But people like Horace Kephart knew the difference between a national park that safeguarded trees and a national forest that allowed logging. In 1923, a group supporting a genuine Great Smokies park formed in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mr. and Mrs. Willis P. Davis, of the Knoxville Iron Company, in the summer of that year had enjoyed a trip to some of the country’s western parks. As they viewed the wonders preserved therein, Mrs. Davis was reminded of the natural magnificence near her own home. “Why can’t we have a national park in the Great Smokies?” she asked her husband.
Back in Knoxville, Mr. Davis began to ask that question of friends and associates. One of these was Col. David C. Chapman, a wholesale druggist, who listened but did not heed right away:
Grace Newman sits enraptured as Jim Proffit plays the guitar.
Burton Wolcott
“Not until I accidentally saw a copy of President Theodore Roosevelt’s report on the Southern Appalachians did I have any idea of just what we have here. In reading and rereading this report I learned for the first time that the Great Smokies have some truly superlative qualities. After that I became keenly interested in Mr. Davis’ plan and realized that a national park should be a possibility.”
The Davises and Chapman led the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association. Congressmen and Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work were contacted. Work endorsed the project, and two years later Congress passed an act authorizing associations in Tennessee and North Carolina to buy lands and deed them to the U.S. Government.
Problems immediately presented themselves. The citizens would have to buy this park. Unlike Yellowstone and other previous land grants from the Federal Government, the Smokies were owned by many private interests and therefore presented a giant challenge to hopeful fund raisers. To further complicate matters, no group had the power to condemn lands; any property, if secured at all, would have to be coaxed from its owner at an appropriately high price. Finally, and most discouragingly, park enthusiasts faced an area of more than 6,600 separate tracts and thousands of landowners.
Yet events conspired to give the park movement a sustaining drive. The lumber companies had made the people of the Smokies more dependent on money for additional food, modern-day clothing, and new forms of recreation. World War I and the coming of the highways had instilled a restlessness in the mountain people, a yearning for new sights and different ways of living. Some began to echo the sentiments of one farmer who, after realizing meager returns for his hard labor on rocky fields, looked around him and concluded, “Well, I reckon a park is about all this land is fit for.”
Determined leadership overcame obstacles large and small. Behind Chapman’s professorial appearance—his wire-rimmed glasses and three-piece suits and unkempt hair—was a man who had been a colonel in World War I, a man who had resolved to make the dream of a national park into a reality. Along with Chapman as the driving force, associate director of the National Park Service Arno B. Cammerer provided the steering and the gears. Cammerer’s marked enthusiasm for incorporating the Great Smokies into the national park system added a well-placed, influential spokesman to the movement. By spring of 1926, groups in North Carolina and Tennessee had raised more than a million dollars. Within another year, the legislatures of the two states each had donated twice that amount.