The Great Smoky Mountains In Images Of America
Great Smoky Mountain National Park, covering 500,000 acres in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, is the most frequently visited of America's "crown jewels" in the National Park system. The Park is a place of extraordinary beauty, with its craggy mountains and its rivers and waterfalls, together with great diversity of plant and animal life, including its famed black bears. The Great Smoky Mountains are also a rich source as well of varied human activity. Over the years the Cherokee Indians, mountain people, loggers, and tourists have left their mark on the mountains.
Steve Cotham's book "The Great Smoky Mountains National Park" (2006) offers a photographic history the people and places of the mountains beginning from the late 1800's, continuing through the official establishment of the park in 1934, and concluding in the early 1950s. Cotham is the manager of the McClung Historical Collection of the East Tennessee History Center, and his book makes broad use of many rare photographs from its archives. The book is part of the"Images of America" series of Arcadia Press, which presents much local history of the United States in appealing volumes of 128 pages of annotated photographs. I have learned a great deal from this series about American places and people, both familiar and unfamiliar to me. The Great Smoky Mountains are somewhere between familiar and unfamiliar. I have visited them several times, but briefly.
In ten chapters of annotated photos, Cotham's book gives a good sense of the scenery and people of the Great Smoky Mountains. The book opens with a short overview of farming and settlement in the region from about 1880-1900. It is followed by a chapter on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and their Reservation which lies on the eastern boundary of the park in North Carolina. Most of these photos date from the 1930s, but they brought back memories of my visit to the Reservation some years ago.
From the early years of the 20th Century to the early 1930s, the Great Smoky Mountains were heavily logged, losing as much as one-half of their stands of virgin timber. The book offers photographs of the people, the railroads, the bridges and the heavy equipment, and the large trees involved in these massive operations. The Park was established, in part, to save the mountains from complete denuding in further timbering operations. Besides the logging, the Smoky Mountains became a haven for hikers. Harvey Broome was an early hiker who receives much attention in this book. He would ultimately become the founder of The Wilderness Society. Portions of the mountains also attracted a resort clientele, in part due to the attractions of mineral water. The resort communities which flourished up to the establishment of the Park receive documentation in two chapters of the book.
The most appealing chapters of the books are those which describe the mountain communities and their environs. The book shows a great deal of the character of mountain life, and I would have liked more. There is a consideration of the range of activities of those who lived in the mountains as well as some focus on individuals. For example, we learn about the seven Walker sisters who lived in a cabin in a mountain homestead from the 1930s to 1950s, about a lanky mountain entrepreneur, Levi Trentham (1852 - 1936) who succeeded in several ventures even though he was illiterate, and about Horace Kephart, author of a famous book about the mountain people called "Our Southern Highlanders."
Two chapters of Cotham's book "The People of the Mountains" and the "Vanished Communities of the Great Smoky Mountains" tell the story of a rugged way of life that virtually disappeared with the establishment of the Park. Another chapter about the people of the mountains, "Gatlinburg" describes the bordering towns and how they changed in character from small, rural communities to tourist destinations with the establishment of the Park.
The establishment of the park, including the efforts of community leaders in North Carolina and Tennessee, and the purchase of the lands of the mountain families, the timber companies, and other landowners is described in a chapter of the book. Sadly, the old homes of the mountaineers were little preserved and today are largely relics in the Park. A final chapter of the book describes the dedication of the Park in 1940 by President Franklin Roosevelt and takes a short look at early tourism subsequent to the dedication to the Park and the surrounding towns..
The book offers a good photographic introduction to the land and people of the Great Smoky Mountains before and at the time of the establishment of the Park. A map of the park and its landmarks and their relationship to the adjacent communities would have been useful. I used a rough map in a National Park Service brochure of the Park to get my bearings.
