Charles S. Grossman
Wash day was a laborious one of lifting large buckets of water and stirring steaming kettles of dirty clothes.
Maurice Sullivan
Over another fire, Mrs. Kate Duckett and daughter Tennie of Coopers Creek make hard soap. Mrs. Duckett stirs the lard with a wooden paddle as Tennie fans the fire with a hawk wing before dipping into the kettle with a gourd scoop. It was a five-hour process.
In December 1863, after Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside had secured Knoxville for the Union, Col. William J. Palmer and the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry attacked Thomas’ camp near Gatlinburg. After a short battle, Thomas and his troops retreated across the mountains into North Carolina. One month later, Confederate Gen. Robert P. Vance decided to remedy the situation in the mountains. With 375 cavalry, 100 infantry, and artillery, he marched from Asheville, joined Thomas and 150 Indian troops in Quallatown, and crossed the Smokies during a bitterly cold spell. While Thomas remained in Gatlinburg, Vance proceeded toward Newport, camped on Cosby Creek deep in the Smokies, and was surprised there by none other than Colonel Palmer and his 15th-Pa. In the resulting rout, General Vance was captured along with about everything else: men, horses, medical supplies, food, ammunition. In February, Thomas and his Legion were engaged once more, in the Great Smoky Mountains near the mouth of Deep Creek. The result was another defeat, this time by the 14th Illinois Cavalry under Maj. Francis Davidson.
Thomas and his Legion did not win mighty military victories for the Confederacy; Governor Vance even accused Thomas’ command of being “a favorite resort for deserters.” But it appears that this strange little mountain force did act as a deterrent against wholesale raids in the Smokies by Federal sympathizers, and to some extent, raids by marauding bushwhackers. As for “Little Will” himself, mental disorder in later years brought him his own personal civil war and its losing battles. He died in a North Carolina hospital.
An equally well-known force in the Great Smokies during the war was a band of Union raiders led by Col. George W. Kirk. One contemporary called him “Kirk of Laurel,” referring to a remote watershed in Madison County where the colonel often camped. Kirk’s most effective march into the Smokies came near the close of the war, in the early spring of 1865. With 400 cavalry and 200 infantry he entered the mountains through East Tennessee’s Cocke County, via Mt. Sterling, and marched into Cataloochee. Turning aside a Confederate company there, he went on to Waynesville, then proceeded to Soco Valley and back across the Smokies.
Kirk raided, released Federal prisoners, skirmished with home guards, and scattered general fear throughout the mountains. In fact, his main achievement for his cause lay in diverting Confederate troops and keeping them scattered on the home front rather than mobilized on the battlefields where they were desperately needed. Try as they might, the Confederates could not find enough of the “silver-greys” or the “seed-corn”—as those too old and too young for regular service were called—to totally protect their homeland from Kirk’s men, or from renegade bushwhackers who had no cause but plunder and pillage.