Little River Lumber Company
The great scale of the logging machinery was like nothing the Smokies had seen before. Long trains carried loads of huge tree trunks to sawmills after the flat cars were loaded by railroad-mounted cranes.
To coordinate all of these operations efficiently required skill and judgment. The lumber companies devised numerous approaches to the problem of maximum production at lowest cost. They contracted with individuals; Andy Huff, for example, continued to run a mill at the mouth of Roaring Fork and paid his men a full 75 cents for a 16-hour day. The corporations sometimes worked together; in one maneuver, Little River helped Champion flume its spruce pulpwood to the Little River railroad for shipment to Champion’s paper mill at Canton, North Carolina. Haste and carelessness could lead to shocking waste. When one company moved its operations during World War I, 1.5 million board feet of newly cut timber was left to rot at the head of Big Creek.
The ravages of logging led to fires. Although fires were sometimes set on purpose to kill snakes and insects and to burn underbrush, abnormal conditions invited abnormal mishaps. Parched soil no longer held in place by a web of living roots, dry tops of trees piled where they had been flung after trimming the logs, and flaming sparks of locomotives or skidders: any combination of these caused more than 20 disastrous fires in the Smokies during the 1920s. A two-month series of fires devastated parts of Clingmans Dome, Siler’s Bald, and Mt. Guyot. One holocaust on Forney Creek, ignited by an engine spark, raced through the tops of 24-meter (80-foot) hemlocks and surged over 5 kilometers (3 miles) in four hours. A site of most intense destruction was in the Sawtooth range of the Charlie’s Bunion area.
Despite the ravages of fire, erosion, and the voracious ax and saw, all was not lost. Some two-thirds of the Great Smoky Mountains was heavily logged or burned, but pockets of virgin timber remained in a shrinking number of isolated spots and patches at the head of Cataloochee, the head of Greenbrier, and much of Cosby and Deep Creek. And as the 1920s passed into another decade, the vision of saving what was left of this virgin forest, saving the land—saving the homeland—grew in the lonely but insistent conscience of a small number of concerned and convincing citizens.
Conducting a preliminary survey of the park’s boundaries in 1931 are (from left) Superintendent J. Ross Eakin, Arthur P. Miller, Charles E. Peterson, O. G. Taylor, and John Needham.
George A. Grant
Birth of a Park
Logging dominated the life of the Great Smoky Mountains during the early decades of the 20th century. But there was another side to that life. Apart from the sawmills and the railroads and the general stores, which were bustling harbingers of new ways a-coming, the higher forests, the foot trails, and the moonshine stills remained as tokens of old ways a-lingering. One person in particular came to know and speak for this more primitive world.