Part 2
Highland Homeland
A home in the Smokies usually meant a simple log house nestled in the hills among the trees and amidst the haze.
National Park Service
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.