Through these and similar efforts, which included almost 110 kilometers (70 miles) of the famous Appalachian Trail, the natural value of the Great Smoky Mountains became a recognized and established lure for thousands, eventually millions, of visitors. But there was another resource that remained untapped, a challenge to the national park purpose and imagination. This resource was first overlooked, then neglected, and finally confronted with respect. The resource was the people and their homes.
Joseph S. Hall
Columbus “Clum” Cardwell of Hills Creek, Tennessee, worked in the CCC garage at Smokemont. That experience led to a 23-year career as an auto-mechanic at the national park.
Many previous owners of park land had received lifetime leases that allowed them to live on in their dwellings, work their fields, and cut dead timber even while tourists streamed through the Smokies. Some of the lessees, such as those living near Gatlinburg, saw a new era coming, thrusting back the street-ends until motels and restaurants and craft shops pushed against an abandoned apple orchard or a 10-plot cemetery or a deserted backyard laced with lilacs. These rememberers of an earlier time relinquished their lands in the park, more often than not resettling within sight of the mountain range and the homeland they had just left.
Yet a few lessees, those living further up the valleys, deeper into the mountains, or isolated from the well-traveled paths, these few folks stayed on. The Walker sisters of Little Greenbrier Cove were representative of this small group.
John Walker, their father, was himself the eldest of his parents’ 15 children. In 1860, at the age of 19, he became engaged to 14-year-old Margaret Jane King. The Civil War postponed their wedding, and John, an ardent Unionist who had enlisted in the First Tennessee Light Artillery, spent three months in a Confederate prison and lost 45 kilograms (100 pounds) before he was exchanged and provided with a pension. In 1866, they were finally married. After Margaret Jane’s father died, the young couple moved into the King homestead in Little Greenbrier.
They had eleven children: four boys, seven girls. John remained a strong Republican and Primitive Baptist; he liked to boast that in a long and fruitful lifetime he had spent a total of 50 cents on health care for his family (two of his sons had once required medicine for the measles). Margaret Jane was herself an “herb doctor” and a midwife, talents which complemented John’s skills as a blacksmith, carpenter, miller, farmer. Once, as Margaret Jane was chasing a weasel from her hens, the reddish-brown animal bit her thumb and held on; she calmly thrust her hand into a full washtub, where the weasel drowned in water stained by her blood.
Edouard E Exline