Pages 22-23: These proud people all dressed up in their Sunday best are members of the George H. Caldwell family.
H. C. Wilburn
They ate well. The creek bottomlands provided rich soil for tomatoes, corn and beans, cabbage and onions, potatoes and pumpkins. Split rail fences were devices to keep the cattle, hogs, and sheep out of the crops; the animals themselves foraged freely throughout the watershed, fattening on succulent grasses and an ample mast of acorns and chestnuts. Corn filled the cribs, salted pork and beef layered the meathouse, and cold bountiful springs watered the valley.
The Civil War erupted in 1861. Although Cataloochee lay officially in the Confederacy, this creek country was so remote, so distant from the slave plantations of the deep South, that no government dominated. Raiding parties from both sides rode through the valley, killing and looting as they went. Near Mt. Sterling Gap at the northern end of the watershed, Kirk’s Army made a man named Grooms play a fiddle before they murdered him. The people of Catalooch kept his memory alive throughout the century by playing that ill-starred “Grooms tune.”
But the war was only an interlude. Five years after its end, Cataloochee was estimated to have 500 hogs, sheep, milch cows, beef cattle, and horses; some 900 kilograms (2,000 pounds) of honey; and about 1,250 liters (1,320 quarts) of sorghum molasses. Sizable apple crops would begin to flourish during the next decade, and by 1900 the population of the valley would grow to over 700. Producing more than they themselves could use, these farmers began to trade with the outside world. They took their apples, livestock, chestnuts, eggs, honey, and ginseng to North Carolina markets in Fines Creek, Canton, and Waynesville, and to Tennessee outlets in Cosby, Newport, and Knoxville. With their cash money, they changed forever the Cataloochee of the early 1800s.
They sold honey and bought the tools of education. Using the tough, straight wood of a black gum or a basswood, a farmer hollowed out a section of the trunk with a chisel. He then slid a cross-stick through a hole bored near the bottom. Upon transplanting a beehive into the trunk and leaving an entrance at the bottom, he covered the top with a solid wooden lid and sealed it airtight with a mixture of mud and swamp-clay. In August, especially after the sourwoods had bloomed and the bees had built up a store of the delicately flavored honey, the beekeeper took a long hooked honey knife, broke the sealing, and cut out squares of the light golden comb to fill ten-gallon tins. He never went below the cross-stick; that honey was left for the bees. An enterprising family might trade 10 tins of honey in a season. And at the market, they would turn that honey into school supplies for the coming year: shoes, books, tablets, and pencils.
Like many others in the Smokies, Dan Myers of Cades Cove kept a few bees. He apparently was a little more carefree than some about the tops of his bee gums, or hives. Some old boards or scraps of tin, with the help of a couple of rocks, sufficed, whereas most people sealed their wooden tops with a little mud.
Charles S. Grossman