Little Greenbrier Cove was known to some people as Five Sisters Cove because of the Walker sisters’ place just above the schoolhouse. The Walkers had their garden and grape arbors close to the house for handy tending.
Edouard E Exline
Inside, everything was neat as a pin with coats, hats, baskets, guns, and what-have-you hanging on the newspaper-covered walls.
Edouard E Exline
Sitting on the front porch are (from left) Polly, Louisa, and Martha. Also on the porch is a loom made by their father (see page [120]) and a spinning wheel.
The children grew up. The three older boys married and moved away. The youngest, Giles Daniel, left for Iowa and fought in World War I. Sarah Caroline, the only one of the daughters ever to marry, began her life with Jim Shelton in 1908. Hettie Rebecca worked for a year or two in a Knoxville hosiery mill, but the Depression sent her back home. When Nancy Melinda died in 1931, the original home place was left in the hands of five sisters; Hettie, Margaret Jane, Polly, Louisa Susan, and Martha Ann.
They lived the self-sufficiency of their ancestors. They stated simply that “our land produces everything we need except sugar, soda, coffee, and salt.” Their supplies came from the grape arbor, the orchard, the herb and vegetable garden; the sheep, hogs, fowl, and milch cows; the springhouse crocks of pickled beets and sauerkraut; the dried food and the seed bags and the spice racks that hung from nails hammered into the newspaper-covered walls of the main house. The material aspects of their surroundings represented fully the fabric of life as it had been known in the hundreds of abandoned cabins and barns and outbuildings that dotted the landscape of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And the Walker sisters were not about to give up their way of life without a struggle. In a poem, “My Mountain Home,” Louisa expressed the family’s feelings:
“There is an old weather bettion house