Aquilla Rose stands proudly with his mowing machine outside his home near Eagle Creek. He didn’t stand that still when revenuers came around.
National Park Service
All the wonders of the Great Smoky Mountains—the nature, the people, the stories, and the battles and the jests—affected Horace Kephart mightily. This man whose own life had been “saved” by the Smokies began to think in terms of repaying this mountain area in kind. For during his years on Hazel Creek and Deep Creek and in Bryson City, he saw the results of the “loggers’ steel,” results that caused him to lament in a single phrase, “slash, crash, go the devastating forces.” In 1923 he summarized his feelings about the lumber industry:
Edouard E. Exline
When the Civilian Conservation Corps moved into the Smokies in the 1930s, young men from the cities saw moonshine stills firsthand. Here one pretends to be a moonshiner and hangs his head low for the photographer.
“When I first came into the Smokies the whole region was one superb forest primeval. I lived for several years in the heart of it. My sylvan studio spread over mountain after mountain, seemingly without end, and it was always clean and fragrant, always vital, growing new shapes of beauty from day to day. The vast trees met overhead like cathedral roofs.... Not long ago I went to that same place again. It was wrecked, ruined, desecrated, turned into a thousand rubbish heaps, utterly vile and mean.”
Kephart began to think in terms of a national park. He and a Japanese photographer friend, George Masa, trekked the Smokies and gathered concrete experience and evidence of the mountains’ wild splendor. At every opportunity, Kephart advocated the park idea in newspapers, in brochures, and by word of mouth. He proudly acknowledged that “I owe my life to these mountains and I want them preserved that others may profit by them as I have.”
The concept of a national park for these southern mountains was not a new one in 1920. Forty years earlier, a retired minister and former state geologist, Drayton Smith, of Franklin, North Carolina, had proposed “a national park in the mountains.” In 1885, Dr. Henry O. Marcy of Boston, Massachusetts, had discussed future health resorts in America and had considered “the advisability of securing under state control a large reservation of the higher range as a park.” By the turn of the century, the Appalachian National Park Association was formed in Asheville, North Carolina, and publicized the idea of a national park somewhere in the region, not specifically the Great Smokies. When the Federal Government seemed to rule out this possibility, the Association devoted the bulk of its time and effort to the creation of national forest reserves.