Joseph S. Hall
Before leaving for Lufty Baptist Church, Alfred Dowdle and his family of Collins Creek pose for Joseph S. Hall, who was studying linguistics in the Smokies for the Park Service.
In January of 1941, however, the Walker sisters relented a little and sold their 50 hectares (123 acres) to the United States for $4,750 and a lifetime lease. Partly because of this unique situation, this special lifestyle, park officials delayed any well-defined program to recreate and present a vanishing culture. When the Saturday Evening Post “discovered” the Walker sisters in 1946, tourists in the Smokies flocked to the Walker home as if it were a museum of Appalachia. The sisters themselves tolerated the visitors, even sold mountain “souvenirs.” But the years passed, three of the sisters died, and in 1953 Margaret Jane and Louisa wrote to the park superintendent:
“I have a request to you Will you please have the Sign a bout the Walker Sisters taken down the one on High Way 73 especially the reason I am asking this there is just 2 of the sister lives at the old House place one is 70 years of age the other is 82 years of age and we can’t receive so many visitors. We are not able to do our Work and receive so many visitors, and can’t make sovioners to sell like we once did and people will be expecting us to have them....”
The park, of course, cooperated and helped the sisters until Louisa, the last, died in 1964.
Increasingly the park recognized the value of the human history of the Smokies. Out of that recognition came interpretive projects and exhibits at Cades Cove, Oconaluftee, Sugarlands, and a variety of other sites which showed and still show the resiliency and the creativity of the Appalachian mountaineer.
The same mix of problem, potential, and progress has made itself felt on the Eastern Band of the Cherokees. Their population within the Qualla Boundary doubled from approximately 2,000 in 1930 to more than 4,000 forty years later. This increase has only pointed more urgently to the economic, social, and cultural challenges confronting the Cherokees.
By 1930, the inhabitants of the Qualla Boundary had reached a kind of balance between the customs of the past and the demands of the present. Most families owned 12 or 16 hectares (30 or 40 acres) of woodland, with a sixth of that cleared and planted in corn, beans, or potatoes. A log or frame house, a small barn and other outbuildings, and the animals—a horse, a cow, a few hogs, chickens—rounded out the Cherokee family’s possessions, which about equalled those of the neighboring whites. The Eastern Band itself was unified by two main strands: first, the land tenure system by which the more than 20,230 Qualla hectares (50,000 acres) could be leased, but not sold, to whites; and second, the lingering social organization of the clan.
Smithsonian Institution