Smokies Life Issue 10 (Volume 6 Issue 1, Spring 2012)

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SMO KIES LIFE MAG A ZIN E

—John D. Rockefeller, Jr., following his first visit to the Great Smoky Mountains

volume 6 #1

"We expected much, but found far more beauty than we had even dared hope."

USA

GSMA

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GSMNP ARCHIVES

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From the Editor: Park Visitation Hits 16 Year Low Visitation to Great Smoky Mountains National Park is declining. On the one hand, this is cause for celebration. Less impact on park resources. Fewer traffic jams in Cades Cove and on Newfound Gap Road. More available parking at popular trailheads (at least in theory). And, after all, we’re still America’s most visited national park by a wide margin. But why has our visitation dropped by over a million during the same time period that the U.S. population has jumped by 60 million? From people who track trends in

park use and outdoor recreation, theories abound. Our nation’s population demographics have changed. Children spend less time exploring the outdoors. We are becoming more urban and indoorsy. We’re too busy watching cable TV, playing Angry Birds, and keeping up on Facebook to go hiking. It is a shame that children may not be having the rich outdoor experiences we had in our youth, splashing about in mountain streams and shuffling through the autumn leaves. It would be a pity if urban adults never

Steve Kemp Editor Steve@GSMAssoc.org

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got to see a black bear cub, or a salamander, or a cove hardwood forest, except on the flat screen. And it would be tragic if national parks lost the constituents to fend off those who view our public lands as wasted opportunities for commercial development. I do know that nobody knows what the future will bring. It’s possible that as America’s 70 million baby boomers retire they will flock to the parks and visitation will soar to new heights. And if not, well…maybe we can finally get a reservation for a weekend night on Mount Le Conte.

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Volume 6 Number 1 $6.95 Contributing Editor Steve Kemp Lead Designer Lisa Horstman National Park Service Publications Liaison Kent Cave Designers Joey Heath Karen Key Editorial Assistance Julie Brown Valerie Polk Susan Simpson Research Assistance Annette Hartigan Advertising Sales Curt Talbot Š2012 Great Smoky Mountains Association. No portion of this magazine may be reproduced without written permission from GSMA. Executive Director Terry Maddox Membership & Special Events Coordinator Judy Collins National Park Service Coordinator Elizabeth Dupree Great Smoky Mountains Association Board of Directors Danny Bernstein Warren Bielenberg Mitch Crisp William Hart, Jr. Dan Lawson Carolyn Leahy, Treasurer Kelly Leonard, Chairman Tom Massie David McGuire Barbara Muhlbeier, Vice Chairman Ken Smither Kate Welch Front cover photograph by Ryan Yoder Back cover photograph by Bill Lea Attention Retailers To carry Smokies Life in stores, contact Curt Talbot, Curt@GSMAssoc.org or (865) 436-7318 x350 Advertisers: Contact Curt Talbot, Curt@GSMAssoc.org or (865) 436-7318 x350 416 Cherry St., Gatlinburg, TN 37738. Printed in the U.S.A. Smokies Life (ISSN 1937-0725) is published biannually by Great Smoky Mountains Association, a nonprofit organization. P.O. Box 130, Gatlinburg, TN 37738-0130 (865) 436-7318. www.SmokiesInformation.org This magazine is a premium for members of Great Smoky Mountains Association. To join, change an address, or make other membership inquiries, contact membership and special events coordinator Judy Collins at the address above or Judy@GSMAssoc.org. Memberships start at $35 per year. No submissions of manuscripts, photographs, or art, please. Written queries are welcome. Copyright 2012 by Great Smoky Mountains Association. Send address changes or other membership queries to Judy Collins at the address above or Judy@GSMAssoc.org. Periodicals postage paid at Knoxville, TN. Postmaster: Send all address changes to Judy Collins, GSMA, P.O. Box 130, Gatlinburg, TN 37738-0130 or Judy@GSMAssoc.org. www.SmokiesInformation.org

The text pages of this magazine are certified by the Forest Stewardship CouncilŠ as adhering to strict environmental and social standards. Printed with vegetable inks.

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In This Issue Smokies Life Magazine Volume 6 Number 1 The Civil War Battle for Gatlinburg Is there a connection between the Civil War and today’s pancake houses? by Courtney Lix

Horace Goes Hollywood The 1927 film “Stark Love” is violent and sexy and was filmed in our own backyard. by John White

The Great Pretenders: Butterfly Deceit in the Smokies The Pipevine Swallowtail receives the sincerest form of flattery. by Charles Smith and Elizabeth Domingue

Weaving A Livelihood in the Smokies The strong tradition of weaving highlights the gift of something made by one’s own hands. by Rose Houk

Mountain Arts: The Nature Paintings of Charles H. Collum On Top of the World For Smoky Mountain Ridge Runners, the Appalachian Trail feels like home. by Don Williams

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Get Real!

Cocke County, Tennessee

For your next“Real” Smoky Mountain adventure, give us a holler! www.cockecounty.com 423.625.9675

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A Tale of Cherokee Rebels, Pancakes, and Tourism by Courtney Lix

atlinburg, my little hometown snuggled at the foot of the Great Smokies, is famous for many things: it’s where the song Rocky Top was written; where a very large population of native black bears roams the forested slopes of neighboring Great Smoky Mountains National Park; and where a downtown offers amusements ranging from an authentically preserved 1807 log cabin, a Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum, a Dukes of Hazzard Museum and a Mirror Maze, half a dozen (miniature) golf courses, and a replica of the Seattle Space Needle (slightly shorter than the original).

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Although I grew up in a house outside of town, with woods and a meadow and a creek winding close to our old tobacco barn, one of the top ten tourist destinations in the country was only a few miles away: Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with Gatlinburg situated at one of its main entrances. My elementary school was right downtown, surrounded not by neighborhoods and houses, but hotels. Across the street was The Village, a shopping complex built to resemble a quaint European hamlet. A hop-skip down the Parkway, you could be at an arcade,

a jungle-themed mini-golf course, a haunted house (the pay-to-get-scared kind), pose for some old-timey photos, or play laser tag. Forty years earlier, my father grew up in Gatlinburg. He remembers when there was a horseback riding establishment where today’s convention center sits (you walked very carefully on that side of the street). He remembers when the hotels had fleets of golf carts to ferry guests to restaurants or the movie theater, and sometimes he and his friends would take one and go joy-riding

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around downtown. Gosh, he remembers when there was an actual small town movie theater—it showed black and white Westerns. The town was a quaint place to grow up when my dad was young. By the time I arrived, it was trending more toward kitschy in a weirdly mega corporate way, what author Edward Abbey referred to as “industrial tourism.” But one enterprise has stayed refreshingly local through the decades of change: the pancake house restaurant. A breakfast of hoe-cakes—pancakes—is a time-honored tradition in Gatlinburg, recommended by everyone from my best friend’s grandmother to The New York Times. If you happen to be walking in downtown Gatlinburg any morning when the weather is at least halfway decent (and often when it’s not), I guarantee there will be a line at least twenty feet long snaking out of a pancake restaurant. If you then look to your left and your right, you will see similar lines out the doors of other pancake places, establishments with names like Log Cabin Pancake House, Little House of Pancakes, and Aunt B’s Pancake House & Grill. But pancakes have a greater historical significance than most visitors—perhaps most residents, these days—even know. It all goes back to the Civil War. As I mentioned in the beginning, Gatlinburg is famous

for many things. One thing it is not famous for is any sort of Civil War battle. True, only the state of Virginia saw more fighting within her borders than Tennessee, but any commander who could avoid it steered his troops clear of the mountains in the East. Given the relative obscurity of the one somewhat larger-than-normal engagement in Gatlinburg, you might think it took place in some secluded mountain valley, but had it occurred in 1963 instead of 1863, the men would have been fighting pretty darn close to The Wax Museum and the legendary Mountain View Hotel. Admittedly, the bloodshed didn’t rival Shiloh or Chickamauga (in fact, no one died), but there was plenty of suffering. Since long before the Civil War, Gatlinburg has been notoriously difficult to travel to and through. And it still is—although these days, traffic from millions of vacationers is the cause of most of the angst. The sentiments expressed by one of the Union men in Colonel William J. Palmer’s 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry will seem very familiar to anyone who has tried to drive through town at the height of fall foliage season: “one of the most toilsome journeys that was ever undertaken….After marching about eight hours, having lost the trail twice, we indeed felt

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By the time I arrived, [Gatlinburg] was trending more toward kitschy in a weirdly mega corporate way, what author Edward Abbey referred to as “industrial tourism.” But one enterprise has stayed refreshingly local through the decades of change: the pancake house restaurant.

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ourselves a forlorn hope… .The men bumped against the horses and the horses bumped against the men. As we moved down the wild mountain trail, I thought the column resembled an immense serpent, with every vertebra in its back in violent action, winding its way into the darkness of the forest…an unusually long, toilsome, and continuous march...” Sitting in traffic gives ample opportunity to contemplate what might have transpired had the troops descended into modern Gatlinburg: infinite varieties of fudge would have awaited them, along with saltwater taffy logs, candy corn, caramel apples, chocolate-covered cherries, corndogs and 40 ounce slushie drinks. Perhaps, as a reward for a hard march, they would have settled down at white-covered tables and a view of the Little Pigeon River, with steaks cut to order at their table, shoulder-to-shoulder with honeymooning couples at The Peddler Restaurant, one of Gatlinburg’s best-known places for a fancy date. But of course, that is not what they found. Two and a half years into the war, food was scarce in the mountains. Most men in the region had been called away to war, leaving women and children and old folks to try to plow and harvest as best they could. And even in the best of times, there was very little spare labor or food on a mountain farm.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL LEA

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(Above) Colonel William Holland Thomas, who led the 69th North Carolina regiment, comprised mostly of members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and white North Carolina highlanders. (Top right) Two participants in 2007 at the Battle of Burg Hill reenactment in Gatlinburg. (Bottom right) The 69th North Carolina regiment at the 1903 New Orleans Confederate Reunion.

Colonel Palmer had already been through much in the war—raised as a Quaker, he abhorred violence, but was a true abolitionist and took up arms in the interest of abolishing slavery. He had been captured at the Battle of Antietam and imprisoned at Thunder Castle prison in Richmond, notorious for its rampant brutality. Freed in a prisoner exchange, he had rejoined his regiment in February 1863. By winter that same year, he and his cavalry were hot on the trail of a most unusual band of Confederate soldiers who were occupying Gatlinburg. Confederate Colonel William Holland Thomas’s 69th North Carolina regiment was comprised mostly of members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and some white North Carolina highlanders. Although the Cherokee had little interest in slaves or growing cotton, they had been convinced to enlist by the charismatic fifty-seven year old Thomas, a former state senator for North Carolina. Thomas himself was a white man, but as a young boy he had been affectionately adopted by Cherokee chief Yonaguska and then inherited the role of Chief of the Eastern Cherokee, as well as being the Cherokee’s agent who represented their interests in Washington DC. Thomas firmly believed that Western North Carolina

would flourish in the Confederacy. He was certain that being at the ‘geographic center’ of the new country would make it a prime location for everything from industry to leisure—the wealthy and powerful would arrive in droves to do business, bringing access to better education and goods with them. His personal land and business holdings stood to become enormously valuable because of this. And since his dealings had become somewhat inextricably linked with those of his adopted tribe, his hope that the Confederacy would bring prosperity became a vision worth encouraging the Cherokee to fight for. Although early polls showed Western North Carolina almost evenly split between remaining in the Union and seceding, after the attack on Fort Sumter, a bit more favor swung toward the Confederacy. Thomas had attempted to persuade the State of North Carolina to recognize his regiment of 200 Cherokee men, called the Junaluska Zouaves, as a fighting force for defending the North Carolina mountains. The state legislature rejected the proposal, so Thomas joined the Confederate Army instead. In April 1862, he was authorized to recruit a regiment. And recruit he did, mustering around 2,000 men (both Cherokees and whites) who made up what was generally called the Thomas Legion.

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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY WARREN REED

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Rebel Corner in Gatlinburg, 1975 (top) and the fire that destroyed it and most of the block in 1992.

Most of the Legion was quickly dispatched to Virginia, for brutal fighting along the front lines, but Thomas and about two hundred men soon returned to the mountains. Their presence was important, due to the fact that the Confederacy was being greatly irritated by the traitorous behavior of the East Tennesseans. Tennessee was the last state to withdraw from the Union, and still did so without the approval of most citizens who lived in the eastern mountains. Two out of every three voters from Cocke, Blount, and Sevier counties were against secession. When overruled, the eastern part of the state even proposed seceding from the State of Tennessee, as West Virginia did from Virginia, in order to remain in the Union. The request was quietly denied, but perhaps only deepened the mountain folks’ resentment of the Confederacy. The area was so hostile that in 1862, Confederate Major General Edmund Kirby Smith wrote, “No one can conceive the actual condition of East Tennessee, disloyal to the core, it is more dangerous and difficult to operate in than the country of an acknowledged enemy...” Disloyal to the core? To stroll the streets of Gatlinburg today, you’d never know it. You can find myriad t-shirts with “Rebel Pride” slogans hanging in window displays right beside ones that say “Paddle faster, I hear banjos.” If you

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When did this shift toward embracing the Spirit of Dixie happen? I’d point to a moment almost a hundred years after the Civil War skirmish, when a legendary shop called Rebel Corner opened on the main Parkway in Gatlinburg, practically in the center of town.

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prefer your Confederate flag on a bikini or a dog collar, a shot glass or a shower curtain, you probably won’t have to look very hard. When did this shift toward embracing the Spirit of Dixie happen? I’d point to a moment almost a hundred years after the Civil War skirmish, when a legendary shop called Rebel Corner opened on the main Parkway in Gatlinburg, practically in the center of town. It was two stories tall, and plywood cutouts of Confederate soldiers, proud in their gray uniforms, waved their swords, brandished the flag, and held their guns. Over a dozen Confederate flags of varying sizes fluttered in the wind. The “General Lee-style working revolver” was a popular item, difficult to keep in stock. Rebel Corner’s popularity and longevity would have shocked the East Tennesseans of the 1860s (who probably would have burned it to the ground immediately, all things considered). It stayed in business until 1992, at last going down in true battlefield style when some faulty wiring in a neighboring business caused a fire that destroyed the entire block, making the national news. Buried under all of the Confederate Battle Flag/made-inChina stuff is the fact that many Tennessee mountain folk saw the Civil War as a “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s

fight,” meaning that the average family had little to gain from the independence of the Confederate states, yet many husbands, sons, and brothers were conscripted to risk their lives for the cause. To make matters worse, they could see that the cotton-growing parts of the state would gain wealth and power in the Confederacy, but no such improvements would be realized in their own lives. If anything, they would become relatively poorer in a country whose economic engine was King Cotton. Despite the official allegiance of their state, hundreds of young men in East Tennessee risked their lives heading up to Kentucky to join the Union Army. Others stayed behind to carry out plots to destroy railroads and other means of Confederate communication and transport. Many other men hid in the mountains for years, not actively sabotaging, but merely taking advantage of the difficult terrain to avoid Confederate conscription. Politicians in more pro-secession North Carolina complained about “‘the danger of infection’ from East Tennessee, as though skepticism about the rebel cause could be spread by the very wind that blew through the mountain passes,” to quote Bushwhackers: The Civil War in North Carolina by William Trotter. And so it came to pass that Colonel

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As Palmer’s men stormed Thomas’s Confederate encampment, they found hoe-cakes still cooking in skillets over smoldering coals.

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Union Brigadier General William J. Palmer. At the time of the Battle of Burg Hill, he held the rank of Colonel of the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry.

Thomas and his Cherokee soldiers arrived in Gatlinburg to stay the course of the winter, and set up their camp on Burg Hill—also known as the now-defunct Fun Mountain amusement park. My idea of a Fun Mountain is not one upon which a Civil War battle was once fought, I have to say. And, as it turns out, it didn’t take long for Fun Mountain to go out of business. Perhaps you can guess why, when you read Colonel Palmer’s description of the terrain: “situated on a steep wooded ridge, commanding both roads and intercepting communication between us [the Union flank approaching from the north]…It being impossible to make a dash upon them, we were obliged to dismount our men and deploy them as skirmishers…” Too steep for riding horses? That was 1863, and almost a century and a half later, the hillside is still VERY STEEP. Despite the best attempts of the construction crew to shape the amusement park into something more easily accessible, Fun Mountain always seemed to be a place where it would probably be difficult to really have fun unless you had the cardiovascular training of, say, Lance Armstrong. For the two-hundredth anniversary of Gatlinburg’s

founding, in 2007, a group of Civil War re-enactors put on a display of the ‘Battle of Burg Hill’ in Mills Park, a pleasant open space which has amenities including a covered picnic area and a babbling creek, located a couple of miles away from downtown. It was picturesque, and I’m sure the ‘soldiers’ found it helpful to have the open space of the grassy park to fight in. Still, would it not have provided the city’s citizens with the perfect opportunity for self-reflection if the two hundred Confederate soldiers had camped once more on Fun Mountain, their tents set up in the neat rows on the mini golf course called “Tede Bear Falls,” or strung out along the barren, cracked concrete where bumper cars once spun and clashed wildly? Perhaps they would have posted lookouts in the dangling, moribund “ski lift” chairs that once whisked people merrily up the mountain for a view out over the valley. Maybe they would have bathed in the Pool o’ Boats before the water turned brackish and was finally drained. The ridge was considerably more accommodating for a regiment when Thomas and his men actually arrived: it was heavily wooded yet had a nice view over the town. They had come over the mountains from North Carolina on a road barely passable, particularly while hauling military

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When Confederate Brigadier General Robert B. Vance led his men along the route in 1864, they had to dismantle their artillery caissons and wagons and carry the pieces down the steep road into Tennessee before reassembling them.

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Confederate Brigadier General Robert B. Vance.

gear. When Confederate Brigadier General Robert B. Vance led his men along the route in 1864, they had to dismantle their artillery caissons and wagons and carry the pieces down the steep road into Tennessee before reassembling them. Thomas’s Cherokee troops were eager not to have to make that journey again anytime soon, and they had cut down some sizeable trees and constructed log huts on Burg Hill in anticipation of staying around a while. A few frame buildings had also been built. It was reported that several Cherokee women had journeyed over the mountains from North Carolina to be with their husbands for the long, cold months. To be frank, the situation in the mountains in late 1863 was not at all what the Confederates had hoped for. Knoxville was in grave danger of falling into Union control, and East Tennessee was generally considered Union territory (now in the spirit of the land as well as the hearts of the people). This had greatly displeased the newly appointed commander of the Confederacy’s Department of Western Carolina, Brigadier General Robert B. Vance. Vance requested Thomas and his men be on the offensive, ready to take advantage of any opportunity to regain control of East Tennessee.

In late November, a correspondent of Thomas’s in East Tennessee urged him to send a small force into the area to “be a terror to the Tories and rogues who have been stealing horses and negroes.” This coincided nicely with Thomas’s orders to be somewhat aggressive in his maneuvers, and in compliance with Vance’s orders, the 69th Regiment settled down in little Gatlinburg, a town so small and out of the way that they probably would have passed the winter undisturbed if they’d been patient. Instead, Thomas and some of his men decided to raid the jail in Sevierville and free a few of their rebel compatriots. They also made off with a good haul of horses, guns, and ammunition. With that successful breakout, Thomas won a small victory, but put the encampment squarely in the crosshairs of Union troops stationed nearby. Union spies soon reported that Thomas and his men had withdrawn only as far as Gatlinburg, to their accommodations on Burg Hill. Union Brigadier General Samuel D. Sturgis then ordered Colonel Palmer’s cavalry to give pursuit. Loyalists guided Palmer through the mountains, enabling him to march men and horses through the freezing, dark night. He split his troops into three groups: fifty approached from the Sevierville Road, 150 parted from them at Trotter’s Bridge and struggled through “Weir’s Cove” to

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approach Gatlinburg from the opposite direction, and those soldiers with horses that were unshod or unfit to travel over the rough mountain roads remained to picket the road out of Sevierville, making sure the few secessionists in the area couldn’t get word to the Confederate troops. The Union soldiers attacked at morning light, which naturally coincided with breakfast time for Thomas’s men. To his credit, Thomas had posted watchmen. Unfortunately, they were so close to the camp itself that even though they were alert to the enemy, the Confederates only had a few minutes of lead time to ready themselves for battle, compounded by the fact that most of them had been concentrating on not burning their pancakes instead of imminent engagement with the enemy. Still, they exchanged several rounds of shooting with the Union troops, holding their ground for about an hour until they discovered the second flank moving in behind them. Outnumbered and about to be surrounded, they withdrew up the extremely steep path (which, being born and bred in the mountains apparently didn’t give them as much trouble as the Union soldiers) and continued to return gunfire as they slowly retreated back over the Smoky Mountains, into North Carolina, back to Quallatown, in the heart of Cherokee land.

For their efforts, the Union troops captured one prisoner, a few horses and some provisions and ammunition. Palmer also noted that Will Thomas’s hat had been left hanging in his tent as evidence of the haste in which he was forced to leave. The troops returned stolen items to their owners and burned the camp. But perhaps what made the entire march worthwhile was not the ultimate victory, but the unexpected hot breakfast: as they stormed the encampment, they found hoe-cakes still cooking in skillets over smoldering coals. Reported Union Corporal William Spang, “We… climbed up the hills and into the Indian camp. There were the blazing fires and the corn cakes baking, just ready to eat; so we gobbled them from out the frying pan…” For hungry soldiers who had spent the winter’s night marching through difficult mountain terrain, how sweet that victory must have tasted! In the interest of full disclosure, I should explain that I can’t prove that the pancake houses in Gatlinburg today trace their ancestry directly to this Civil War skirmish. But I would like to think that they do. I would like to think that the real history of Gatlinburg is not irretrievable from beneath the layers of “industrial tourism” that have swooped in on the quaint little town of my father’s youth. Beneath its

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modern façade of mostly fun-house development, Gatlinburg has a tradition marked by self-reliance and ingenuity, traditions of weaving and quilting, whittling, fiddling…of songs whose verses hearken to those sung centuries earlier in England, of knowledge of edible and medicinal plants native to one of the most biologically diverse places in the world, the Great Smoky Mountains. I’m not a hopeless romantic, though—I know that the days are long gone when locals who had a spare room in their houses signed up for a “volunteer program” and someone with the Chamber of Commerce would call them up to host visitors when all of the hotels in town were full and families of tourists had resigned themselves to sleeping in their stationwagons. I just don’t want us to forget where we came from, which side we stood for, who we are. And with every historic hotel torn down for an amusement park, we drift a little farther away from being unique, and a little closer toward being a carnival made up of disparate amusements native to Atlantic beaches, the American West, New Orleans, Acapulco, or, frankly, nowhere. Sometimes our traditions are parodied as hillbilly culture, but if the recent interest in “artisan” moonshine, log architecture, rustic furniture, the enduring popularity of mountain music, and

black bears are any indication, we are rich in many things that are both appealing and can’t be found anywhere else. And maybe there’s something more to the story of the victorious Union soldiers and the hoe-cakes than first meets the eye. The Pancake Pantry, located on the Parkway almost equidistant between Fun Mountain and where Rebel Corner once stood, claims to be Tennessee’s oldest pancake house, founded ninety-seven years after the Union troops helped themselves to the Confederates’ breakfast. It was also established at about the same time as Rebel Corner… and hasn’t burned down yet. Coincidence? I’ll leave that for you to decide—and encourage you to help yourself to a big breakfast of authenticity as you think it over.v Courtney Lix is a graduate of Gatlinburg-Pittman High School and Princeton University who now works as an assistant editor for Island Press in Washington, D.C. Her book, Frequently Asked Questions About Smoky Mountain Black Bears, won first place in the 2011 Association of Partners for Public Lands Media competition. Her last story for Smokies Life was on Smoky Mountain medicine women.

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by John White

“You are quite correct in assigning huge importance to Horace [Kephart’s] ‘Our Southern Highlanders.’ Even in Mr. Brown’s very barren later circumstances, when he had about one linear foot of books in his room, he kept two copies of the [Kephart] book, one of which he gave to me. He regarded ‘Stark Love’ as essentially based upon the book.”

Stark Love (Paramount, 1927) is a movie Unicoi Mountains of Graham County, I’ve known about for nearly twenty North Carolina around Rattler Ford (now a years. I’ve written a lot of articles about popular tourist campground), and on locait, I’ve made a movie about it, I’ve come tions since covered by Santeetlah Lake. to know the families of the people who The movie is a compelling visual depiction made Stark Love way back eighty-five of life in the mountains in the second years ago. Yet every time someone like decade of the last century. Steve Kemp of the Great Smoky MounAlthough critically acclaimed, Stark Love tains Association asks me to revisit the (one of the last silent films made before the story, I find something brand new. ascension of “the talkies”) has never been Revisiting my jumbled manila folders released to the public on VHS or DVD. In and scores of computer files, I stumbled recent years, only a small community of across two unnoticed pieces of evidence film historians and enthusiasts have seen —historian David Shephard the movie, plus those lucky enough to have reinforcing my long-held view that the film is largely based on Our Southern attended its special screenings, usually Highlanders by Horace Kephart. Legendary for his outdoor hosted by universities, museums, and film festivals. writing, with books such as Highlanders, Camping & Woodcraft, The screenplay is simple yet powerful: Rob Warwick’s hundreds of articles in sporting magazines, and famous for mother is in poor health from toiling in the home and field his efforts in helping create Great Smoky Mountains Nato feed and clothe her family. Meanwhile, her husband Jational Park, Kephart is less well known for his contribution son Warwick hunts, drinks whiskey, and loafs. to a Hollywood movie that was heralded by The New York Rob grows fond of a young mountain girl, Barb’ry Allen, and Times as “one of the top ten movies of the year.” is determined she will not suffer the same fate as his mother. Stark Love was shot in the summer of 1926 in the nearby He views education at the mountain school far away in

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Horace Kephart, circa 1928.

the valley town as a means of escape for both Barb’ry and himself. Rob sells his horse and travels with a circuit preacher to the school. When he arrives, he decides to use his money to pay for Barb’ry’s tuition instead of his own. As Rob travels by foot on the long way back home, his mother passes away. Mr. Warwick hires a woman to take care of his children and home but is dissatisfied. Unaware of the affection between Rob and Barb’ry, Warwick asks his best friend Quill Allen for Barb’ry’s hand in marriage—a socially accepted “wild marriage” until the preacher returns in the spring to “sanctify” it.

Quill Allen accepts the Warwick’s proposal and forces Barb’ry to go home with him. They must hurry for the rains have come and the creek is beginning to flood. Rob arrives soon after Jason Warwick returns with Barb’ry to his cabin. Along the way home, Rob has learned of his mother’s death. When he understands his father’s intentions toward Barb’ry, Rob is horrified. He tries to reason with his father but Jason’s mind is set. This leads to a mighty brawl between father and son. Rob is determined to protect Barb’ry. But, alas, he is defeated and thrown out of the cabin. He lies by the raging creek which is near the point of flooding. When Rob is powerless to protect her, Barb’ry takes matters

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—and a sharp axe—into her own hands. She escapes from the cabin in time to save Rob from the flood. Through Barb’ry’s brave actions, Rob and she are able to leave the mountain for a better life. Barb’ry is the true hero of the story. In the care of a less sensitive and skillful director, Stark Love would be poor melodrama. Instead, it is a stunningly beautiful vignette of early twentieth century Appalachia.

f K e p h a r t ’ s i n f l u e n c e is prevalent throughout Stark Love. Eighty years after the film’s release, historian David Shepard, a close friend and neighbor of director Karl Brown, wrote the following: “You are quite correct in assigning huge importance to Horace Kephardt’s (sic) Our Southern Highlanders. Even in Mr. Brown’s very barren later circumstances, when he had about one linear foot of books in his room, he kept two copies of the Kephardt book, one of which he gave to me. He regarded Stark Love as essentially based upon the book.” Indeed, anecdotes, even photographic plates from the 1922 edition of Our Southern Highlanders, come to life in Stark Love. Yet, surprisingly, throughout his life, especially in interviews during Stark Love’s initial theatrical run, the film’s director Karl Brown made very little mention of Kephart or his contribution to the film. Despite the fact, Brown held a

reverence for the writer until his dying day. Always a teller of tales and spinner of yarns, Brown cited Lucy Furman’s The Quare Women as his source and inspiration for the Stark Love story. It was not until he penned a memoir late in life, posthumously published in The Appalachian Journal, that he acknowledged Kephart’s influence on Stark Love —and, even then, the extent of the author’s involvement was only partially admitted. Brown always maintained the idea for his film sprang from a magazine article he read on location for The Covered Wagon (Paramount, 1923). He was the cameraman on that picture, a ruggedly realistic western (the first “epic” western) shot on the desolate prairie of Snake Valley, Nevada employing 400 Conestoga wagons and 1,700 extras, including 700 Native Americans—Arapahoes, Crows, Bannocks, Navajos, and Shoshones imported from Wyoming and Arizona. According to Brown, during a break in shooting the film, he read an installment of Quare Women in the Atlantic Monthly. No doubt, it was the “The Widow-Man” chapter which appeared in the November, 1922 edition and contains several essential ideas found in the storyline of Stark Love: Thirty-two year-old Jeems Craddock is a recent widower forced to take on the hard chores—farm and house work—formerly carried out by his deceased wife Mallie. Desperate for a replacement, he trains his eyes on an inappropriate successor, his children’s 28 year-old, city-raised teacher, Amy. The desperate widower, the suspicion of education, the

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From Kephart’s book Our Southern Highlanders (left to right): Title page from the book’s first edition; a moonshine still; a bear hunt; “Let the women do the work”; moonshine king Quill Rose and family.

slave-like toil of mountain women, and an unrealistic choice of bride, are all elements which appear in Stark Love. But the detail, and possibly the central conflict, of Stark Love—a familial feud over the affections for a mountain girl—are found in the pages of Our Southern Highlanders, a book Brown happened upon while traveling south by train in 1926 to scout locations for his Appalachian movie. He was so enthralled he read the book non-stop, cover to cover. Yet, in several interviews at the time of the picture’s release, Brown failed to mention the book. In fact, even in his memoirs, he instead tells of finding his story while attempting to cast his leading lady. Brown recalls his introduction to “a dark-haired beauty” in the mountains with whom he discussed the part of the leading female character, Barb’ry Allen. He was so impressed with the young woman, he even staged an impromptu rehearsal. He pitched a chip of wood into a nearby creek’s slow current and “asked her to follow it with her eyes, wishing she could be that chip, well on its way from a lifetime of slavery.” “She exceeded all possible expectations. Hope when she saw the chip, yearning as it passed, and heartbreaking sorrow as it passed out of sight. I had never been so touched by any performance at any time…” However, in Brown’s version of the story, the young girl was in the company of her “black-bearded, stony-eyed,” barrel-shaped father. When Brown offered the daughter the role, her father forcefully interceded. He told the girl to

“Git!” Then he turned on Brown to tell him to “Leave my wommern-folks be! They ain’t none of ‘em agoen to be no movie Jezebels for you or nobody else…” After father and daughter departed, a mountain man told Brown, “Don’t pay no mind to him. He got soured when his new woman ran off down to this Berea place with his own son [Berea College is known for providing work-for-tuition opportunities for its students]…” He further explained that the young girl had been promised to the father and the son had “put up a fight for her.” In the legend, this provided a “Eureka!” moment for Brown. The mountain man’s offhanded comment had supplied the basis for his mountain story. While this is a marvelous anecdote, regrettably for historians, Brown never let the truth get in the way of a good story. For instance, he told interviewers until the day he died that the leading man, Forrest James, was an illiterate mountain lad who disappeared into the woods with rifle and coon dog never to be seen again after filming was complete. However, he had personally recruited James and knew differently. Forrest “Fob” James was a three-sport letterman from Auburn University (then API), on a road trip to play Vanderbilt, who Brown met in the lobby of a Nashville hotel. Embellishment is a common trait among gifted raconteurs and Brown (who had many sterling personal and professional qualities deserving of the utmost respect) some times stretched the truth.

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Robbinsville Sheriff Riley Orr, “a large, portentous man with a mustache to match,” helped secure a mountain guide for the filmmakers, serve as liaison to the community, and keep them out of trouble. The Stark Love film crew included assistant director Paul Wing (third from left), director Karl Brown (center), and cinematographer James Murray (third from right). The inscription was likely written by leading man Forrest James.

staying overnight with a mountain family in a one-room Indeed, the mountain girl incident is most certainly cabin. He was shocked at bedtime when everyone casually apocryphal. It matches closely the encounter experienced by Ollie May Holland Stone, as told to Jerry Williamson in disrobed in each other’s presence before retiring. Oyen the early 1990s and recently recounted by Mrs. Stone’s wrote, “in this predicament it flashed across his mind how daughter Kay Davis. Yet, in truth, Ollie May was a collegeterrible it would be if a father and son noticed and desired educated young woman and her father, although expressing the same woman.” the sentiments of the father in Brown’s story, was cleanThis scene, duplicated in the film when Barb’ry “shucks shaven, articulate, and happily her clothes” in front of her family, is, in married to Ollie May’s mother. truth, inspired (as was Brown’s story) by the The difficulties of motion The conversation was carried out depiction of cabin life in the Our Southern picture production in the on the streets of Robbinsville, not Highlanders chapter entitled, “The Land of Do wilds were enormous. To in the mountains. Without.” reach their location, they Kephart described the first time he endiscovered rocky outcrops joyed the overnight hospitality of a mounwhich would block any sort tain family in a crowded cabin: “Naturally there can be no privacy and hence no delicaof wagon. So they borrowed W h i l e r e v i s i t i n g my notes cy, in such a home.” dynamite from a construction for this article, I found two old He explained there was no need for curcrew building a dam forty pieces of newsprint from 1927 tains in the house as he had spotted a shiny miles away and blasted their which shed further light on new percussion cap on the nipple of the way through. Brown’s “inspiration.” One was muzzle-loading rifle hanging over the father’s from the New York Times. The other bed. Propriety, if not modesty, was enforced. was from a magazine, most possibly Country Gentleman, which In point of fact, the real source of familial discord in Stark had been pasted in an ancient scrapbook. The publication Love is more than likely the “Blood-Feud” chapter of Our could not be determined from the ragged cut-out, but the Southern Highlanders which discusses the naturally combative writer, Sara Oyen, was the widow of Henry Oyen, a novelspirit of mountain women: “She would despise any man ist and frequent contributor to the magazine. who took insult or injury without showing fight.” When interviewed in 1927 for the New York Times article, Although the chapter primarily addresses warring families, Brown gave a version closer to the Stone account, which, as did it also covers intra-clan violence, as well. Several examples Ollie May’s recollection, lacked mention of a father/son rivalry. are given where the disagreement begins over a woman or is Interestingly, Brown told yet another version of his inspieven “stirred up” by a woman. “Love of women is the priration story in 1927 when interviewed by Sara Oyen. On mary cause, or the secondary aggravation, of many a feud.” this occasion, he related a tale straight from the pages of Barb’ry Allen is the central character of the Stark Love stoOur Southern Highlanders and claimed it as his own. He told of ry. Kephart’s observation of the mountain man as “lord of

f

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On the film set of Stark Love. Instead of a studio, an actual cabin with two walls removed was used for filming.

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“The Polo Field,” base camp for the movie crew. Located in a cove near Rattler Ford, today the area lies beneath the waters of Santeetlah Lake. Right: Cooks for the film cast and crew.

his household” and the woman as “household drudge” and “field hand” is carried forward from the film’s opening screen title: “Deep in the North Carolina Mountains...Man is the absolute ruler—Woman is the working slave.” Indeed, as mentioned earlier, Kephart addresses the principal theme throughout his book of a woman’s lowly station in highlander culture: “…There is no conscious discourtesy in such customs; but they betoken an indifference to woman’s weakness, a disregard for her finer nature, a denial of her proper rank, that are real and deep-seated in the mountaineer. To him she is little more than a sort of superior domestic animal.” In the last pages of Our Southern Highlanders, he voices the

secondary theme of the Stark Love story: education, particularly for women, is a way out of a bleak, near-hopeless existence. He mentions Berea College. He says that “the future of Appalachia lies mostly in the hands of those resolute native boys and girls who win the education fitting them for such leadership.” Beyond the broad strokes of Kephart’s influence are the details. Little touches are found like the name of Barb’ry Allen’s father, Quill Allen. This was a nod to the King of the Mountain Moonshiners, Quill Rose, once a friend and neighbor of Kephart’s. Additionally, the original 1927 English screen titles are nearly identical to passages found in the “Mountain Dialect” chapter: “You wimmen folks skin up this hawg.”

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“Gimme that sack, I wouldn’t have Dad and the boys see fer nuthin’” “[Barb’ry] You’re different and hadn’t oughter be let git wore out with work and babies. You got a right to live and be loved and respected and pleasured, even if you are a woman.” The screen titles in our surviving copies of Stark Love are even closer to Kephart. The original English prints were either destroyed or lost many years ago. In 1968, British film historian Kevin Brownlow discovered a European copy of the movie in Prague. David Shepard explains that the film version we see today is a “In the middle of translation from the Czech print: the night, I was “I was Film Acquisitions Manager and later Associate Archivist awakened by bullets whizzing through for the American Film Institute my tent. You can beginning in 1968 and had quite imagine how scared a bit to do with the reimportaI was.” tion of Stark Love, the making of the new English titles, and its —Helen Mundy first public exhibition at the recalling a gunfight New York Film Festival. The between locals Paramount story and continuity files which are now in the Margaret Herrick Library were then in a basement room at the studio which was more or less cubed solid with them, so the original title lists were unavailable. The late Bill Bowser and I therefore wrote new titles based on literal translations of the Czech ones and—you guessed it—the language in Kephardt’s book. Incidentally, the title of the film in Czech translated back to English as In the Glens of California.” The film’s cinematography was also inspired by the fine photographs included in the 1922 edition of Our Southern Highlanders. Plates from the book come to life on screen with the opening shot of a cabin in a deep valley. The scene of men carrying game home on a cut sapling, women working while men loaf nearby, the mill by the creek, the whiskey still, also are among several memorable images from the book. The Stewart cabin photograph is reproduced in an opening scene with the fiddler and banjo player—played by Uncle Grant and Dave Stewart. The fight scene between father and son illustrates a paragraph out of the Blood-Feud chapter. “[Fights are] rough-andtumble brawls, in which they slug, wrestle, kick, bite, strangle, until one gets the other down…[often] a club or stone will be used in a mad endeavor to knock the opponent senseless at a blow.” In Stark Love, Rob grabs a rifle to even his odds, to no avail. Barb’ry is more successful with the axe. It should be noted that Kephart’s intention was to docu-

BOTH IMAGES COURTESY OF TENNESSEE ARCHIVE OF MOVING IMAGE AND SOUND

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Helen Mundy as she appeared as Barb’ry in Stark Love (above) and in everyday life (left).

ment the life of the mountain people, not to ridicule or to parody them. He was a highly meticulous transcriber of first-hand observations which he impeccably penned upon pages and pages within his journal. Kephart had been a world-class librarian before turning his back on city dwelling to seek a healthier life in the outdoors. He had risen through the ranks of Cornell and Yale to head the St. Louis Mercantile Library. Clarence Miller, an assistant to Kephart and later head librarian of the Mercantile himself remembered him as, “the most brilliant man I have known, and, almost as a matter of course, the least assuming.” He was a first-rate writer and scholar. His aim in writing Our Southern Highlanders was not satire. He explained in the preface to the 1922 edition of his book that “I have tried to give a true picture of life among the mountaineers…This book deals with the mass of the mountain people.” He said his book was not concerned with the townspeople of the small villages or the “prosperous valley farmers,” for the influences of a slowly encroaching outside world distinguished them from their “back-country kinsmen.” Our Southern Highlanders is about the “real mountaineers,” the “original” breed, the “ones who interest the reading public.” By the time Karl Brown sought out Kephart, he had lived in the Bryson City, North Carolina area for more than 20 years. He not only had studied the mountain folk and written about them, he had lived their way of life and had earned the trust and respect of many. In the manuscript

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“[Fights are] roughand-tumble brawls, in which they slug, wrestle, kick, bite, strangle, until one gets the other down… [often] a club or stone will be used in a mad endeavor to knock the opponent senseless at a blow.” —from Our Southern Highlanders

titled “The Making of Stark Love: From The Paramount Adventure,” Brown provides an exaggerated and entertaining account of their first meeting: We stored our gear in baggage rooms [at the railway station in Bryson City] while we wandered up the street looking for someone who might give us news of Kephart. Suddenly I saw and recognized him, standing negligently before the town’s one hotel . . . [He] was a small man, something below medium height, but chunky and intrinsically formidable….We crossed the street and ascended some wonderfully uneven steps to land in an equally wonderful uneven office with a floor that was as wavy as a mild sea. Kephart’s desk was of the old rolltop kind, his typewriter, a battered old Underwood 5. The nearby table was piled high with books, papers, magazines and letters, with everything piled on top of everything else. On the floor beside the desk lay a coil of twisted galley-proofs, waiting for some kindly soul to correct them. A few old pipes, thick-crusted and rank, lay on the desk while cloth bags of Havana clippings were handy to fuel these mephitic tobacco burners. Another important contribution of Kephart was his recommendation of Robbinsville, North Carolina as the film location. Additionally, Kephart secured for Brown and his crew a driver and an introduction to the Robbinsville sheriff, Riley Orr. He also provided the following advice: “Do whatever you do honestly and openly, without the slightest trace of pretense. You never know what eyes are watching you from the nearest thicket.” Brown could not have asked for a better advisor and consultant. Near Robbinsville, the Tallassee Power Company was building the Santeetlah dam on the Cheoah River. Toward this purpose, they had displaced an entire community near

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Above: Sparks fly between Barb’ry and Rob. Both youngsters were in their acting debuts in the film. Right: the fight scene between characters Rob Warwick and his father seems right out of Kephart’s chapter titled “The Blood-feud.”

the Unicoi Mountains, in the vicinity of the present-day Nantahala National Forest. The dam would not be completed before 1928 so construction would not interfere with filming. The abandoned cabins and deserted landscape presented an ideal wilderness movie set. Sheriff Riley Orr, an ex-dry goods merchant and logger, was “a large, portentous man with a mustache to match.” Kephart knew that Orr could secure a mountain guide for the filmmakers, serve as liaison to the community, and otherwise keep them out of trouble. When the Sheriff produced an elderly guide (incredibly named Davey Crockett), Brown inquired of the fee. The Sheriff informed Brown that, “We don’t hold with taking pay from friends for any little service that they may need...” but he did say that Davey and he would allow for a quart or two of whiskey should they come upon a moonshiner in the mountains. Being unacquainted with mountain custom, Brown was mildly shocked by the request; but sheriffs and

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bootleggers were on friendly terms in Graham County. In fact, Sheriffs during that time regularly would ride ahead and warn locals if a revenue agent was in the area. That’s not to say that they didn’t keep the law. Indeed, Riley Orr had killed a renegade named Jordan in the line of service. Davey Crockett proved worthy of his name. He ably led Brown and cameraman Jim Murray on a trek into the mountains where they found a large meadow in a cove near Rattler Ford. They christened it “The Polo Field.” This is where the movie crew’s base camp was established. Today the meadow is underwater, a portion of the 3,000 acre Santeetlah Lake. Karl Brown filmed through the summer of 1926. Thanks to the engineering and organizational skills of Jim Murray and assistant director Paul Wing, roads were built, a multitude was sheltered, fed and paid, cameras worked, lights worked, and dams burst on cue. Incidentally, Wing also played the key role of the circuit preacher in the movie. Kevin Brownlow spoke of his conversations with Karl Brown who described the challenges faced: “The difficulties of motion picture production in the

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Promotional materials for the film.

wilds were enormous. To reach their location, they discovered rocky outcrops which would block any sort of wagon. So they borrowed dynamite from a construction crew building a dam forty miles away and blasted their way through.” Lighting the film in a remote area was trying but Brown adapted. “They were in mining country and miners still used acetylene lights on their helmets. So Brown’s crew adapted a whole battery of acetylene lights to give an intense glow. Instead of a studio they used an actual cabin and took two walls out.” Geographic and technical difficulties were not the only obstacles. Moonshine proved to be the greatest danger to life and property. One night a gunfight broke out. A mountaineer had stolen his brother’s still. There was no bloodshed although Brown almost lost his leading lady. Helen Mundy was the only woman who slept overnight at the Polo Field. The other women associated with the shoot lived close by and came into camp every morning. For her protection, and possibly for her supervision, Helen’s tent was pitched between Karl Brown’s and Paul Wing’s. Helen Mundy recalled the gun battle. “In the middle of the night, I was awakened by bullets whizzing through my tent. You can imagine how scared I was.”

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Robbinsville historian, Marshall McClung, tells of another whiskey-fueled incident. A series of “splash dams,” similar to those used in the logging industry to float logs downstream, had been designed near the headwaters of the Little Santeetlah for the film’s climactic flood scene. The idea was to knock timbers from the splash dams in a sequence to simulate a gradual, increasing tide that would flow by the Warwick cabin as the courageous Barb’ry Allen rescues the unconscious Rob Warwick from the raging waters. Unfortunately, the Graham County men in charge of the splash dams became bored waiting for the camera set up and began drinking moonshine. By the time Paul Wing signaled for the first dam to be opened, they were so drunk they knocked loose the timbers of all the dams at once. The resulting torrent thundered down Santeetlah Creek hitting Helen and Fob with a tremendous force, washing them downstream well past their intended mark. To make matters worse, Helen had been tied to a raft for safety’s sake. This alone almost drowned her when a huge wave hit the bulky, makeshift craft. “I feel certain that the look of fear on the young lady’s face was genuine,” said McClung. Any trouble the mountaineers may have caused was more than offset by their performances on screen. The acting of the amateur players far exceeded Brown’s expectations. Both Forrest James and Helen Mundy were offered 5-year contracts by Paramount. James bore a striking resemblance—both in appearance and manner—to the studio’s great superstar Wallace Reid who had died tragically of morphine addiction three years earlier (a condition brought on by Paramount doctors treating an injury). Yet James, whose mother was very religious and disapproved of movies, turned his back on show business and purportedly never saw the film, even when it appeared in his hometown. He graduated from Auburn, became a teacher, a highly successful high school and amateur baseball coach, and then a prosperous and respected small town businessman. One of his three sons, Forrest James, Jr., became Governor of Alabama. Mundy, a 16-year-old who had been “discovered” by Brown’s crew in a Knoxville soda fountain, accepted the contract and proceeded to “go Hollywood.” She dated big stars of the time—William Powell, Richard Dix, and Ricardo Cortez—and traveled by train with a huge entourage of feathered and furry pets. In a short time she wore out her welcome with the studio when she refused to accept supporting roles or acquiesce to the “makeover” they proposed. On a trip to Asheville to promote Stark Love, she met Michigan bandleader Donald Barringer and married him the next day. The union lasted until his death in 1966. When Helen died, twenty-one years later, she was survived by four children, eleven grandchildren, and twenty-four great-grandchildren. When filming was finally completed on Stark Love and it came time to leave North Carolina, Horace Kephart was the last person Brown saw before he boarded the train to Asheville.

From the start, Brown held a reverence for the writer: “…there was something so direct and honest in his bearing…I never asked him why he had hidden himself away from the world in this tangled miz-maze of mountains. If he wanted to tell me, fine. If not, it was his business, not mine…” As the train pulled away from the platform, Brown watched Kephart’s receding figure as he stood in front of the old depot: “...the last I saw of Kephart was his waved salute as the train bore me out of the Great Smokies…” When Karl Brown returned to his home studio, Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount Pictures), he was met by a corporation in turmoil. The former artistic powers of the company, Vice President Jesse Lasky and General Manager Walter Wanger were being edged out of creative control by President Adolph Zukor. Lasky, already nervous about a film like no other the studio had produced—a picture shot on location with “hillbillies” and no-name actors, at the advent of talkies—decided to shelve the film. Using all his formidable powers of persuasion, Brown talked Lasky into allowing him to premier Stark Love with his own money, which he did at the Cameo Theatre at 42nd Street and Broadway on February 27, 1927. The film opened to great critical success and a four-week run. The New York Times proclaimed it “The most unique motion picture ever made!” Their critic, Mordaunt Hall, extolled the “ethnographic value” of the movie. The News called it, “An almost perfect picture!” The Sun implored, “See it at all costs!” Even Life magazine and the National Board of Review put it on their Top 10 Films of the Year list, in the company of Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings, Victor Fleming’s The Way of All Flesh, Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld, and William Wellman’s Wings. Karl Brown had defied the Paramount studio system and had won an audience for his film. But it was a small audience. For the very reasons that concerned Lasky, the movie did not enjoy a big box office success. It went back into the studio vaults, then was destroyed, and forgotten until 1968 when Kevin Brownlow discovered a European print in Czechoslovakia. It has never been released on VHS or DVD. Happily, Stark Love was placed on the National Film Registry in 2009 and the Museum of Modern Art began restoration of their print, a copy of the Czech print, in 2011. Hopefully, one day the film will be accessible to the public.v John White, an Atlanta writer and filmmaker, holds a doctorate degree of education from Auburn University. His interest in Stark Love springs from his friendship with the late Cal James, Sr., son of the film’s leading man. Dr. White has extensively researched Stark Love for six years and has written seven articles about the film for such publications as Film History: An International Journal, Alabama Heritage, and Kentucky Humanities. He has produced a documentary about Stark Love and continues to work toward the original movie’s release on DVD.

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The Great Pretenders: Butterfly Deceit in the Smokies by Charles R. Smith & Elizabeth A. Domingue

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“Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.” – Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832), English Cleric

“Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.” – Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832), English Cleric

“Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELIZABETH A. DOMINGUE

– Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832), English Cleric

Humans are the only organisms to engage in flattery, though many other animals engage in imitation. For butterflies, imitation, or “mimicry,” involves fascinating interactions among plants, butterflies, and butterfly predators. We will use butterflies as our cast of characters and the Smoky Mountains as a setting for exploring what G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a noted natural scientist, described as “…the ecological theater and the evolutionary play.” The leading character in this particular play is a big, black, beautiful butterfly, the Pipevine Swallowtail, perhaps one of the most common late spring and summer butterflies in the southern Appalachians. As a distinct species, Pipevine Swallowtail was first described by Linnaeus in 1771. Our butterfly’s name reflects both its appearance and the food habits of its caterpillar. Swallowtails are a group of large, colorful butterflies, with nearly thirty different kinds found throughout North America. Five swallowtail species are regularly seen in the Smokies. As a group, most swallowtails share a distinctive feature—two or more projections, or “tails,” at the back edges of their back pair of wings. Those

tails reminded early naturalists of the long tail feathers found in some birds, like the Barn Swallow. Other members of the swallowtail family include the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, Zebra Swallowtail, and Black Swallowtail. The Pipevine Swallowtail is found throughout the eastern United States, wherever its food plants grow, generally south of the Great Lakes and westward to the southwestern states. It is especially common in the southern Appalachians. In the eastern United States, Pipevine Swallowtails like a variety of open habitats, usually near forests, including yards and gardens. In the Smokies, the butterfly can be found at all elevations, from Sugarlands to near the top of Clingmans Dome. Pipevine Swallowtails may produce three distinct groups of offspring (called “flights”), in spring, midsummer, and late summer. The flights are the result of matings by three different generations of butterflies, with the adults of each generation surviving for only a few weeks. Eggs laid in late summer by the last flight of butterflies develop only to a resting stage, called a pupa or chrysalis, which hibernates through the winter. A new generation of

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And you thought your body has been through a lot of changes... From left to right, the Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillar, pupa, and the winged adult.

“...the ecological theater and the evolutionary play.” – G. Evelyn Hutchinson

adults emerges from the over-wintering pupae each spring. In the Smokies, the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory reports observations of Pipevine Swallowtails from late April through late September, with most observations reported from May and July, when its food plant is widely available. “Pipevine” in the name of the Pipevine Swallowtail typically refers to a climbing vine, which is found throughout the Appalachians, from New York to Georgia. The largeleaved pipevine, or Dutchman’s pipe (Aristolochia macrophylla), has large, heart-shaped leaves and a small, inconspicuous flower, reminiscent of an old-fashioned, curved, Dutch smoking pipe. It is common in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, especially on the Carolina side. Once you get to know its appearance, you can see it along roadways throughout the Smokies and elsewhere. In Victo-

rian times, pipevine was widely planted as an ornamental vine, useful for providing shade or screening for porches and verandas, while also providing food for Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillars. As it turns out, the large-leaved pipevine and one of its smaller relatives—Virginia snakeroot (Aristolochia serpentaria)—are the only plants eaten by eastern Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillars, and the survival of the butterfly depends upon the plant in more ways than one. In addition to providing food for growing caterpillars, the pipevine plant also bestows upon Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillars and adults a survival advantage. Chemicals called “aristolochic acids” found in the pipevine plant are concentrated and held within the bodies of the caterpillars, making them distasteful to predators (mostly birds). When birds try to eat the caterpillars, they quickly find out that

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they taste bad and learn to avoid them. The bright orange dots on the black body of the caterpillar further reinforce the process, proclaiming “Don’t eat me; I taste bad” to birds. In nature, the color combination of orange and black often warns potential predators that the prey is distasteful. Naturalists refer to this particular warning color combination as “aposematic” coloration, and it can be found in such varied groups as insects and salamanders. Our story, however, does not end with bad-tasting caterpillars. Caterpillars have but one purpose in life: to turn plant food into a butterfly. As with other butterflies, Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillars grow in stages, including a “chrysalis” (also called a “pupa”) stage, from which an adult butterfly eventually emerges (a process called “metamorphosis”). The cycle from egg, to caterpillar, to chrysalis, to adult butterfly can be as short as four to six weeks during the summer, or as long as four to six months, depending upon whether or not the butterfly passes the winter as a caterpillar, a chrysalis, or an adult. With Pipevine Swallowtail, the chemicals from the pipevine plant are passed from the caterpillar to the adult butterfly, making it taste bad to predators, as well. The bodies of adult Pipevine Swallowtails also are tough and not easily injured when grabbed by a predator. When a predator initially captures an adult Pipevine Swallowtail, it produces an acrid smell, possibly further discouraging the predator from eating it. Once again, the primary predators on adult butterflies are birds and birds learn quickly that the color combination of a mostly black butterfly, with large orange or red spots on the

underside of its wings, is something to be avoided. Other caterpillars do not eat pipevine leaves and lack the chemicals that make Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillars and adults taste bad to predators. Naturalists have discovered, however, that certain Pipevine Swallowtail look-alikes are avoided by predators. Because the other butterflies are so similar in appearance (a phenomenon called “convergence”) to distasteful Pipevine Swallowtails, predators become confused and also avoid the look-alikes. At least six other butterfly species found in the southern Appalachians resemble the Pipevine Swallowtail. Though all of these imitators are predominantly black butterflies, with patterns of orange and red spots on the undersides of their wings, none of them have caterpillars that use Dutchman’s pipe for food. In laboratory experiments, studies of Pipevine Swallowtails and their imitators have shown that jays and mice which have tasted and rejected Pipevine Swallowtails learn to leave the swallowtails, and their imitators, alone in the future. Among the imitator butterflies from the southern Appalachians are Red-spotted Purple, Black Swallowtail, Spicebush Swallowtail, and females of the Diana Fritillary and Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. Taken together, these species form a “mimicry complex,” all apparently imitating the Pipevine Swallowtail “model.” Another butterfly, the Ozark Swallowtail, found only in the Ozark Mountains of central Missouri, also resembles the Pipevine Swallowtail and is avoided by predators. The association of an edible mimic with a distasteful model has been known to naturalists for a long time. An English naturalist, Henry Walter Bates, first

PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH A. DOMINGUE

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES R. SMITH

Below: Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillars feed on the leaves of the Dutchman’s pipe vine. Chemicals in the plant give the caterpillar and butterfly their special defense against predators. Right: The flower of the Dutchman’s pipe vine resembles an old-fashioned smoking pipe.

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Pipevine Swallowtails

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS ON SPREAD BY CHARLES R. SMITH

Pipevine Swallowtail butterflies can be found at all elevations of the Great Smoky Mountains. This is what they look like when viewed from above.

This photograph shows the colorful underside of the Pipevine Swallowtail’s wings.

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Imitators

Black Swallowtail from above.

Underside of the Black Swallowtail’s wings.

Spicebush Swallowtail from above.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail from above.

Dark form female Tiger Swallowtail from above.

Underside of the dark form female Tiger Swallowtail.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES R. SMITH

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES R. SMITH

Imitators

Underside of the Red-spotted Purple.

White Admiral form of the Red-spotted Purple from above.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES R. SMITH

Female Diana Fritillary from above.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES R. SMITH

PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH A. DOMINGUE

Red-spotted Purple from above.

Underside of the White Admiral form of the Red-spotted Purple.

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described the phenomenon in his studies of South American butterflies in the mid-1800s. The term now used to describe what we observe is “Batesian mimicry.” In the 1950s, pioneering studies by Jane and Lincoln Brower at Amherst College in Massachusetts described the Pipevine Swallowtail mimicry complex, its chemical basis, and the consequences for the butterfly predators. Evidence for the Pipevine Swallowtail mimicry complex comes not only from laboratory studies, but also from observations of Eastern Tiger Swallowtail color patterns in the field. The large, yellow-and-black Eastern Tiger Swallowtail is widespread and common in the eastern United States. The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail’s range overlaps broadly with the range of the Pipevine Swallowtail, but the Pipevine Swallowtail is more common in the southeastern United States. Though the typical Tiger Swallowtail bears very little resemblance to the Pipevine Swallowtail, there is a color form of the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, found only in females, that is darker, without yellow and with orange spots on the underside of its wings, much like the Pipevine Swallowtail. Knowledge of the black form of Eastern Tiger Swallowtail is not new. It was first described by Linnaeus in 1758, who thought it was a distinct species from the black-and-yellow form. The black, female form of the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail is rarely found in the northern part of the Tiger Swallowtail’s range, where Pipevine Swallowtails are absent. As one moves south through the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail’s range, however, and encounters more Pipevine Swallowtails, the frequency with which the dark, female form of the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail occurs increases. The Appalachian Tiger Swallowtail, which was first described as a species new to science in 2002 (based upon specimens found on Spruce Knob in West Virginia) also has a black, female form, apparently mimicking the Pipevine Swallowtail. It is thought that the darker Tiger Swallowtails likely gain some protection from mimicking the distasteful Pipevine Swallowtail, but there is more to the story. As is often the case in nature, the story is complex and other examples of associated mimics can be found. Another butterfly also has two very different color forms, one of which mimics the Pipevine Swallowtail. In the northern part of its range, where Pipevine Swallowtails do not occur, the White Admiral butterfly has a striking white-and-black color pattern. As one travels south, farther into the range of the Pipevine Swallowtail, the White Admiral color form is replaced by the “Red-spotted Purple” color form, a black butterfly, with orange spots on the undersides of its wing, imitating the Pipevine Swallowtail. White Admirals and Red-spotted Purples are different color forms of the same species. Once again, it is thought by naturalists that the Red-spotted Purple mimic gains some survival advantage from imitating the distasteful Pipevine Swallowtail model. The Pipevine Swallowtail, the plants its caterpillars eat, the chemical protection provided by its food source, and its associated mimicry complex are just one example of the

amazing, intricate, and captivating world that can be found at our doorsteps. Those wonders often can be observed easily when we slow down a bit and contemplate the beauty and intrigue of the natural world, with its fascinating cast of characters. In the final paragraph of the last page of Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in 1859, Charles Darwin summarized it well: It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. v Charles R. Smith is a naturalist, educator, and conservationist who has taught field natural history and conservation of birds at Cornell University for more than 30 years. Currently he serves on the board of directors for Discover Life in America and studies butterflies in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Elizabeth A. Domingue is a widely published naturalist, educator, photographer, and guide. She lives in Walland, Tennessee and leads guided interpretive hikes and conducts environmental education programs for youth, adults, and fellow educators through her business, Just Get Outdoors.

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Weaving a Livelihood IN THE SMOKIES

BY ROSE HOUK

At Frances Fox’s studio near Gatlinburg, a lovely wooden loom stands ready and waiting out on the front porch. Frances invites me to sit down on the bench and start weaving. Holding the boat-shaped shuttle in my right hand, I press down the appropriate foot pedals, as Frances instructs. I throw the shuttle to the left through an opening in the colorful strands, pull the beater bar back to tamp down the thin thread, switch feet to a different set of pedals, then throw the shuttle back to the right. Pedal, throw, beat. Pedal, throw, beat. One after another,

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eighties. Cora Morton, raised in the Gum Stand area and in Norton Cove and Cove Mountain, took care of Sara Ellen while raising 11 children of her own. From the age of 17, Cora would go on to spend 47 years as a weaver. She took good care of her loom, Stella notes, covering it with a sheet and keeping a can of oil nearby to lubricate the metal parts. Stella still has one of Cora’s looms. Stella’s mother Jane started weaving at a young age, and one of Stella’s earliest memories is of her mother singing while she wove. There is a lot of music in the weaving of cloth. A weaver presses the treadles of the loom like playing a pipe organ; pulls the beater bar with a soft, steady thrum; and hums or sings an old hymn or ballad, keeping time while hypnotic hours fly by.

A Long Woven Trail Weaving—the process of interlacing threads of two elements at right angles—reaches back into the dimmest past of human endeavor. Ten thousand years, at least, probably longer. By plaiting together strands of almost any fibrous material—bark, grass, stems, hair, or fur— people made mats, baskets, blankets, bags, rope, sandals, and all sorts of other useful items. Long before European contact, the Cherokee in the southern mountains practiced what is known as finger weaving, using fibers of dogbane, buffalo hair, and mulberry root bark. Master weaver Karen George, who learned the technique in school as a teenager, demonstrates the craft at the Oconaluftee Indian Village in Cherokee, North Carolina. Finger weaving does not use a loom. Instead, as Karen describes, lengths of yarn are measured out and attached to a wooden stick, PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID LUTTRELL FROM QUILTS AND COVERLETS OF THE SMOKIES

again and again in a steady rhythm, I keep going under Frances’s watchful eye. Inch by inch, the warp and the weft combine to create a woven piece of cloth of intricate design. I start to see why weavers love this craft, how it becomes such an addiction that they want to do nothing else but weave. I laugh and tell Frances I know she’s already done the hard part—setting up the loom—leaving for me the instant gratification of creating a beautiful textile. Frances Fox weaves contemporary clothing and wall hangings on her many looms, both at her studio and at her home. Yet she’s also dedicated to sharing the rich history of weaving in the Great Smoky Mountains. For Frances, weaving “is an unbroken line.” Both her grandmothers were weavers, and they inspired her life’s work. Eliza Fox, her paternal grandmother, lived on Waldens Creek at the foot of Mount Le Conte. Eliza had a spinning wheel inscribed with “Anderson 1860” (which Frances now has), and she wove on an old barn loom. She crafted only traditional coverlets, Frances tells me, making one for each of her children, and selling enough of her work in the 1930s to put three of her 11 daughters through college. Frances’s other grandmother, Sarah Reagan, grew up in the Roaring Fork area, and earned enough money from her weaving to buy an electric washing machine during the Great Depression. Sarah always kept cash in the pocket of her petticoat. For her, says Frances, weaving was an occupation. But for Eliza, “it was her calling.” When Frances discovered weaving, it was the same. “I found my niche,” she proclaims. In 1980, she resurrected the old family loom her mother had brought to her, took a class at Arrowmont, wound her first warp around two kitchen chairs, wove a set of placemats, and thought “that would be the end of it.” But Frances took to weaving like a bee to a blossom. She then worked for three years as assistant designer in the cottage weaving industry, studying under master weaver Nella Cook Hill. It was the same group her grandmother had woven for 50 years earlier. Frances came away from that experience seeing nearly infinite avenues of weaving open to her. Another Smokies family has kept the skill and art of weaving alive for four generations—starting with Sara Ellen Moore Ownby, daughter Cora Morton, granddaughter Jane Morton Nolan, and now great granddaughters Stella Lamon and Hope Reagan. “We all wove growing up,” Stella says, “father too.” Stella’s great grandmother Sara—“Mamaw Ownby”—wove curtains and coverlets and sewed into her

Frances Fox working at her loom in her Gatlinburg studio.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID LUTTRELL FROM QUILTS AND COVERLETS OF THE SMOKIES

the particular pattern, through the heddles that hang on the harnesses. The warp was wound onto the backbeam waiting to be advanced for weaving. The tension on the warp was adjusted, and the yarn tied to the treadles, or foot pedals. Even for something as small as an apron, it could take more than 7 hours to “dress” the loom! A much larger coverlet would require perhaps 800 warp threads, and obviously would take much more time to set up. As Frances Fox says, “it’s all math and geometry.” If this laborious but critical step was not done right, the next stage, Master weaver Karen George displays items woven using the finger weaving technique. No loom, what most people envision as shuttles, or bobbins are used. real “weaving,” would fail. The weft, or horizontal, and those strands hang down to make a warp. Using only threads were carried on a bobbin in the wooden shuttle that her hands, no shuttles or bobbins, Karen pulls the individa weaver threw back and forth from one side to the other ual strands under and over each other to form a tight braid. through the opening of the warp threads, called the shed. Striking diagonal, chevron, and arrowhead designs are held After each throw of the shuttle, the weaver pulled the beatin her mind, and the combination of colors makes each er bar forward to secure the weft thread in place. Then, as piece unique. Karen often chooses red, black, white, and each individual strand of yarn interlocked, a piece of cloth dark blue yarn, and also incorporates beads into her work. began to appear, like a miracle—the reward for the weaver’s A three-inch wide belt will take about 60 strands of yarn patience, careful planning, and organization. and five days to finish, and is an item in demand among traThe pièce de résistance among weavers was the handwoditional Cherokee dancers. ven, bed-sized coverlet. Depending on the type of loom In Britain and Europe, people were spinning fibers into and style of weaving, there were counterpane, doublecloth, yarn and finding ways to keep vertical strands under tension jacquard, and reversible “summer-and-winter” coverlets. The while weaving horizontal threads through them. With that traditional southern Appalachian coverlet, or “kivver,” was came the manufacture of cloth. The Scots-Irish were indusproduced in a weaving style called overshot (a “shot” being trious, prosperous weavers who brought their skill across one row). The warp thread was usually of plain weave white the ocean to their new home in the southern Appalachian cotton, with a weft often of wool in red, blue, or other colMountains in the 1700s. They grew the raw materials, spun ors. The weft threads skipped several warp threads and thus the yarn, and wove on hand looms, thus nurturing the craft appeared to “float” on the surface. Within the overshot of weaving from the earliest days of Euro-American settlestyle, there was an array of patterns and variations—Catalpa ment in the Great Smokies. A big timber-built loom on the Flower and Pine Cone Bloom, Bonaparte’s March and Charifront porch of a cabin in summer was a sight as common as ot Wheel, Blazing Star and Sun and Moon, Lover’s Knot a springhouse or a mule for many decades. and Tennessee Trouble, Cat Tracks and Snail’s Trail, the Initially, weavers in the Smoky Mountains used linen, iconic Whig Rose, and what one author has called the cotton, and wool yarns, handspun preferably on the great, “quintessential overshot coverlet pattern,” Sixteen Snowballs or walking, wheel. They raised flax for linen, sheep for with Bowknot Border. wool, and could buy commercially spun cotton yarn from Every piece demanded exact coordination of the loom country stores or peddlers by the late 19th century. foot pedals to raise particular warp threads, following a Though materials may have changed through time, the pattern the weaver kept in front of her. These patterns, or basic method of hand weaving was fairly unaltered. First, “drafts,” were long narrow strips of paper inked with marks the loom was “dressed.” That process involved stringing the that looked like a musical score. Drafts were often copied, warp, or vertical, threads, onto pegs in even lengths. Each shared, and passed down from one generation to the next. warp thread was passed through the reed and, following Rolled up and stored away, the patterns have since been

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rediscovered. Fragile and yellowed by time, they still show the small pin pricks a weaver made to keep track of her place in case she was interrupted by some other chore. The old four-harness hand loom—which was actually foot-powered—was the workhorse of mountain weavers. Built of heavy, rough-hewn timbers, the loom was a tool “like a plow,” says Frances Fox. And it took up about as much room. Looms were set up indoors in the winter, out on the porch in the summer, or in an outbuilding called a loom house. When not in use, they were taken apart and stored in the barn, hence the common name barn looms. People often bestowed a personal name to their loom too, based on who made it. A “McCarter,” for example, referred to one built by local carpenter Eli McCarter. A four-harness loom allowed a weaver to make a piece of cloth about 44 inches wide. To weave a coverlet big enough for a bed, two pieces of that width were needed, which were then sewn together. A perfectly matched seam was a tribute to a weaver’s skill. A neat straight edge, or selvedge, on the finished cloth, and a high number of shuttle crossings per inch of material were also points of pride.

A Cottage Industry After the Civil War as commercial fabrics became available, some people put their looms away. By the early 20th century the skill of weaving had faded in many places. At the same time, settlement schools were arriving in the Appalachian Mountains, started by eastern philanthropists to educate children. Along the way, they also spawned a revival of traditional mountain crafts, among them the “forgotten art” of weaving. (Historians dispute how much people actually “forgot” weaving. Some resist the idea that weavers ever forgot how to weave, and whether the craft actually needed to be revived.) Frances Goodrich, Allen Eaton, and John and Olive Campbell were among these founders, who valued the artistry and skill of the craft and saw the production and sale of weavings as a route to improve the economic situations of mountain families. Penland and the John Campbell School in western North Carolina, and Berea Industries in southeast Kentucky became renowned centers of weaving. Another was a school in east Tennessee, started by the Pi Beta Phi fraternity for women.

Tools of the trade include (clockwise from top left): boat shuttle, spinning wheel, yarn winder, and bobbin.

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The Pi Beta Phi school opened in Gatlinburg in 1912, and by 1915 a teacher noted some women in the area were still making handwoven coverlets and blankets. If they could sell their pieces, she thought, many more people “might undertake the work.” A loom appeared at the school that same year, and 10 years later weaving instructor Winogene Redding arrived. During her first few years in Gatlinburg, Redding walked or rode a horse deep into the mountains to visit weavers and prospective students. She said, in understatement, that they “lived distances from the school that were separated by rocky or muddy roads.” About the school’s rustic accommodations, she noted, only the teacher’s cottage had both a furnace and a bathroom. “Gene” Redding was evangelical in encouraging local weavers. Her message: weaving meant “emancipation from tending the crop; for others the money it brings means new shoes, a new dress for one of the children, a poke of meal for the family or a new and coveted piece of furniture.” She revamped the entire weaving program—started classes, recruited weavers, and set standards for what would be accepted for sale—and served 20 years as the “Weave Boss.” Unlike other programs, weavers in the Great Smokies wanted to work independently, weaving at home on their own time. They brought their finished items into town at least every two weeks, received cash for each piece, picked up more yarn, and returned home to weave more. Cora Morton was known to walk a dozen miles down from Cove Mountain, carrying a baby in her arms, to deliver her completed work. And “Aunt” Lizzie Reagan and “Aunt” Lydia Whaley, respected local weavers, were among those who contributed their skills and talents. At first, the teachers promoted the use of handspun yarns dyed with indigo and madder. The complex, time-consuming coverlets then accounted for a greater share of production. A coverlet sold for about 40 dollars and took one to four weeks to weave (not including all the setup). In 1926, the Arrowcraft Shop opened at the Pi Phi school on Gatlinburg’s main street, where woven goods and other handicrafts were sold. Weaving guilds formed, plays were staged, and exhibits and annual fairs were held. Gatlinburg’s cottage weaving industry grew into one of the largest in the country. Many well-known Gatlinburg names appeared in the Arrowcraft earnings lists—Clabo, Carver, Husky, Maples, McCarter, Ownby, Reagan, and Watson. Lucinda Ogle wove at the Pi Phi school from age 11 to 17, and some of her fabric was used

A woven coverlet from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park collection.

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PHOTOGRAPHS FROM QUILTS AND COVERLETS OF THE SMOKIES

(Left) “Aunt” Lizzie Reagan at the Pi Beta Phi School, circa 1939. (Below) Rebecca Ann Ogle Oakley weaving at a loom in 1937.

(Above) The Loom Room at Pi Beta Phi Settlement School, 1929. (Right) John Walker poses before one of his daughters’ woven coverlets. The Walker Sisters were accomplished weavers who wove coverlets on a loom made by their father.

(Above) Pi Beta Phi Settlement School weaving instructor Winogene Redding (on right) with La Delle Allen, Arrowcaft manager, in 1925.

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COURTESY OF FRANCES FOX

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Various weaving patterns are displayed on this card from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park collection.

COURTESY OF FRANCES FOX

A woven hand towel from the Walker Sisters collection.

The March 2, 1930 edition of The Knoxville Sunday Journal reported on Eliza Fox’s travels with her loom.

to upholster furniture for the White House. She came from a long line of weavers too, including her grandmother Lucinda Bradley Ogle and her mother, Rebecca Ann Ogle Oakley, wife of famous mountain man Wiley Oakley. Weaving also helped sell the soon-to-be Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In 1929 and 1930, Frances Fox’s grandmother Eliza, with master weaver Josie Mast of North Carolina, headlined a big-city whirlwind tour. They set up their own looms and spinning wheels and put on weaving demonstrations in department stores in Boston and six Midwestern cities. While onlookers watched, Allie Owenby of Gatlinburg passed around photos of the park’s scenic wonders. In the mid 1930s and 1940s, with the park established and dedicated, more and more visitors flocked into the

mountains. Gatlinburg tourists could watch a weaver at a loom at Andy Huff’s Mountain View Hotel, where the waitresses also wore handwoven aprons. And people could buy woven pieces at Wiley’s Shop, Smoky Mountain Handicrafts, and the M&O Tea Room. The Pi Phi program changed to meet that new demand. As Philis Alvic details in her fine book, Weavers of the Southern Highlands, there was a shift away from the larger, more expensive coverlets to smaller, more saleable items—towels, potholders, purses, baby blankets, and placemats that sold for $1.25. Between 1936 and 1944, nearly 250 different women wove for Arrowcraft. While they still made nearly 200 coverlets during that time, they produced literally tens of thousands of the less expensive souvenir items. Though the cottage weaving program at Arrowcraft is

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At the Mountain View Hotel (above), tourists could watch a weaver at a loom. The waitresses also wore handwoven aprons.

no longer, classes are still given at the Arrowmont center. The tradition of fine weaving thrives among people like Frances Fox and Stella Lamon. And for weavers today, as for those before them, the rewards are much the same—pride of creation, the gift of something made by one’s own hands, and the musical rhythm that guides the work. As one woman said: “When you watch your pattern grow, t’me it’s like life…. You weave your life into somethin’ beautiful.”v

COURTESY OF LECONTE LODGE

Frances Fox’s paternal grandmother Eliza Fox and husband, Riley. Eliza toured many cities with her loom and spinning wheels, demonstrating how handwoven coverlets were made.

Weaving at LeConte Lodge Since the mid 1920s, hikers have made the 5- or 6-mile trek up to LeConte Lodge, situated at 6,360 feet elevation, on the third highest peak in the Great Smoky Mountains. Paul Adams and Jack Huff built LeConte Lodge in the 1920s. Huff also built, onsite, a four-harness loom of pine logs so the lodge and cabins would be adorned with handwoven curtains. Debra Grounds of Sevierville, Tennessee, remembers the loom well because she was the resident weaver at LeConte Lodge during the 1970s. By the time she arrived, the window coverings were stained and smoke damaged and needed to be replaced. Debra went down to Arrowmont to learn to weave new ones. She found it took quite a bit of time to learn the skill, but she did manage to make curtains suitable for the crew quarters. She went on to weave tapestries, wall hangings, and rugs that were used in other buildings at the lodge. For the five years she lived at LeConte, Debra spent her days carrying water, cooking, and weaving. With no electricity, she wove in the evenings by the light of several kerosene lanterns. During the couple of winters she stayed up on the mountain, “we wore red long johns to keep warm,” and “time stood still.” There was a telephone that “worked sometimes,” she recalls. Without fail, Knoxville newspaperman Carson Brewer would call each day at 6 a.m. to get the mountain weather report. In winter that included supplying snowfall measurements—sometimes snowdrifts were so high the cabin door was blocked, so they had to jump out the window. Whenever Debra hiked back down to town, she picked up more weaving supplies and carried them up on her back. In her days at the lodge, the loom sat in the office building. At other times, it occupied the center of the large dining room, with its big windows and a woodstove where guests gathered. The LeConte loom is still there, along with the threads of history running through it.

Rose Houk is a frequent contributor to Smokies Life magazine and author of several books for the Great Smoky Mountains Association. This article is partly excerpted from her most recent book, Storied Stitches: Quilts and Coverlets of the Smokies.

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Charles H. Collum Although he has lived in the foothills of the Smokies for the last 20 years, Charlie recalls that as a child growing up in Florida his father “dragged� he and a sister around the state to bird watch. Now whenever he presses his forehead against the windshield to i.d. a hawk or recognizes the song of a warbler, Charlie thanks his father for the gift. Sister’s thankful, too. She holds a degree in ornithology from the University of South Florida. www.chcollumartist.com

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O

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Ridge Runners in the Great Smoky Mountains

volunteer organizations from Maine to Georgia, patrolling the esteemed trail. Hot coffee, music at a touch, warm bath, familiar March through October, McFalls averages more embrace, sumptuous meal, bliss of sleep floating on than five days and nights per week, counting a cloud. recreational hikes, in Great Smoky Mountains Such are reasons enough to come home, even National Park. Not to put too fine a point on after one night on the trail. So it’s hard to grasp it but, “When I get days off, I like to go the lives of Ridge Runners like Doug McFalls, hiking,” McFalls says. who’s been known to stay in the Smoky Despite the high-pitched serial chuckle Mountain backcountry not 24 hours, not 48 that punctuates the remark, McFalls is the or even 72, but sometimes for weeks on end. first to acknowledge he pays a price for Ridge Runner sounds like a nickname, this outlier existence. but it’s not. No company insurance. McFalls wears the title like an honorific, No paid vacation. bestowed as it was by the Appalachian Doug McFalls No sick leave. Trail Conservancy (ATC). No overtime. Like many a species found along the 2,200 miles He earns $10.50 per hour for 40 hours, plus $7 per or so of the Appalachian Trail (AT), Ridge Runners day food stipend while on the trail. And the work inhabit a special niche. Employed by the ATC, they is seasonal, March through October. work with the National Park Service (NPS) and

Coming off-trail can be Heaven.

by don WILLIAMS • photographs by doug mcFalls

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March What was all this activity, all this building, this going and coming? What status-seeking, greed, phoniness? AT veterans refer to the phenomenon as “re-entering,” and for many it’s a disturbing experience. Standing on a trail, those many years ago, Householder explained it this way. “Everything is stripped down out here, much simpler. In mainstream society, everything is so available, it’s much easier to get caught up in role-playing. Out here, you know right away whether someone’s intentions are good or bad.” When he hired on as the park’s first Ridge Runner, he was glad to be back on the mountain.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM BRIMER/KNOXVILLE NEWS SENTINEL

Still, Ridge Runners love their work.

I found that out 20 years ago while hiking with Alan Householder, the park’s first AT Ridge Runner. It’s telling that all these years later, at age 56, Householder is still on the mountain, serving as llama wrangler on Mt. Le Conte, leading the hardy animals that carry supplies up to the lodge. Householder just can’t get enough of mountain… otherness. I hiked with him for a newspaper story in July, 1991. Over two nights and three days we visited the wreckage of a high-performance jet plane that had crashed on the mountain, stood atop the highest peak in the east without a road leading to it, climbed an aged fire tower and witnessed a slow holocaust of trees. Along the way I was introduced to a distinct subculture known as Thru-Hikers—brothers and sisters of the Trail who hike Georgia to Maine, or viceversa, right through the trail’s spiritual heart in the Great Smokies, where the AT encounters its highest peaks, greatest precipitation and maybe its friendliest people. Householder was like many another thru-hiker. He’d chased a series of dreams, little knowing they’d lead him here. He wanted to be a writer, but as he put it at the time, “I couldn’t be the next Thomas Wolfe, so I got a guitar. That didn’t really work out, so I decided I’d be a great hiker.” Actually, as the trail loosened his tongue, I learned it was more complicated. With wiry physique and unruly black hair, he’d been a man in love, long about 1983. One year later he was a man with a broken heart. He put it this way at the time: “Things were running amok in the psycho-village.” A fellow musician suggested Householder try hiking away his blues, so he picked up a publication, “One Hundred Favorite Trails,” and did them all. Over the next couple of years, he made a milestone decision. “I started selling things for next to nothing. My car, my cabin, cats. I threw it all to the wind.” In 1988, he stayed five and a half months on the AT. When he came off-trail, the world seemed out of focus.

Alan Householder, the Smokies’ first AT Ridge Runner, leads a pack of llamas carrying supplies up to Mt. Le Conte.

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Two decades later, so too is McFalls.

At six-foot-two and 210 pounds, he’s a pronounced presence out front of Sugarlands Visitor Center, where he greets me with a smile, hand extended, this September morning. It’s a Thursday, the start of his work week. McFalls loves his job and the people he works around. It’s plain to see when he checks in with Pam Rodgers, backcountry information specialist, who happens to be weeding the native wildflower display garden at Sugarlands when we show up. “Did you talk with a guy at Silers Bald who chased a bear with a shovel?” she asks. “It was getting into his pack so he grabs a trail shovel and goes after it.” McFalls laughs and changes the subject. “South bounders are just showing up,” he says, speaking of Thru-Hikers who started in the spring at Mt. Katadhin, ME, some 2,000 miles away. “Some’re hiking 25 miles a day now.” “Yeah, they’ve found their legs,” Rodgers says. They compare notes on traffic, news, weather, then we walk to a door in the center’s gray limestone wall and make reservations for space to unroll our sleeping bags at a trail shelter. Next we check in with Melissa Cobern, backcountry specialist for the National Park Service. She and McFalls discuss trail conditions, shelters closed due to bears, progress on a privy under construction, then it’s on to the park’s communications center. Two dispatchers engulfed in radio chatter, computer screens, maps and lots of paper, bring McFalls up to speed regarding weather, trail conditions and Be-On-the-Look-Out bulletins (BOLOs) for missing persons. Such a person was a 45-year-old North Carolina man missing since April, whose car was found abandoned at Newfound Gap. Newfound Gap is where we park my old Chevy S-10, then drive McFalls’ equally dark blue pickup to Clingmans Dome. He parks in 50-degree mists, and we hoist our packs. His weighs about 40 pounds, mine maybe 25, a measure of the gulf between his job and mine.

I’m on an overnighter, covering seven or eight miles. He’ll spend five days and four nights on-trail, traveling 50 miles or more. From the top of his Tilly hat to the soles of his lifetime guaranteed Danner boots, McFalls is loaded for bear. Radio, knife, saw, ski poles, water purifier, nylon cord, notebook, jet-stove, trail food, notepad and digital camera in baggies, patrol radio, sleeping bag with inflatable pad, waterproof backpack cover—McFalls is ready. His one luxury item is Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, by Virginia Sen. Jim Webb. It speaks to his roots. He loves the westerns of Louis L’Amour too. Reading takes place mostly around bedtime, as McFalls finds plenty to occupy his days. During five days on-trail he’ll document obstacles for volunteer crews to clear out, saw through, bridge, rebuild, or detour around. He’ll speak to scores of hikers about park regs and backcountry ethics, file radio field reports, cut limbs and trees off pathways, mulch backcountry privies, and haul away garbage. Who knows, he might rescue somebody. “Right out of the gate this season,

in early March, I got involved in a rescue of four young spring-breakers who were in a very dangerous hypothermic situation.” The foursome had hiked in on a whim, wearing jeans, tennis shoes and loafers, arriving at Mt. Collins Shelter at 5:30 a.m.—yes, a.m.—in 20-degree weather and falling snow. Figuring the four young men would hike out to nearby Clingmans Dome parking area before the day was through, McFalls and Ridge Runner Caleb Gray went about their business, patrolling the trail as scheduled. They hiked by way of Clingmans to Double Springs Gap, arriving about 3:30 p.m. Five hours later, to their surprise, in walked the foursome, shivering and wet, having missed their best chance to leave the trail at Clingmans Dome. As McFalls reported, “One of the hikers climbed into a sleeping bag with his friend to try and keep him warm.” Next morning, as snow continued falling, McFalls and

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Gray closely assessed the four, and decided their health might be at risk. They alerted dispatchers, then instructed the four young men to remove their wet clothes, provided them with a base of dry clothes, from their own packs, to the extent possible. They tied plastic bags over their shoes, then McFalls led the party toward Clingmans Dome, as Gray hiked sweep. Had the quartet continued westward into one of the most remote sections of the Smokies’ AT, there’s little doubt they would have vanished in the snowy abyss between Double Springs and Derrick Knob. In biting winds and eight inches of snow, drifting to three feet, they stopped every 10 to 20 minutes to take in water and food, yet still kept their rendezvous with rangers, who drove them down the mountain in four-wheelers behind two snowplows. “We debriefed at Newfound Gap and asked our hikers to pass on all that they had learned.” Teaching is maybe the most important part of a Ridge Runner’s job. “Our park’s very accessible to Knoxville, Sevierville, North Carolina, but because it’s so accessible, lots of college kids and young families get out here to backpack and don’t realize you can get into a lot of trouble fast. “It can be sunny in May down there, but up here you still can have ice and snow.” In short, these mountains can kill. Through mist and drizzle blanketing the parking lot at Clingmans Dome, we peer at the southern boundary of McFalls’ area, marked by Fontana Lake. It’s a couple of aquamarine commas in the run-on commentary of hazy horizons. Some 40 miles to the north, vaguely the direction we’ll be hiking, lies Davenport Gap, northern terminus of McFalls’ domain. We start walking, and soon we’re yakking the way new hiking buddies do, disarmed by activity and the beauty of our surroundings, so that by the time we’ve hiked the first half-mile—a steady up-hill grind—we’re huffing our way through an actual cloud. It swaddles Clingmans Dome observation tower, a brief spiral rising 54 feet above the mountaintop for a 360-degree view. McFalls spent his young adulthood in Metro Atlanta, working construction, remodeling, doing restaurant work. Meanwhile his parents retired and moved back to the old homestead, over a hundred acres off the Spur between Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. McFalls’ grandfather purchased the land with money he earned as a logger in the Smokies prior to park establishment.

“I’d come up on vacations, and was spending more and more time here. A friend said one day, ‘I notice you’re spending about one week out of four there.’ About five years ago I moved. I have a lot of really good friends, and that’s all I miss about Metro Atlanta. I don’t miss that pace of life. I don’t miss the traffic and crime. People here still wave at each other when they pass. There’s just an attitude you can’t help but take on. “I’d always wanted to work at Le Conte, so I applied for a crew there, and packed all my stuff up. I signed on as a winter caretaker my second season, which was a fantastic job. You have all those winter months where you get used to having all that time to yourself. Then all these people who work there start showing up and all these guests start showing up and you say, Gosh, where’s all the peace and quiet I had up here all winter? Most people do one season—eight or nine months. It’s kind of the way the job’s set up. “I knew it was about time to find something new but I had signed on for a third season, so at the end of that I applied for this job and here I am. This is my first year as a Ridge Runner.”

May

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June

For McFalls, like Householder, an overnight ramble in the backcountry isn’t enough. “To me, it’s spiritual. You don’t have all that digital stuff to distract you. In town you get all hung up on Walmart and grocery stores and what Fox News is saying about the Middle East. A few days out here and you get back to what’s important.” Hike with McFalls and you’ll never see the Smokies the same way again. Every twist in the trail, every fraction and fractal and footfall, becomes new. He points out lush southern lady ferns, fire-colored witch-hobble, white capped mushrooms, thick fungi that embrace silvery boles of firs, spruces, beeches, and birches. Many such trees are no longer vertical, and trail workers give names to these. Leaners, blow-down, head-knockers …. “Endangered bats inhabit some of these trees,” so volunteers cut only the ones obstructing trails. “They’re habitat for all sorts of bugs and grub worms.” He marks head-knockers for cutting. Crosscut sawyers take down such low-leaning trees. They cut passages through logs lying across trails. Others tend to surface and drainage repair or beat back encroaching blackberry briars with scythes. “This water bar needs fixing,” McFalls says, pointing to a log maybe eight inches in diameter, running slantwise across

the path, toward a drainage trench fanning out to a leafy crease in the hills. “See how the silt’s got in there—pine needles and dirt and leaves and stuff—and filled up the run-off?” We round a bend and pause at the bottom of a hill. McFalls points out the need for more water bars, more steps on both sides of the dip. To help volunteers who’ll do the heavy lifting—and to aid the local economy—the ATC hires local helicopter companies to loft in locust logs, suspended from the chopper with a cable. “There’s not going to be any insects or blight that would infect the park,” says McFalls, because they’re harvested inside the park. “It’s not pressure treated, so there’s not going to be any foreign chemicals.” Later he shows me a clearing—maybe 25 by 35 feet— atop a hill on the trail. “They’ll designate this spot and say we need 25 locust logs in this spot. They’ll mark it with a GPS and there’ll be somebody out here with an orange flag waving. “So we’ll use locust logs, and to fill low places they’ll find some place on the trail where they need to move dirt out. Sometimes where a tree’s turned over, the root ball will pull that soil out. So the idea is to get your water out of the trail, keep the surface raised up, so you keep your hikers on a good dry surface, which is difficult in the Smokies, because we’re practically a rain forest.” Hikers don’t always appreciate such things, but McFalls is a walking instructor.

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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY GSMA

We encounter a Wisconsin couple out for a day hike, a Tennessee geologist collecting acid-water samples, a lawyer from Jackson, TN, hiking the AT piecemeal. McFalls exchanges pleasantries with them all, learns destinations, tactfully probes for any discomforts or inconveniences they might’ve experienced. It’s all in a day’s work. Hikers and scientists are not the only ones passing through. McFalls points to a heap of red, yellow and orange berries, like hundreds of carnival beads suspended in black fibrous mulch decorating the middle of the trail. “Isn’t that beautiful?” Yes… beautiful, I agree, suspiciously. “Bear scat,” McFalls says. “This is a big fella. He’s feasting on mountain-ash berries. Look, here’s some more.” Around every other bend are telltale signs of bears. Here’s an American mountain-ash berry tree that’s been bowed over by a bear climbing its length, drawn farther and farther up the bole by the berries, until the bear likely took a tumble. Over there, a bear’s knocked down a rotting stump, with the sweep of a paw, then prowled through, sniffing for grubs to lap up with its tongue. Large splashes of burnt-orange and vermillion wood appear in irregular patches—some covering 70 to 100 square feet or more on the forest floor. Mountain mists render the oxidized remains glossy, as if lacquered. “The art nature creates is wonderful,” McFalls says, as he pauses beside a root-ball—maybe 12 by 15 feet across—still attached to the spruce tree that lofted it from the ground during a winter storm.

The Mt. Collins shelter along the Appalachian Trail.

fragrant zones of mist and sweet smells of decay, we arrive at Mt. Collins Shelter in an early evening drizzle. Such shelters have changed a lot since Householder and I hiked to them 20 years ago. Back then most shelters consisted of three stone walls with a gated chain-link fence forming the front, to keep out bears. Two decks of log frames with sagging wire mesh bottoms provided space for a dozen or more hikers to roll out sleeping bags beneath a tin roof. A stone fireplace inset in one end provided heat. Hikers often ate or stashed food in the dark recesses of bunks, and this attracted bears, skunks and rodents. It was not uncommon

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Moving through

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at the end of a long day’s hike, to arrive in time to see half a dozen mice scurrying around beneath the wire mesh of a lower bunk, or even to awake in the night and feel their footfalls crossing your sleeping bag. Often, a bear paced out front. Those days are mostly gone. Shelters still feature the same sturdy stonework on three sides, but log-frame and mesh bunks have been replaced with smooth planking for supporting pads and sleeping bags in re-designed shelters like the one at Mt. Collins. No chainlink fence blocks off the front. Instead, narrow tables with wooden benches are attached to the superstructure a dozen feet or so from the bunks to discourage eating in them. Steel cables and pulleys make it easy to suspend backpacks, foodstuffs and garbage a dozen or more feet off the ground, far from the reach of critters. Moreover the roof at Mt. Collins features a Plexiglas skylight maybe four feet wide by six feet long, providing light well into evening. Only one hiker, Barry Kinnison from the heartland of North Carolina, has beaten us to the shelter. He’s already snuggled down in his sleeping bag, but he rises from his upper bunk as we unburden ourselves, while he tells us his story. He’s hiking the AT piecemeal, an effort to drop 50 pounds from his substantial frame. It’s all part of a deal he’s worked out with his son, who’s serving in the Air Force in some top secret operation in Arizona. “If I drop to 180 from 230, he’ll quit smoking cigarettes,” Barry says. “He said, ‘I’ll crumple them up and throw them away.’ But that’s not my primary reason. I just love being up here.” As we prepare separate suppers, four women, ranging from age 25 to 40 join us. They come in irritable and quarrelsome after hiking all day in the drizzle, but mugs of tea and bowls of stew heated on compact stoves warm their spirits and tongues. Soon they’re telling us of their lives in Tampa, FL. Two of them plan to move to New York City and get married. They became engaged atop Max Patch, a famous section of the AT with wide grassy meadows and 360-degree views. A few days after their engagement locals told them about a young man who’d led his girlfriend onto Max Patch to ask for her hand last June. She’d said, “God Baby, look how beautiful it is.” Thirty seconds later lightning struck. As she lay dead or dying, he placed a ring on her hand.

August

At left, Doug McFalls poses with a tranquilized bear at Spence Field shelter. The aggressive bear was tagged as #513 and released.

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September For many hikers, the AT quickly becomes a riddle wrapped around a koan, floating in a mystery. Spirits vie for hearts and minds. The spirit of linear progression, as hikers move from point to point. The spirit of dreams and longing as thoughts soar and plummet. Hikers often have faraway looks in their eyes as McFalls approaches. Others steadfastly search for the next firm foothold. Many ask which way they’re going. If you’re on the AT, “You’re usually going east or west, in

the Smokies,” says McFalls, as we pick up our packs next morning to head for Clingmans Dome, “because here the Appalachian Trail runs mostly east and west, but we refer to it as north or south.” Maine to Georgia, natch. “Of course, we’re going north today, which is actually east, hahaha.” Like direction, notions of distance and time become relative affairs. Depending on altitude, trail conditions, and attitudes of the hikers, a three-miler can take as long as a twelve-miler.

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October

Add to the mix the way memories and imaginations spin castles in the air, and the trail becomes something quite different from a tunnel among trees or a knife-edge path along a ridge top. Fear or wonder engendered by hunger, dehydration, hypothermia, fever, the endorphin rush of seeing a wild boar, or looking up, as Kinnison once did, to behold a bear looking down at him from a tree above, can stop time in its tracks and render the trail infinite. The organic, often primitive experience of over-nighting can return primordial notions to consciousness and render coming off-trail an alien experience. On Friday afternoon following my hike, I drive out of the mountains and brace myself for Pigeon Forge, but nothing really prepares an AT hiker—even an over-nighter like me—for the mayhem of a Grand Rod Run weekend in the Forge. I think of a question I asked McFalls before coming offtrail. “Will you be back in the spring?” He went quiet before answering.

“I go down and see my friends in town and they’re worried about things that don’t make any sense to me. I find a real spiritual connection out here. Some find it in church, others in music I guess, but I find it out here on the trail. “They’ll give me til January to decide. Dad always says it’s time to quit messin’ around in these woods, but when it’s time, I’ll know it.” v Don Williams is a freelance journalist, short story writer, and founding editor of the annual literary anthology, New Millenium Writings, which published his book of journalism, Heroes, Sheroes, and Zeroes: The Best Writings about People. His last story for Smokies Life was on photographer Dutch Roth. He is working on a novel set in east Tennessee.

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photograph by bill lea

ALL THE TRAILS IN THE SMOKIES

FOR ALL TIME… Friends of the Smokies has made the Trails Forever Endowment its #1 fundraising priority for this year. Trails Forever is a lasting gift that will benefit the Smokies’ 800 miles of trails and every hiker who will use them for countless generations. Our goal of raising $2 million to match funds dedicated by The Aslan Foundation of Knoxville in memory of Lindsay Young is the single most ambitious fundraising initiative in Friends of the Smokies’ 17-year history. Do you hike? Do you have great memories of seeing the fall colors from the mountaintops? Do you hike to spend time with friends and family? To stay in shape? Do you

have a favorite waterfall or other beloved place accessible only by trail? Do you hike to get away from it all? Would you like to honor or remember a special hiker in your life? Whatever your motivation, and whatever your means, your support for the Trails Forever campaign will be for all the trails in the Smokies, for all time. Be a part of this lasting legacy for the Smokies. To receive more information, please call us at (800) 8455665, visit our website at www.SmokiesTrailsForever.org, or return the card included here.

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SMO KIES LIFE MAG A ZIN E

—John D. Rockefeller, Jr., following his first visit to the Great Smoky Mountains

volume 6 #1

"We expected much, but found far more beauty than we had even dared hope."

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