The Lesson of Cades Cove by Bob and Julia McCormick
After filling most of our spring season with
family get-togethers and a multitude of homelife necessities, we finally loaded up our camper van and once again, embraced the freedom of the open road in early June. It couldn’t come soon enough! In past years we have celebrated the start of summer by heading west to the Rockies - and beyond - from our home in Tulsa. You could almost set your calendar by the direction our van was pointed as the days began to swelter in Oklahoma. This year, we resolved to head east of the Mississippi River - with a desire to explore country we had not yet touched, at least not with much conviction. Our first stay of length was in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in eastern Tennessee. We camped for a week in the park’s Cades Cove Campground. To say we were neophytes to this area is a bit of an understatement. It wasn’t until we opened the park map that we saw our campsite was just a few miles as the crow flies from the Appalachian Trail, which also doubles as the Tennessee - North Carolina border through most of the park. Nor did we appreciate the significance of where we made our camping reservations. Call it dumb luck when we decided in December 15
2022 that Cades Cove would be the first stop of our easterly summer tour. Cades Cove is deep in the beauty of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. If you look forward to black bears walking through your heavily wooded campsite, this is the place to be. One day, we were sitting outside soaking up the fresh air when a man casually walked up to us and said, “Excuse me, there is a bear behind you.” He wasn’t warning us to flee to the safety of our van but to get up, turn around, and enjoy the creature from a safe distance away. And we did just that. The bear, foraging for food in the brush behind our campsite, proceeded undeterred and uninterrupted through the entire length of the campground. But Cades Cove is more than simply a bearogling, tree-hugging paradise. It’s also deep in the history of the Appalachians. The term “cove” is Smoky Mountain vernacular for a flat valley surrounded by mountains. Part of Cades Cove’s special tie to history is its relative isolation in the mountain highlands. It was the cove’s fertile land that first drew in homesteaders. Records show John and Lucretia Oliver were the first permanent white settlers, making a home there in 1818. By 1830, there were churches and schools and by 1850, there were 671 people living on the roughly 6,800
