Time traveling in Cataloochee
The drive to Cataloochee Valley is a harrowing one, especially if the weather’s bad or your car is, like mine, nearly 20 years old and in constant danger of breaking down. Luckily for me, I had a ride on this blue-skied April day—I was hiking with the Carolina Mountain Club, for which carpooling is standard practice.
As the car climbed up the steep, narrow ridge and then plunged into the valley, I thought about the people in whose shoes I’d come here to walk—the residents of Cataloochee who once scraped out a living on this rugged land, topography separating them from the outside world. What must it have been like to ascend that ridge in a horse-drawn carriage, only to oh-so-carefully descend it days later, wagon full of purchases from a rare trip to town?
It’s been nearly 100 years since communities like Nellie and Ola thrived in what is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The families were expelled to make way for the park, but evidence of their presence remains—a school, church and several homes still stand in the valley. Despite the remote location and cold climate, hike leader Beth Fluharty said the settlement was successful. It began in the 1830s, and within a generation or so the community had outgrown the valley. By 1910, the Cataloochee area included multiple settlements—home to 1,200 people, four post offices and five schools. One of those places, a community even more remote than the Big Cataloochee settlement where we’d parked the cars, was our destination for the day.
We began our hike, sunshine illuminating the forest floor’s moss-covered logs through the still-bare trees. After passing through Big Cataloochee, the trail turned its attention toward Davidson Gap, which we reached after 2.6 miles of trail, multiple creek crossings and 1,200 feet of elevation gain. It’s a challenging walk, both today and in ages past—it would take settlers more than a day to travel from Big Cataloochee to Little Cataloochee and back.
The trail descended the gap alongside Coggins Branch, reaching the old Dan Cook place at 3.3 miles. The cabin was built in the 1850s and reassembled in 1999 from the original wooden pieces deconstructed in the 1970s. A crumbling stone foundation stands nearby, the remains of an apple house constructed around 1910. At first, settlers here scraped out a living as subsistence farmers, but later they began planting apple orchards, whose fruit was sold as produce or made into brandy. By the time talk about creating a national park began in the 1920s, the area was in the midst of another transition, offering guided fishing tours and cabin rentals as it turned to tourism.
Cook Cabin was our lunch spot that afternoon, the restored front porch perfection on a day just warm enough for a shaded respite from the sun. I leaned against the wall, stretching out my feet and munching a sandwich, thoughts drifting to the romance of life in this beautiful place, in this sturdily built cabin, days spent tending a garden and harvesting apples.
It’s an easy trap to fall into, at Cataloochee or really anywhere. We see the good parts of the lives that aren’t ours, and we want them, desire them, would gladly trade them for our own. But when we reached the Little Cataloochee Baptist Church about three-quarters of a mile later, the illusion shattered. There’s a cemetery behind the church, and many of those buried there died as children.
There’s Leola, daughter of W. M. and Myrtle Messer, whose headstone bears just a single date—Nov. 12, 1928—and the inscription “only a bud to bloom in heaven.” The grave of Lennis Mae, daughter of C. L. and Flora Morrow, is marked with the same inscription and a different date, Dec. 19, 1921. Owen, son of J. W. and H. B. Burgess, died on May 9, 1911, before reaching his fourth birthday. It was not the first time tragedy struck the family, with J. W. and H. B. also burying sons Reuben and Rufus in 1906 and 1905, respectively, months before their first birthdays. The list goes on.
The human mind likes simplicity. It wants to distill complex stories and ideas down to something uncomplicated and easy to digest. I love the outdoors, and I love the idea of a time when we were more connected to the people around us than to strangers on the internet. I want Cataloochee to be an idyllic community in one of the most beautiful places on earth, where people worked hard and looked out for each other and subsisted on the fruits of their own labor.
However, as is usually the case, the truth is more complicated. Change is the only true constant, and Cataloochee is no exception. In a century of settlement it went from subsistence farming to apple production to tourism, because life was hard and the people who lived there wanted it to be easier. They wanted to know that even in the dead of winter they’d have food to eat, and they wanted to bear children who wouldn’t die as infants in arms.
They wanted the same things as you and me. They just lived in a different time.