruits and vegetables for winter storage. Everyone, that is, but Aunt Cindy. She used the big boulder across from their cabin, or what used to be the flat part of it. Many’s the time Glenn’s mother, as a little girl, helped Aunt Cindy spread produce to sun dry on the rock.

Glenn Cardwell is an affable walking encyclopedia of Smokies life at the time the Smokies changed from a piece of Tennessee and North Carolina real estate into our second national park in the East. Stories such as Glenn’s—and there are many—supply a compelling human resonance to this wilderness land. Glenn’s enthusiasm is a bit unusual, because his father was bought out twice by the Federal government as lands were being acquired for the park. And each buy-out meant an unplanned relocation for the family, moving and building anew.

“I think if my mother hadn’t had me on the way at the time of the first buy-out,” Glenn said, “my father would have pulled up stakes and gone back to Cumberland, Virginia, like many, many of our other relatives did.” But the Cardwells stayed on near the park and Glenn embodies a transition, bridging new and old ways of doing and seeing things here. His father was bitter at first, but when he visited the Noah “Bud” Ogle Cabin years later he admitted he was glad the park had come along so that some things remained unchanged. It was nice, he said, that he and others could still see the land as it had been.

The Great Smokies represented a new direction in national park policy in the 1920s. The eighteen national parks then in existence in the West had been created from lands already owned by the Federal government. The Smokies lands authorized for park purchase beginning in 1926 were all in private ownership in more than 6,600 tracts. The lion’s share was owned by eighteen timber and pulpwood companies, but 1,200 other tracts were farms. Worse, there were also more than 5,000 lots and summer homes. Many of these had been won in promotion schemes and their owners had never bothered to pay taxes on them. This created an awesome land acquisition headache.

The Federal government would not purchase land for national parks in those days, so in 1927 the Tennessee and North Carolina legislatures each provided for appropriation of $2 million to purchase the land. Already, $1 million had been pledged. The legislation also created State Park Commissions in each state to handle the buying. The John D. Rockefeller family supplemented the fund drive with a $5 million donation. This was considered one of the biggest and most important accomplishments of the entire national park movement. The two states eventually purchased the needed lands and donated them to the Federal government.

Ten years of dogged, full-scale activity and several more years of tying up loose ends were required to get the acquisition job done. Despite this tremendous impact of human land use in the Smokies, however, about forty percent of the park’s 209,000 hectares (517,000 acres) constitutes the East’s most extensive virgin forest. Forest recovery is now well underway throughout the park despite the former blight left by logging and subsequent forest fires, and landslides, and other forms of erosion.

At one time no sharp edge separated two aspects of nature in the Great Smokies: man and the wilderness. Cherokee Indians lived here in ways ironically similar to those of the whites who would soon displace them. They cultivated crops, hunted, believed in one god, practiced a democratic form of government, and lived not in teepees but in mud-and-log structures. “The place of blue smoke,” Shaconage, they called this mountain hunting ground. And here amidst the haze lived also the spirit of their people; it, too, could not be divorced from the land itself. Treaty after treaty saw the Cherokees lose more and more homeland, up to and finally including the Smokies. In one of the great human tragedies that blots American history they were forcibly removed westward, “relocated” to Oklahoma via the “Trail of Tears.” One fourth of the people died along the way. A few Cherokees had resisted removal, staying behind in small groups and hiding out in the mountains. Troops could not relocate them because they couldn’t locate them. Later the Cherokees were allowed to return and reclaim the borders of their old homeland. They live there today on the Cherokee Reservation.