Chapter VI: Part 2 (4)

Only a few years earlier Kephart had said:

“_Here to-day is the last stand of primeval American forest at its best. If saved--and if saved at all it must be done at once--it will be a joy and a wonder to our people for all time. The nation is summoned by a solemn duty to preserve it._”

And it was, indeed, preserved. The Federal Government in 1933 contributed a final $2 million to the cause, establishing the figure of $12 million as the grand total of money raised for the park. On September 2, 1940, with land acquisition almost completed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Great Smoky Mountains National Park “for the permanent enjoyment of the people.”

The park movement’s greatest victory, coming as it did at Kephart’s death, lent a special significance to his life. For his experience symbolized the good effects that a national park in the Great Smoky Mountains could create. These mountains and their people inspired him to write eloquently of their truth and endurance; his own health seemed to thrive in the rugged, elemental environment of the Smokies. Perhaps most important of all, he discovered here the impact of what it can mean to know a real home. Having found a home for himself, he labored tirelessly for a national park to give to his fellow countrymen the same opportunity for wonder and renewal and growth.

George A. Grant

_An early morning fog cloaks the dense vegetation and rolling hills at Cove Creek Gap. Such scenes inspired many people to rally around the idea of purchasing land for a park._ ]

National Park Service

_Those attending a meeting March 6, 1928, when a $5 million gift from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial was announced, included (front from left) former Tennessee Gov. Ben W. Hooper, Willis P. Davis, E. E. Conner, David C. Chapman, Gov. Henry H. Horton, John Nolan, Knoxville Mayor James A. Fowler, (back from left) Kenneth Chorley, Arno B. Cammerer, Wiley Brownlee, J. M. Clark, Margaret Preston, Ben A. Morton, Frank Maloney, Cary Spence, and Russell Hanlon._ ]

_John Walker, the patriarch of a large self-reliant family, admires cherries he raised at his home in Little Greenbrier._

Jim Shelton
]

The Past Becomes Present

As early as 1930, citizens and officials across the United States had begun to realize that a new additional park would indeed encompass and preserve the Great Smoky Mountains. Hard-working Maj. J. Ross Eakin, the first superintendent of the park, arrived at the beginning of the next year from his previous post in Montana’s Glacier National Park and was quickly introduced to the cold, mid-January winds of the Great Smokies and some of the controversies that had arisen during establishment of the park.

At first, Eakin and his few assistants limited their duties to the basics; they marked boundaries, prevented hunting, fought and forestalled fire. But as the months passed, as the park grew in size and its staff increased in number, minds and muscles alike tackled the real problem of shaping a sanctuary which all the people of present and future generations could enjoy.

Help came from an unexpected quarter. The economic depression that had gripped the country in 1930 tightened its stranglehold as the decade progressed. In the famous “Hundred Days” spring of 1933, a special session of Congress passed the first and most sweeping series of President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. The Civilian Conservation Corps, created in April, established work for more than two million young men. CCC camps, paying $30 a month for work in conservation, flood control, and wilderness projects, sprang up.

As far as the young, struggling Great Smoky Mountains National Park was concerned, this new CCC program could not have come at a better time. Through the Corps, much-needed manpower converged by the hundreds on the Smokies from such places as New Jersey, Ohio, and New York City. Supervised by Park Service officials and reserve officers from the U.S. Army, college-age men first set up their own camps--17 in all--and then went about that old familiar labor in the Smokies, landscaping and building roads. In addition, they constructed trails, shelters, powerlines, fire towers, and bridges.

Some of their tent-strewn camps were pitched on old logging sites with familiar names like Smokemont and Big Creek. Others, such as Camp No. 413 on Forney Creek, were more remote but no less adequate. Ingenuity, sparked by necessity, created accommodations which made full use of all available resources. At Camp Forney, for instance, there was a barracks, a messhall, a bathhouse, and an officers’ quarters. Water from clear, cold Forney Creek was piped into the kitchen; food was stored in a homemade ice chest. The residents of the camp, seeing no reason why they should rough it more than necessary, added a library, a post office, and a commissary in their spare time.

The CCC men, their ages between 18 and 25, did not forget recreation. As teams organized for football, baseball, boxing, wrestling, and soccer, the hills resounded with unfamiliar calls of scores and umpires’ decisions, while the more familiar tussles of boxing and wrestling raised echoes of old partisan matches throughout the hills. At times, these young workers answered the urge to ramble, too. One of them later recalled his days as a radio man on the top of Mt. Sterling:

“_It was seven miles steep up there, and sometimes I’d jog down about sundown and catch a truck for Newport. That’s where we went to be with people. The last truck brought us back after midnight._”

A minor problem sometimes arose when the CCC “outsiders” began dating local girls; farming fathers sometimes set fires to give the boys something else to do during the weekends. The conflict of cultures was thrown into a particularly sharp light when a Corps participant shot a farmer’s hog one night and shouted that he had killed a bear!

On the whole, however, the Civilian Conservation Corps program in the Great Smoky Mountains was a major success. In one or two extremely rugged areas of the park, retired loggers were hired in 10-day shifts to hack out or even drill short trail lengths. The rest of the 965-kilometer (600-mile) trail system, together with half a dozen fire towers and almost 480 kilometers (300 miles) of fire roads and tourist highways, was the product of the CCC. When Superintendent Eakin evaluated the work of only the first two years of the CCC’s operation, he equated it with a decade of normal accomplishment.

Through these and similar efforts, which included almost 110 kilometers (70 miles) of the famous Appalachian Trail, the natural value of the Great Smoky Mountains became a recognized and established lure for thousands, eventually millions, of visitors. But there was another resource that remained untapped, a challenge to the national park purpose and imagination. This resource was first overlooked, then neglected, and finally confronted with respect. The resource was the people and their homes.

Many previous owners of park land had received lifetime leases that allowed them to live on in their dwellings, work their fields, and cut dead timber even while tourists streamed through the Smokies. Some of the lessees, such as those living near Gatlinburg, saw a new era coming, thrusting back the street-ends until motels and restaurants and craft shops pushed against an abandoned apple orchard or a 10-plot cemetery or a deserted backyard laced with lilacs. These rememberers of an earlier time relinquished their lands in the park, more often than not resettling within sight of the mountain range and the homeland they had just left.

Yet a few lessees, those living further up the valleys, deeper into the mountains, or isolated from the well-traveled paths, these few folks stayed on. The Walker sisters of Little Greenbrier Cove were representative of this small group.

John Walker, their father, was himself the eldest of his parents’ 15 children. In 1860, at the age of 19, he became engaged to 14-year-old Margaret Jane King. The Civil War postponed their wedding, and John, an ardent Unionist who had enlisted in the First Tennessee Light Artillery, spent three months in a Confederate prison and lost 45 kilograms (100 pounds) before he was exchanged and provided with a pension. In 1866, they were finally married. After Margaret Jane’s father died, the young couple moved into the King homestead in Little Greenbrier.

They had eleven children: four boys, seven girls. John remained a strong Republican and Primitive Baptist; he liked to boast that in a long and fruitful lifetime he had spent a total of 50 cents on health care for his family (two of his sons had once required medicine for the measles). Margaret Jane was herself an “herb doctor” and a midwife, talents which complemented John’s skills as a blacksmith, carpenter, miller, farmer. Once, as Margaret Jane was chasing a weasel from her hens, the reddish-brown animal bit her thumb and held on; she calmly thrust her hand into a full washtub, where the weasel drowned in water stained by her blood.

Joseph S. Hall

_Columbus “Clum” Cardwell of Hills Creek, Tennessee, worked in the CCC garage at Smokemont. That experience led to a 23-year career as an auto-mechanic at the national park._ ]

Edouard E Exline

_Little Greenbrier Cove was known to some people as Five Sisters Cove because of the Walker sisters’ place just above the schoolhouse. The Walkers had their garden and grape arbors close to the house for handy tending._ ]

Edouard E Exline

_Inside, everything was neat as a pin with coats, hats, baskets, guns, and what-have-you hanging on the newspaper-covered walls._ ]

Edouard E Exline

_Sitting on the front porch are (from left) Polly, Louisa, and Martha. Also on the porch is a loom made by their father (see page 120) and a spinning wheel._ ]

The children grew up. The three older boys married and moved away. The youngest, Giles Daniel, left for Iowa and fought in World War I. Sarah Caroline, the only one of the daughters ever to marry, began her life with Jim Shelton in 1908. Hettie Rebecca worked for a year or two in a Knoxville hosiery mill, but the Depression sent her back home. When Nancy Melinda died in 1931, the original home place was left in the hands of five sisters; Hettie, Margaret Jane, Polly, Louisa Susan, and Martha Ann.

They lived the self-sufficiency of their ancestors. They stated simply that “our land produces everything we need except sugar, soda, coffee, and salt.” Their supplies came from the grape arbor, the orchard, the herb and vegetable garden; the sheep, hogs, fowl, and milch cows; the springhouse crocks of pickled beets and sauerkraut; the dried food and the seed bags and the spice racks that hung from nails hammered into the newspaper-covered walls of the main house. The material aspects of their surroundings represented fully the fabric of life as it had been known in the hundreds of abandoned cabins and barns and outbuildings that dotted the landscape of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And the Walker sisters were not about to give up their way of life without a struggle. In a poem, “My Mountain Home,” Louisa expressed the family’s feelings:

“_There is an old weather bettion house
That stands near a wood
With an orchard near by it
For all most one hundred years it has stood_

“_It was my home in infency
It sheltered me in youth
When I tell you I love it
I tell you the truth_

“_For years it has sheltered
By day and night
From the summer sun’s heat
And the cold winter blight._

“_But now the park commesser
Comes all dressed up so gay
Saying this old house of yours
We must now take away_

“_They coax they wheedle
They fret they bark
Saying we have to have this place
For a National park_

“_For us poor mountain people
They dont have a care
But must a home for
The wolf the lion and the bear_

“_But many of us have a title
That is sure and will hold
To the City of peace
Where the streets are pure gold_

“_There no lion in its fury
Those pathes ever trod
It is the home of the soul
In the presence of God_

“_When we reach the portles
Of glory so fair
The Wolf cannot enter
Neather the lion or bear_

“_And no park Commissioner
Will ever dar
To desturbe or molest
Or take our home from us there._”

Joseph S. Hall

_Before leaving for Lufty Baptist Church, Alfred Dowdle and his family of Collins Creek pose for Joseph S. Hall, who was studying linguistics in the Smokies for the Park Service._ ]

In January of 1941, however, the Walker sisters relented a little and sold their 50 hectares (123 acres) to the United States for $4,750 and a lifetime lease. Partly because of this unique situation, this special lifestyle, park officials delayed any well-defined program to recreate and present a vanishing culture. When the _Saturday Evening Post_ “discovered” the Walker sisters in 1946, tourists in the Smokies flocked to the Walker home as if it were a museum of Appalachia. The sisters themselves tolerated the visitors, even sold mountain “souvenirs.” But the years passed, three of the sisters died, and in 1953 Margaret Jane and Louisa wrote to the park superintendent:

“_I have a request to you Will you please have the Sign a bout the Walker Sisters taken down the one on High Way 73 especially the reason I am asking this there is just 2 of the sister lives at the old House place one is 70 years of age the other is 82 years of age and we can’t receive so many visitors. We are not able to do our Work and receive so many visitors, and can’t make sovioners to sell like we once did and people will be expecting us to have them...._”

The park, of course, cooperated and helped the sisters until Louisa, the last, died in 1964.

Increasingly the park recognized the value of the human history of the Smokies. Out of that recognition came interpretive projects and exhibits at Cades Cove, Oconaluftee, Sugarlands, and a variety of other sites which showed and still show the resiliency and the creativity of the Appalachian mountaineer.

The same mix of problem, potential, and progress has made itself felt on the Eastern Band of the Cherokees. Their population within the Qualla Boundary doubled from approximately 2,000 in 1930 to more than 4,000 forty years later. This increase has only pointed more urgently to the economic, social, and cultural challenges confronting the Cherokees.

By 1930, the inhabitants of the Qualla Boundary had reached a kind of balance between the customs of the past and the demands of the present. Most families owned 12 or 16 hectares (30 or 40 acres) of woodland, with a sixth of that cleared and planted in corn, beans, or potatoes. A log or frame house, a small barn and other outbuildings, and the animals--a horse, a cow, a few hogs, chickens--rounded out the Cherokee family’s possessions, which about equalled those of the neighboring whites. The Eastern Band itself was unified by two main strands: first, the land tenure system by which the more than 20,230 Qualla hectares (50,000 acres) could be leased, but not sold, to whites; and second, the lingering social organization of the clan.

These clans, which largely paralleled the five main towns of Birdtown, Wolftown, Painttown, Yellow Hill, and Big Cove, stabilized the population into groups and offered, through such methods as the dance, an outlet for communication and expression. Through the Friendship dance, for example, young people could meet each other. The Bugah dance depended upon joking and teasing among relatives. And the revered Eagle dance celebrated victory in the ball games between Cherokee communities.

The whirlwind changes of the mid-20th century tipped whatever balance the Cherokees had gained. The Great Depression, World War II, and the explosion of tourism and mobility and business opportunity brought inside the Qualla Boundary both a schedule of modernization and a table of uncertainty. The dance declined in importance. Surrounding counties seemed to take better advantage of the new trends than these natives who had been cast into a political no-man’s-land.

By the 1950s, the Eastern Band could look forward to a series of familiar paradoxes: relatively poor education; a wealth of small tourist enterprise and a dearth of large, stable industry; an unsurpassed mountain environment and an appalling state of public health. A 1955 survey of health conditions, for instance, found that 90 percent of 600 homes in seven Cherokee districts had insufficient water, sewage, and garbage facilities. More than 95 percent of the housing was substandard. Diseases springing from inadequate sanitation prevailed.

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.

Smithsonian Institution

_Dances are associated with certain traditional Cherokee games. Separate groups of women and lacrosse-like players are about to begin a pre-game dance in 1888._ ]

Smithsonian Institution

_Nine men celebrate a game victory with an Eagle Dance in 1932._ ]

Charles S. Grossman

_Samson Welsh shoots arrows with a blow gun at the Cherokee Indian Fair in 1936._ ]

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.

The present-day Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, located upon a peaceful estate in the heart of commercial Gatlinburg, attests to the imagination of a generous group, the cooperation of a chosen community, and the lasting good works of both. Like Qualla, like the CCC camps, like the park today, and, most of all, like the Walker place, Arrowmont signifies the profound beauty that can result when people practice a simple respect for their homeland.

Handicrafts

Woods and meadows, fields and mines and swamps, every part of the natural scene yielded some material that could be transformed into a handcrafted article of usefulness and beauty. From the trees came richly grained lumber for furniture and musical instruments, sturdy timber for tools and utensils, and softer wood for whittling “play-pretties” and purely decorative objects. Wood-working, even sculpture, became one of the outstanding skills of mountain artisans. All the crafts involved in textile design and production were part of the region’s history: weaving and spinning, quilting and braiding and hooking, making dyes from roots, barks, vegetables, herbs. Baskets were woven from oak and hickory splits, from river cane, and honeysuckle vines.

Cherokee and mountaineer alike shared designs and shapes for the baskets made from different materials for uses ranging from egg-gathering to household storage.

Laura Thornborough
]

And, as illustrated by Mrs. Matt Ownby (above) and Mack McCarter (above), basketmaking was something done by both men and women. Clay, fashioned on rude, homemade potter’s wheels of the earlier days, provided pots and pitchers of primitive handsomeness and daily utility. Broomcorn and sedge offered materials for rough but effective brooms. Leather crafts arose from the need for harnesses on mules and horse, and shoes on people. Skinning, treating, tanning were just the first steps of a long, demanding process of turning raw hide into usable leather. The use of corn shucks illustrated with special clarity the mountain person’s inventiveness in utilizing everything he raised or acquired. Corn shucks could make a stout chair-bottom or a captivating little mountain doll. Nimble fingers turned the husks into a dozen different articles. In his _Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands_, Allen H. Eaton wrote in 1937: “We must try to find the qualities of excellence which these people have developed before insisting that they accept our formula for living, thinking, and expression.... Better certainly, if we know, as those who have worked and lived in the Highlands have had a chance to know, what are the standards and the ideals to which the people cling. But even that experience should not be necessary for us to understand and to cherish the spirit of the young highlander who, after expressing gratitude to the missionary who had come in to help build a school, said with characteristic mountain frankness, ‘Bring us your civilization, but leave us our own culture.’”

Alan Rinehart

_Claude Huskey and Mack McCarter make chairs at one of the shops in Gatlinburg in the 1930s._ ]

Edouard E. Exline

_John Jones was the miller in the late 1930s at the Mingus Creek Mill in Oconaluftee._ ]

Charles S. Grossman

_Tom and Jerry Hearon, along with John Burns, hew a log trough with a broad ax and adze._ ]

Charles S. Grossman

_With a mallet and ax, Tom and Jerry Hearon split logs into bolts from which to make shingles._ ]

Charles S. Grossman

_Dave Bohanan feeds cane between the rollers as he makes sorghum molasses._ ]

National Park Service

_A Smokies resident builds a flat bed for his sourwood sled._ ]

_A visit to the cabin of John and Lurena Oliver takes a family back to yesteryear in Cades Cove._

Fred R. Bell
]

Coming Home

Tremont. This Tennessee valley of the Middle Prong of the Little River does not differ widely from Deep Creek or Greenbrier or Cosby or most of the other branches and hollows of the Smokies. Each, including Tremont, penetrates the hills, divides them like a furrow, and protects its own rocky, racing stream with a matting of thick, green growth. Nearby Cades Cove and North Carolina’s Cataloochee might guard a few hectares of lush, hill-cradled pasture or farmland, but even these are stamped with the clear, cool air and feel of the Great Smoky Mountains.

So Tremont is representative. And, perhaps because of this, it is a symbol--a symbol of both the mystery and the clarity of the mountains which give it a name. There is, for example, the legend of a small boy who wandered into the backcountry above the “Sinks” and was lost for two days. Uncle Henry Stinnett, a worried neighbor, searched in vain for the boy until he dreamed, on the second night, of a child sleeping near a log on a familiar ridge. Henry Stinnett renewed the search, and the boy was indeed found asleep “under the uprooted stump of a tree.”

And side by side with such a strange vision exists its opposite: the unforeseen. In August of 1947, a young woman was sunbathing on the boulders of the river. While she enjoyed the rays of the warm sun downstream, the high upper reaches of the prong were being flooded by the swollen, flash attacks of a hidden cloudburst. Within minutes, the woman drowned in a hurtling wall of water.

Yet there is also a clarity here that offsets the unknown. It is a quality of outlook, a confidence of ability and expectation for the future as immense as the mountains which inspire it. But it is an awareness grounded in the facts of history and anecdote and the crisp, fresh sounds of children’s voices.

“Black Bill” Walker knew about children; he had more than 25 himself. A double first cousin to the father of Little Greenbrier’s Walker sisters, “Black Bill” or “Big Will” Walker moved into the lonely valley in 1859. He was only 21 years old then, and his name was simply William. He was accompanied by his strong 19-year-old wife, Nancy.

His mother was a Scot, a member of the McGill clan. His father, Marion, was another of those multitalented frontiersmen: miller, cattleman, orchardist, bear hunter, saddlebag preacher. William took up where his parents left off. He became the leader, the ruler of the community he had started. He was rumored to have been a Mormon, although denominations mattered little in the wilderness. He and Nancy raised seven children. Later wives bore him approximately 20 more.

_Legend has it that Black Bill Walker once went into a cave after a bear and came out alive--with the hide. The story is probably true, for he did many things on a grand scale. He was the patriarch not only of a large family, but of a community._

National Park Service
]

He milled his own corn and built log cabins for each of his families. He fashioned an immense muzzle-loading rifle, nicknamed it “Old Death,” and handled it with rare skill. Horace Kephart, in a 1918 magazine article, tells of a conversation he had with the 80-year-old hunter:

“_Black Bill’s rifle was one he made with his own hands in the log house where I visited him. He rifled it on a wooden machine that was likewise of his own make, and stocked it with wood cut on his own land. The piece was of a little more than half-ounce bore, and weighed 12½ pounds ... the old hunter showed me how he loaded...._

“‘_My bullets are run small enough so that a naked one will jest slip down on the powder by its own weight. When I’m in a hurry, I pour in the powder by guess, wet a bullet in my mouth, and drop it down the gun. Enough powder sticks to it to keep the ball from falling out if I shoot downhill. Then I snatch a cap from one o’ these strings, and--so._’

“_The old man went through the motions like a sleight-of-hand performer. The whole operation of loading took barely ten seconds._”

After Black Bill’s own children had grown, he went to the nearby town of Maryville and requested and received a school in the valley for children yet to come. He governed his settlement, yet he was not merely a governor. He was a remarkable man, an individualist who also built a community.

After Black Bill’s death in 1919, life in Tremont continued as before. Families still ate turkey and pheasant, squirrel and venison, sweet potatoes and the first greenery of spring, onions. Children’s bare feet remained tough enough to break open chestnut burrs. Mothers continued to put dried peaches in a jar full of moonshine, let it sit a day or two, and test their peach brandy with a sip or two. And on Christmas, fathers and sons “got out and shot their guns” in celebration.

Intervals of violence interrupted the daily routine. Farmers with cattle and sheep freely roaming the ridges sometimes made it hard for others to grow corn and similar crops. A hunter’s bear and ’coon dogs might kill some sheep. One “war” ended with a fire on Fodder Stack Mountain that raced down into Chestnut Flats and killed a number of sheep. No humans died, but the sheep men killed all the hunting dogs in the vicinity.

H. C. Wilburn

_“It is point blank aggravating, I can’t walk a log like I used to,” Aden Carver told H. C. Wilburn as he crossed Bradley Fork in October 1937 at the age of 91._ ]

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.

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.

They learn, first of all, fundamental concepts that are expressed simply: “You don’t have to have a lot of fancy buildings to do a good program,” or “You know, sometimes we teach a lot of theory and we don’t really get down to--I guess you’d call it the nitty-gritty,” or even “Now don’t chicken out, the way some of you did last time, step in the water.”

They learn of “quiet hour,” when, at the beginning of the week, each child stakes out a spot for himself in the woods, beside the stream, wherever choice leads. For an hour each day, in sun or rain, everybody seeks his or her own place and is assured of peace and privacy. A girl writes a poem to her parents; a fourth-grader contemplates on a rock by the water; and almost everyone who observes the quiet hour looks forward to it eagerly each day.

Fred R. Bell

_In an attempt to capture the spirit of the old days, a family climbs about a Cades Cove barn._ ]

_Pages 142-143: Members of the Tilman Ownby family of Dudley Creek, near Gatlinburg, gather for a reunion in the early 1900s. Many of their descendants still live in the Smokies area today._

National Park Service
]

They learn about the highly effective lessons that are scattered throughout the week, lessons such as “man and water,” “stream ecology,” “continuity and change.” Imaginative gatherings become not the exception but the rule: “Sometimes we take a group of children, divide them into members of a make-believe pioneer family, and take them up into a wilderness area, an area which is truly pristine, almost a virgin forest. And we let the kids imagine that they are this pioneer family, and that they are going to pick out a house site.” In one game called “succession,” a boy from blacktopped, “civilized” Atlanta might search along a road for signs of life on the pavement, then in the gravel, then in the grass, then within the vast, teeming forest. And a day’s trip to the Little Greenbrier schoolhouse gives the children of today a chance to experience what it was like when the Walker sisters and their ancestors sat on the hard wooden benches and learned the three R’s and felt the bite of a hickory switch.

It may seem odd that modern children should enjoy so much a trip to school. But enjoy it they do, for as they fidget on the wooden benches or spell against each other in an old-fashioned “spelldown” or read a mid-1800s dictionary that defines a kiss as “a salute with the lips,” they enter into a past place and a past time. For a few minutes, at least, they identify with the people who used to be here in these Smokies--not “play-acting” but struggling to survive and improve their lives.

The schoolhouse itself is old, built in 1882 out of poplar logs and white oak shingles. Its single room used to double as a church for the community, but now the two long, narrow windows on either side open out onto the protected forest of the park. A woman stands in the doorway, dressed in a pink bonnet and an old-fashioned, ankle-length dress. She rings a cast iron bell. The children, who have been out walking on this early spring morning, hear the bell and begin to run toward it. Some of them see the school and shout and beckon the others. In their hurry, they spread out and fill the clearing with flashes of color and expectation. The woman in the doorway is their teacher.

_Children anxiously line up to go back a few years with Elsie Burrell at the one-room schoolhouse in Little Greenbrier._

Clair Burket
]

They have spanned a century and longer. They now live in more worlds than one, because they have come to the place where their spirit lives. It is again homecoming in the Great Smoky Mountains.