Yet the simplicity of life could not insulate the Cataloochee area from “progress.” As the 20th century unfolded, scattered individual loggers gave way to the well organized methods of large company operations. Small-scale cutting of yellow-tulip poplar and cherry boomed into big business during the early 1900s. Suncrest Lumber Company, with a sawmill in Waynesville, began operations on Cataloochee Creek and hauled out hardwood logs in great quantities. Although the spruce and balsam at the head of the watershed were left standing, the logging industry, with its capital, manpower, and influence, vastly altered the valley.
With the late 1920s came an announcement that the states of North Carolina and Tennessee had decided to give the Great Smoky Mountains to the nation as a park. The residents of Cataloochee were incredulous. They were attached to this homeplace; they still referred to a short wagon ride as a trip and called a visit to the county seat a journey. But the park arrived, and the young families of the valley moved away, and then the older ones did the same. Gradually they came to understand that another sort of homeland had been established. And the strangers who now visit their valleys and creeks can look about and appreciate the heritage these settlers and their descendants left behind.
The old families still come back. They return to this creek on the August Sunday of Homecoming. In the early morning hours they fill the wooden benches of tiny Palmer’s Chapel for singing and preaching and reminiscing; at noon they share bountiful food spread on long plank tables beside clear, rushing Cataloochee Creek; in the mellow afternoon they rediscover the valley. For what lures the stranger is what lures the old families back. They come to sense again the beauty and the permanence and even the foggy mystery of the Great Smokies. And this that beckons them back is that which beckoned the Indian discoverers of these mountains hundreds of years ago.
Rail Fences
“Something there is that does not love a wall,” poet Robert Frost once wrote. Likewise, many mountain people felt something there is that does not love a fence. Fences were built for the purpose of keeping certain creatures out—and keeping other creatures in. During early days of settlement there were no stock-laws in the mountains. Cattle, mules, horses, hogs, sheep, and fowls ranged freely over the countryside. Each farmer had to build fences to protect his garden and crops from these domestic foragers as well as some of the wild “varmint” marauders. Rail fences had several distinct merits: they provided a practical use for some of the trees felled to clear crop and pasture land; they required little repair; they blended esthetically into the surroundings and landscape. Mountain fences have been described as “horse-high, bull-strong, and pig-tight.” W. Clark Medford, of North Carolina, has told us how worm fences ([right]) were built:
H. Woodbridge Williams
Charles S. Grossman
“There was no way to build a fence in those days except with rails—just like there was no way to cover a house except with boards. First, they went into the woods, cut a good ‘rail tree’ and, with axes, wedge and gluts, split the cuts (of six-, eight- and ten-foot lengths as desired) into the rail. After being hauled to location, they were placed along the fence-way, which had already been cut out and made ready. Next, the ‘worm’ was laid. That is, the ground-rails were put down, end-on-end, alternating the lengths—first a long rail, then a short one—and so on through. Anyone who has seen a rail fence knows that the rails were laid end-on-end at angles—not at right angles, but nearly so. One course of rails after another would be laid up on the fence until it had reached the desired height (most fences were about eight rails high, some ten). Then, at intervals, the corners (where the rails lapped) would be propped with poles, and sometimes a stake would be driven. Such fences, when built of good chestnut or chestnut-oak rails, lasted for many years if kept from falling down.”