Cades Cove’s lost colony

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Jack Neely photo

Relics of the past

The abandoned homes in Elkmont in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are incongruous to the natural environment, though they are interesting relics of the area’s past.

Picture, if you will, the Smokies settler. A hard-bitten, grizzled fellow who’d grown up not too far away. Remote and isolated, he had never seen the ocean or colleges or cities. He’s a subsistence farmer who’s able to sell a surplus crop now and then.

He builds his homes of logs, or course, and logs only. It’s the only architecture he knows. 

It’s the image visitors come away with after a day in Cades Cove, a popular destination on the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. 

But some other cottages in the Park, just a few miles to the east of Cades Cove, might bewilder campers who stray from the Elkmont campground. Back in the woods is a cluster of modest but maybe a little quirky pre-war suburban-style homes, built with river-rock chimneys and board-and-batten walls—some with old electricity meters attached. They might make you think of a pocket subdivision for nonconformist professors. 

They’re overgrown, some of them so overgrown they’re hard to approach on foot, and falling apart. Most of those that were here 20 years ago have been torn down. The architecture of Elkmont, and the very notion that the place might have an authentic history of its own, has been shunned by purists. They were not mostly true settlers’ homes, they insisted. They were not log cabins. They should be demolished, and returned to nature. 

Elkmont, now more than a century old, began as a logging camp but became a tiny idiosyncratic sort of conservationists’ resort, a bit of semi-private property permitted to remain in the middle of the Park for more than 50 years after most everybody else was evicted. Elkmont’s families knew their stay here would be temporary, and it would be tough to argue persuasively that they shouldn’t have been evicted, too, as eventually they were. 

But to let Elkmont vanish would be to untell a story. All the buildings are more than old enough to qualify for the National Register of Historic Places, but the existence of these non-log cabins is jarring to our well-tended picture of the Smokies. Cades Cove, we assure ourselves, is authentic; Elkmont is not. 

But Cades Cove, and the history of the Smoky Mountains in general, is a little more complex than many assume. 

Several of Cades Cove’s earliest settlers were newcomers to the region. Some were big-time speculators. Some had college educations. One of the Cove’s best-known early settlers arrived in 1846, very early in the Cove’s history: Dr. Calvin Post, a physician from New York. He moved to the Cove at age 40 (Was it a Walden-era urbanite’s midlife crisis?). Believed to have studied in Europe, Post kept an elaborate botanical garden, a “horticultural Eden” the Cove’s curators have never recreated.

He was also a geologist who advocated large-scale mining in the Cove. We may be happy he didn’t succeed, but for more than a quarter-century, Post was one of Cades Cove’s most influential leaders, both as the town doctor and as schoolteacher. 

Others who came to the Smokies before the Civil War included George Washington Harris, the iconoclastic Pennsylvania-born humorist known in New York’s sporting journals, and John Mitchel, the droll Irish revolutionary who had escaped from a penal colony in Tasmania but who would later be elected to British Parliament. Both built homes in Tuckaleechee Cove. Neither lived there long, but they were among the people you might have encountered if you’d hiked through the Smokies, 150 years ago.

We present the Smokies as an enclave of rough pioneers who were so remote they had no other options, but by the time the first logs were being cut for cabins in Cades Cove, Knoxville—25 miles to the north, as the crow flies—had already hosted a state capital, a publishing center, and an fledgling university. And Maryville, hardly a day’s stroll away, was an urban cluster of brick buildings and planed-wood houses, soon to host an especially liberal liberal-arts college.

Up in Cades Cove, they preferred to build log cabins. Sometimes they did, at least. As Durwood Dunn’s history, Cades Cove, points out, Cades Cove saw spells when its residents preferred to build modern-style frame houses, first in the 1840s. In between, in the post-Civil War period, there came a retro trend to build log cabins. 

When the park service took over, though, it demolished all the modern-style houses, saving only the log cabins. They simplified the story. 

Long before that, in Elkmont, houses appeared in a linear arrangement suggestive of a street. Elkmont’s reputation was that of an exclusive resort for the wealthy. Most of the builders of these cabins were professionals with city jobs, yes, but many were also rugged outdoorsmen, among the Smokies’ first conservationists and scouts: David Chapman, remembered better as the Father of the Smokies than as a Knoxville pharmacist; Willis Davis and his wife Annie, one of Tennessee’s first women elected to public office, and the conservationist credited with the national park idea. 

Elkmont had its own history, and it was a history of a rare citizens’ movement to found a national park. Elkmont’s history includes dramatic associations with major national figures ranging like attorney Clarence Darrow and playwright Tennessee Williams. Tourists don’t expect to hear such things on a Winnebago trip through the Smokies. 

The Smokies have a thousand stories to tell, and many of them aren’t the simple ones we come expecting to hear. It doesn’t seem reason enough to not tell them.