The situation changed and is still in the process of change. The Eastern Band could not and cannot allow such oversight, such undercommittment. The Qualla Boundary Community Action Program sponsored day-care centers in several Cherokee communities. In the years surrounding 1960, three industries manufacturing products from quilts to moccasins located at Cherokee and began to employ hundreds of men and women on a continuing, secure basis. A few years later, community action turned its efforts to the housing problem; as the program drove ahead, 400 homes were either “constructed or significantly improved,” reducing the percentage of substandard houses to about 50 percent. As for living facilities, the percentages have been exactly reversed: 90 percent of homes now have septic tanks and safe water.
The Cherokee Boys’ Club, a nonprofit organization incorporated in 1964, has improved the quality of life within the Qualla Boundary. The club’s self-supporting projects include a complete bus service for Cherokee schools and garbage collection for the North Carolina side of the Smokies. Along with the Qualla Civic Center, the Boys’ Club serves a useful socializing function as the modern equivalent to past dances and rituals.
Perhaps the soundest of the native Cherokee businesses is the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual. Since 1947, the Qualla Co-op has marketed the work of hundreds of Indian craftsmen. Magnificent carvings of cherry and walnut and baskets of river cane and honeysuckle preserve the skills and art of the past and symbolize the performance and the promise of the Eastern Band of the Cherokees.
The Tennessee portion of the Great Smoky Mountains has seen its share of major accomplishments through imagination and hard work. One such accomplishment is Gatlinburg’s Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, known as the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School during the early years of the century.
In 1910, Gatlinburg comprised a half-dozen houses, a couple of general stores, a church, and scant educational facilities. Perhaps 200 families lived in the upper watershed of the Little Pigeon River, and these families looked to Gatlinburg for trading, visiting, and whatever learning they could reasonably expect to receive during their lifetimes. In that year, the national sorority of Pi Beta Phi decided to establish a needed educational project somewhere in rural America; after discussing a possible site with the U.S. commissioner of education, who suggested Tennessee, and the state commissioner, who chose Sevier County, and the county superintendent, who pointed to the isolated community of Gatlinburg, the group picked this little village in the shadow of the Great Smokies as the area in which they would work.
On February 20, 1912, Martha Hill, a neatly dressed and determined young brunette from Nashville, opened school in an abandoned Baptist church at the junction of Baskins Creek and the Little Pigeon River. Thirteen suspicious but willing pupils, their ages ranging from 4 to 24, offered themselves for instruction. At first, attendance was irregular, but by Christmastime, a celebration at the schoolroom drew a crowd of 300. Miss Hill, herself tired and a bit ill from spending exhausting hours nursing several sick neighbors, had to be brought to the party by wagon from a cottage she had leased for $1.50 per month.
The winter warmed into spring and the one-room school grew into a settlement school. Workers from Pi Beta Phi organized a sewing club for girls, a baseball club for boys. Martha Hill gathered some books together to form the nucleus of a library. Students built barns and chicken houses on land bought with sorority and community contributions.
During the next two years, achievements small and large piled upon each other. The library expanded to almost 2,000 books; school enrollment swelled to well over 100. Pi Phi sank a second well, tended a fruit orchard, took the children on their first trip to Maryville. The people of Gatlinburg began to accept the school both in spirit and in fact.
Activities branched out into other fields. In the fall of 1920, nurse Phyllis Higinbotham, an experienced graduate of Johns Hopkins, converted the old cottage into a hospital. Endowed with both unswerving dedication and unending friendliness, “Miss Phyllis” walked and rode from house to house, trained midwives, taught hygiene, and persuaded doctors from Knoxville and Sevierville to keep occasional office hours in Gatlinburg. In 1926, after firmly establishing a model rural health center, Phyllis Higinbotham became state supervisor of public health nurses for Tennessee.
As time passed, the county and the burgeoning town assumed greater responsibility for the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School’s crucial progress in the vital areas of health and education. But the broad-based school was by no means undermined. Almost as soon as it had arrived in Gatlinburg, Pi Phi had begun offering adult courses in home economics, agriculture, weaving, and furniture making. These courses formed the basis for a true cottage industry which in the late 1920s benefitted more than 100 local families. And when the coming of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park assured a constant wave of tourism, the products of folk culture in the Smokies rode the crest of that wave.