Tracing Hazel Creek’s History

From boonies to boomtown and back again, the Hazel Creek community’s complicated history comes to life in a new book from the Great Smoky Mountains Association.

A love of fishing Hazel Creek inspired Daniel Pierce, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, to write Hazel Creek: The Life and Death of an Iconic Mountain Community. The book takes readers from the 1830s arrival of the first white settlers through the 20th-century logging boom and bust to the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. 

“I’ve long had an interest in Hazel Creek; it’s an incredibly beautiful place,” Pierce said, adding that the area also has “so many wonderful stories.”

Those stories include characters such as Moses Proctor, the area’s first white settler who was probably more akin to a squatter, and Horace Kephart, a Pennsylvanian who arrived in the early 1920s while in recovery from a mental breakdown. He would later write the iconic book Our Southern Highlanders describing the Appalachian culture he encountered. 

In the 1910s and 1920s, the Ritter Lumber Company moved in, with the company town of Proctor housing 1,000 employees at its peak. When logging ceased, Proctor became a ghost town, and in the 1940s the Tennessee Valley Authority built Fontana Dam, flooding the road to Hazel Creek. The government promised to build a new road, which never materialized—a fact that is still controversial today. Hazel Creek is now part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

“That story still moves me. I think it’s important that that promise be honored, but at the same time I look at Hazel Creek and what it means to me now,” Pierce said. “It’s really the fulfillment of a promise, a promise that the National Park Service made to protect significant places for future generations.”

The book is available at Smokies bookstores and online at smokiesinformation.org. Proceeds support the national park.