By the early 1920s, change was creeping into the valley. The Little River Lumber Company persuaded Black Bill’s children to do what he would not do: sell the timber. From the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties, more than 1,000 workers lived in the logging town of Tremont, patronized the Tremont Hotel, and hauled away tens of thousands of the virgin forest’s giants.
With the Great Smoky Mountains National Park came the CCC. The Civilian Conservation Corps camp on the old lumber site, together with a Girl Scout camp that would last until 1959, signaled a retreat—and a progression—from the extractive industry of the past. Although the CCC disbanded during World War II, a modern-day CCC arrived in 1964. The Job Corps combined conservation work, such as trail maintenance and stream cleaning, with training in vital skills of roadbuilding, masonry, and the operation of heavy machinery.
Then, in 1969, Tremont entered a new era. The previous years of innovation seemed to prepare the secluded valley for a truly fresh and creative effort in education. The Walkers would have been proud of what came to be the Environmental Education Center.
The Center draws on both original and time-tested techniques to teach grade school children basic awareness and respect for the natural world around them. Because its achievements are both fundamental and effective, and because it treats a splendid mountain area as a lasting and deserving homeland for plants and animals and human beings, the story of Tremont culminates this history of the Great Smoky Mountains. For here is one of the ways the Smokies can be best used: as a wild refuge and a living laboratory where young people may discover the deeper meaning of the park’s past and why, for the future, there is a park at all.
The Environmental Education Center, administered by Maryville College from 1969 through 1979 and since then by Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association, evolved through planning by both the park and nearby county school systems. One of the rangers, Lloyd Foster, became so attached to the ideas being presented that he obtained a leave of absence from his work, persistently promoted the project, and became Tremont’s first director. Experienced teachers such as Elsie Burrell and Randolph Shields helped Foster convert talk into action, rhetoric into experience.
Fred R. Bell
In an attempt to capture the spirit of the old days, a family climbs about a Cades Cove barn.
The center soon offered a real alternative to conventional and overcrowded schools caught in the midst of industrialization. Teacher-led or parent-supervised classes from a multitude of states and cities organized themselves, paid a base fee for each member, and came to the valley for one week during the year. Within months, Tremont was teaching elementary students at the rate of thousands per year. The organizers retained their informal, camp-like approach to interested groups and added to the original dining room and two dormitories an audiovisual room and a laboratory complete with powerful microscopes. As the program expanded, children could fulfill their imaginative promptings in an art room, or build a miniature skidder in the crafts room, or turn to a library of extensive readings.
As the idea of environmental education at Tremont and elsewhere spread by word of mouth, volunteers from across the country arrived and aided those already at work. High school and college students participated in and still attend weekend conferences on the activities and the progress of the Center.