A people and their style of life do not change drastically in one year or two years or three. The year 1900, then, does not define a time when thousands living in the Great Smokies suddenly abandoned their 19th-century ways and traditions and bounded into the modern world. Real transition would come only with the upheavals of the succeeding decades, only as a result of America’s industrialization and two world wars and the arrival of a national park. Yet the beginning of a new century did inject one major new element into the lifestream of the Great Smoky Mountains: the lumber companies and their money.
The people who lived here had logged before. A man might operate a family enterprise along some hillside or in a low-lying cove, using a few strong-armed relatives or neighbors to help cut and move the choicest timber of the forest. Andy Huff, for example, established a small sawmill in Greenbrier Cove in 1898. Leander Whaley had cut yellow-poplar, buckeye, and linden from the upper cove—along Ramsey Prong—during the 1880s. These and a few other individual loggers felled the largest and most accessible of ultra-valuable woods such as cherry, ash, walnut, hickory, and the giant yellow-poplar, or “tulip tree.” They used steady, slow-plodding oxen to drag the heavy logs to mill, then hauled the lumber to markets and railroads in stout-bedded wagons drawn by four mules, double-teamed.
But the virgin timber soon attracted a wider attention. In 1901, a report on the Southern Appalachians from President Theodore Roosevelt to Congress concluded simply that “These are the heaviest and most beautiful hardwood forests of the continent.” Of the Great Smokies in particular, the report noted that besides the hardwoods the forest contained “the finest and largest bodies of spruce in the Southern Appalachians.” Lumber entrepreneurs were equally impressed. In that same year, three partners paid about $9.70 per hectare for the 34,400-hectare ($3/85,000-acre) bulk of the Little River watershed. Some 20 years later, Col. W. B. Townsend moved from Pennsylvania and took control of Little River Lumber Company.
On the North Carolina slopes of the Smokies, companies purchased land in swaths stretching from ridge to ridge, staking off watersheds like so many claims. In 1903, W. M. Ritter Lumber Company set up its operations along Hazel Creek. A year later, Montvale Lumber Company moved into the adjacent Eagle Creek area. To the west of Montvale would, in time, lie the Kitchin mill and its Twentymile Creek domain; to the east of Ritter, Norwood Lumber Company embraced the reaches of Forney Creek. And looming beside and above them all stood the 36,400 timbered hectares (90,000 acres) of the Champion Coated Paper Company, an area that included Deep Creek and Greenbrier Cove and the headwaters of the Oconaluftee River.
The companies needed men to cut the trees, skid the logs, work the animals, saw the lumber, lay the roads. They called upon the mountaineers who still owned small tracts in Cades Cove and Cataloochee and lower Greenbrier and throughout the Smokies; or they allowed some workers who had sold forested land to stay in their homes, though now on company property; or they brought in hired hands from outside and housed them and their families in dormitory-like buildings and readymade “towns.” These mushrooming mill villages—Elkmont on the Little River, Crestmont on Big Creek, Proctor on Hazel Creek, Ravensford and Smokemont and Fontana—provided a booming cash market for homegrown food and, as soon as the money changed hands, imported products.
More often than not, residents of the Great Smoky Mountains drove to and from market in covered wagons that protected their goods. Because the drive to an outside market such as Waynesville, Newport, or Maryville might take two or even three days, local families sold what they could to the loggers and sawmill men. They set up honey and apple stands along the roads and offered grapes in season. They supplied stores with butter and eggs. Children could trade in one egg for a week’s supply of candy or firecrackers.
A businesslike atmosphere filtered through the quiet of the Smokies. Though wolves and panthers had largely disappeared by 1910, fur buyers and community traders enjoyed a brisk exchange in mink, raccoon, fox, and ’possum hides. Oak bark and chestnut wood, called “tanbark” and “acid wood” because they were sources of valuable tannic acid, brought $7 per cord when shipped to Asheville or Knoxville. As the sawmills flourished, makeshift box houses of vertical poplar and chestnut planks gave way to more substantial weatherboarded homes of horizontal lengths and tight-fitting frames. Slick, fancy, buggy-riding “drummers” peddled high-button shoes and off-color stories. The spacious Wonderland Park Hotel and the Appalachian Club at Elkmont, and a hunting lodge on Jake’s Creek graced the once forbidding mountainsides.
Undergirding this development was a growing cash base: peaches and chestnuts, pork and venison, wax and lard—translated into money—brought flour and sugar, yarn and needles, tools and ammunition. Yet in the midst of this new-found activity, many clung to their old habits. Children still found playtime fun by sliding down hills of pine needles and “riding” poplar saplings from treetop to treetop. Hard-shell Baptist preachers, such as the hunter and “wilderness saddle-bagger” known as “Preacher John” Stinnett, still devoted long spare hours, and sometimes workdays as well, to reading The Book: “I just toted my Bible in a tow sack at the handle of my bull tongue and I studied it at the turn of the furrow and considered it through the rows.”
But whatever the immediate considerations of the hour happened to be, logging was the order of the day. From the Big Pigeon River, all the way to the Little Tennessee, the second generation of timber-cutters had moved into the Smokies on a grand scale.
The companies, with their manpower, their strategically placed sawmills, and their sophisticated equipment, produced board feet of lumber by the millions. The rest of the country, with its increased demands for paper and residential construction, absorbed these millions and cried for more. By 1909, when production attained its peak in the Smokies and throughout the Appalachians, logging techniques had reached such an advanced state that even remote stands of spruce and hemlock could be worked with relative ease. Demand continued unabated and even received a slight boost when World War I broke out in 1914.