Work on the road progressed slowly. Bluffs and cliffs had to be avoided; such detours lengthened the turnpike considerably. Sometimes the rock was difficult to remove. Crude blasting—complete with hand-hammered holes, gunpowder inside hollow reeds, and fuses of straw or leaves—constituted one quick and sure, but more expensive, method. Occasionally, the men burned logs around the rock, then quickly showered it with creek water. When the rock split from the sudden change in temperature, it could then be quarried and graded out. Throughout the 1830s, residents of Oconaluftee and nearby valleys toiled and sweated to lay down this single roadbed.
This desire and effort to conquer the wilderness also prompted the establishment of churches and, to a lesser extent, schools. In the Tennessee Sugarlands, services were held under the trees until a small building was constructed at the beginning of the 19th century. The valley built a larger five-cornered Baptist church in 1816. Prospering Cades Cove established a Methodist church in 1830; its preacher rode the Little River circuit. Five years later, the church had 40 members.
Over on the Oconaluftee, Ralph Hughes had donated land and Dr. John Mingus had built a log schoolhouse. Monthly prayer meetings were held there until the Lufty Baptist Church was officially organized in 1836. Its 21 charter members included most of the turnpike commissioners plus the large Mingus family. Five years later, the members built a log church at Smokemont on land donated by John Beck.
Nothing fostered these settlers’ early gropings toward community more than stories. Legends and tall tales, begun in family conversations and embellished by neighborly rumor, forged a bond, a unity of interest, a common history, in each valley and on each meandering branch. For example, in one western North Carolina tradition that would thrive well into the 20th century, Abraham Enloe was cited as the real father of Abraham Lincoln. Nancy Hanks, it was asserted, had worked for a time in the Enloe household and had become pregnant. Exiled to Kentucky, she married Thomas Lincoln but gave birth to Abraham’s child.
Stories mingled with superstition. The Cherokees dropped seven grains into every corn hill and never thinned their crop. Many early settlers of the Smokies believed that if corn came up missing in spots, some of the family would die within a year. Just as the Cherokees forbade counting green melons or stepping across the vines because “it would make the vines wither,” the Smokies settlers looked upon certain events as bad omens. A few days before Richard Reagan’s skull was fractured, a bird flew on the porch where he sat and came to rest on his head. Reagan himself saw it as a “death sign.”
Superstition, combined with Indian tradition, led to a strangely exact form of medicine. One recipe for general aches and pains consisted of star root, sourwood, rosemary, sawdust, anvil dust, water, and vinegar. A bad memory required a properly “sticky” tea made of cocklebur and jimsonweed.
A chief medicinal herb was an unusual wild plant known as ginseng. Called “sang” in mountain vernacular, its value lay in the manlike shape of its dual-pronged roots. Oriental cultures treasured ginseng, especially the older and larger roots. Reputed to cure anything from a cough to a boil to an internal disorder, it was also considered an aphrodisiac and a source of rare, mystical properties. But scientific research has never yielded any hard evidence of its medicinal worth.
Alan Rinehart
Aunt Sophie Campbell made clay pipes at her place on Crockett Mountain and sold them to her neighbors and to other folks in the Gatlinburg area.