Pioneer Farmstead
What kind of people were the Smokies pioneers? Part of the answer awaits you at the Pioneer Farmstead next to the Oconaluftee Visitor Center on the North Carolina side of the park. The farmstead buildings suggest an independent people who were hardworking, laboring spring, summer, and fall to prepare for the coming winter.
This is a typical Southern Appalachian pioneer farm. The life style of earlier years is demonstrated by people in period dress here from May through October. A few animals roam the farm-yard and the garden produces traditional crops. In the fall sorghum cane may be pressed to make sorghum molasses. Inside the cabin—you can poke your head through its open doors and windows—traditional breads may be baking, or a quilt be patching, or wool a-spinning. And don’t forget to notice the fieldstone chimneys, the squared logs’ careful notchings, and the handsplit wooden “shakes” up on the roof.
Just up the road is Mingus Mill, an excellent example of a turbine-powered gristmill. A miller is often on hand May through October to answer your questions about how waterpower was used to produce cornmeal and flour. You might even be able to purchase some of the cornmeal or the flour ground right at the mill. Wheat is harder than corn and requires harder stone to grind it. Millstones for grinding wheat in this area were imported from France. The stones used for grinding corn were cut domestically.
A commercial mill the size of Mingus Mill would generally be built by a specially skilled carpenter known as a millwright, a term which has taken broader meaning today.
Cades Cove
Cades Cove
Cades Cove preserves the image of the early settlers’ self-sufficient life style in the Smokies. It was not all romance. Cades Cove itself is expansive, level, idyllic farmland, which hardly describes most of the Smokies. Cades Cove is today an open air museum. Here are the beautifully restored and picturesque Elijah Oliver cabin; the still-operated Cable Mill grinding flour with water power; and numerous churches, houses, and cabins. At Cable Mill are many artifacts of past agricultural practices from throughout the Smokies. The largely self-sufficient agricultural economy here came to an end with the advent of logging about 1900.
By 1920, most Smokies residents were linked to a cash economy, to manufactured items and store-bought foods. But Cades Cove preserves glimpses of the pioneer ingenuity that wrested a living from the landscape. Preserved with the cabins here are many ingenious devices such as effective door latches simply fashioned from local wood.
In 1850 Cades Cove supported 685 people in 132 families. Most originally came from Virginia via routes followed today by Interstate 81 and U.S. 411. A treaty in 1819 transferred the Cades Cove from Cherokee to State of Tennessee ownership. Settlers traded in what is now Townsend, and in Maryville and Knoxville.
A delightful 18-kilometer (11-mile) one-way loop road unfolds the quiet pleasures of Cades Cove to you. This is a popular route with bikers because it is so scenic—and not so arduous. Periodically the loop road is closed to motor vehicles for the sake of bicyclists. Early farmers were quick to appreciate the same level aspect of the cove that appeals to today’s cyclist.
Cherokee Indians
The Cherokee nation was settled in the shadow of the Smokies. “The place of the blue smoke,” they called the mountains in their heartland, and so the Smokies have become named. Myth, ritual, and religion bound the Cherokees closely to the land. Ironically, they enjoyed a sophisticated culture very similar to the white culture that would so cruelly supplant them. They were agrarian and democratic, and they believed in one god. They lived in mud-and-log cabins, women sharing tribal governance, and men sharing household duties.
The Cherokees rapidly adopted governmental features of the invading culture. They adopted a written legal code in 1808. Within a dozen years they had divided their nation into judicial districts with designated judges. Two years later they had established the Supreme Court of the feat. Within just two years of its adoption, The Cherokee Phoenix newspaper was published and most Cherokee-speakers could read and write! But the white people had an insatiable appetite for land. Treaty after treaty was made and broken. The fatal blow was the discovery of gold in 1828 near the Cherokee villages in northern Georgia. Within a few years all their land was confiscated. The infamous “Trail of Tears” came with passage of the 1830 Removal Act.
Some 13,000 Cherokees were forced to march to Oklahoma: 25 percent died en route. Not all left, however, and some soon returned. Today the eastern band of Cherokees lives on the Cherokee Reservation on the park’s North Carolina side.