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Park’s Little River area has interesting past
Listening to 104-year-old Bessie Nations reminisce about her younger days in what is now part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park prompted me to look for other sources of information on the Sugarlands area.
When reading last year’s Together We Read title, Horace Kephart’s “Our Southern Highlanders,” I found several references to the area. One chapter – titled “A Raid into the Sugarlands” – echoes Bessie’s summation of the community’s chief occupation during her formative years.
“Most everybody made whiskey,” she said. “They didn’t have any other way to make a living.”
Kephart also described a logging railroad that was being “pushed up into the wilderness.”
That train, which carried out the huge logs of the Smokies’ virgin forest, was also mentioned by Bessie, who rode it from Sugarlands out to Little River to stay with her sister Mel.
For those with an interest in such matters, former Knoxville (Tennessee) Journal columnist Vic Weals’ 1993 book, “Last Train to Elkmont,” offers history and great photos about the logging operations on Little River and its tributaries. Its subtitle, “A look back at life on Little River in the Great Smoky Mountains,” is a pretty accurate synopsis of the book. The “look” is achieved through more than 120 rare photographs of 6-foot-diameter trees, splash dams, log slides, ox teams, mountain homes and the trains that once chugged through the Smokies’ valleys and coves.
It has an image of the “biggest known chestnut tree” in the Smokies. The giant grew below Tremont Falls and was initially rejected by the timber-cutters because part of it was hollow. Though no diameter measurement is given, the tree is wider than the five people standing in front of it. That chestnut was eventually cut, and the logs were used in a retaining wall that was constructed when the railroad was built above Townsend, Tenn., in 1925.
Weals’ book also gives a nod to the area’s history of moonshiners and stills. In the chapter “Walker Valley: the only world there was” (this book has great chapter titles; others include “When death had the last dance” and “Just say ‘no’ to george-shooters”), Weals tells of the exploits of pioneer Will Walker and notes that while Walker rarely drank and wasn’t known to make liquor, a number of his relatives did both. A nearby cove bears the name “Stillhouse Hollow” to prove it.
The chapter on Walker is a good example of the kinds of stories Weals documents in his book, which he researched during his 37 years at the newspaper.
Walker and his wife, Nancy Caylor, moved into “the wilderness of the Middle Fork of Little River” in 1859, the year they married, and were the first settlers in what came to be known as “Walker Valley.” He built a cabin of poplar logs, and the couple lived there for all 60 years of their marriage, which ended with Will Walker’s death in 1919. Though many in the area left to fight in the Civil War, Walker avoided the conflict and stayed in his valley. Weals describes the 30 years after the war as a time of peace for Will and Nancy – a time when outsiders weren’t aware of their existence, and “few coveted their mountain acreage with its private waterfalls and stands of giant timber.”
All that changed with the arrival of the 20th Century. Logging railroads came into the West and East prongs of the river. According to Weals, the Middle Prong would have been a more accessible valley for the railroad, but Walker wouldn’t sell. In fact, Walker is said to have made a vow that he would never sell out to the timber companies.
Life circumstances forced him to change his mind. Disabled by a stroke, he finally accepted an offer from W.B.Townsend, president of Little River Lumber Co. in 1918.
He especially loved the huge poplars and hemlocks on Thunderhead Prong, the stream that drains Thunderhead Mountain’s northeast slope and is one of the main feeder streams of the Middle Prong, and he “expected to the last to be able to save them from the Townsend band saws.” One of Walker’s daughters, who was present on the day of the sale said that Walker “tried to exact a promise that Thunderhead Prong would not be cut.” The daughter later recalled that such a pledge had been made to her father.
However, that vow was kept only until the time of Townsend’s death in 1936. The tract was cut a short time later.
“If Walker could have been healthy a while longer, and hadn’t been desperately short of cash for living expenses, he might have saved Thunderhead Prong as original wilderness for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” Weals writes.
Through stories like Walker’s, journalist Weals makes the history of the Little River area come alive.
“Last Train to Elkmont” was published by Olden Press in Knoxville.
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