A Conversation With the Smokies’ Recordkeeper

Mike Aday has been the librarian-archivist for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park since 2013, when he left his post at Yosemite National Park to travel east and manage the Smokies’ impressive archival collection. As an employee of the Great Smoky Mountains Association, Aday supports the nonprofit by aiding journalists, authors and academics in their research efforts while supporting the park in its mission to preserve and protect the Smokies’ history and heritage.

What is the job of a librarian-archivist?

I’m responsible for managing the archival holdings. We have 1.4 million holdings in the collection and it’s my responsibility to make sure they are appropriately cared for, housed, catalogued and made accessible as much as possible to the public. It’s a huge collection. Our earliest document is from about 1780 and our most recent records are probably from about 2016, when the building that we’re housed in now was constructed.

You’ve been in this position for about a decade now. What keeps you interested in the work?

This is actual, literal history. You can read about history in a book, you can watch a documentary, but working in an archive is an opportunity to actually hold history in your hands. There’s something really special about the primary sources that we work with every day, and it’s fascinating that this type of information is available to the public. Not all national park locations have archives. Most of them don’t have a collection as large and as broad in span as what we have. Our collections here are not just the documents that were created by the national park itself, but we have all of the documents, all of the records related to the efforts to establish this park, going back as far as the turn of the 20th century. We have everything from the Tennessee Parks Commission and the North Carolina Parks Commission that document all the work they went through to help build this park, including the exercise of eminent domain to acquire the land. We have all these little ancillary collections that are related to the people who lived in the park. We have oral histories with some of the early residents. We’ve got about 35,000 historic photographs in the collection that document a wide variety of topics in the region. It’s not a collection that just relates to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but it’s a collection that documents the changing human history in Southern Appalachia.

Why is it important to maintain these collections?

The national park is required by federal law to maintain in perpetuity records that relate to the way the park manages its natural and cultural resources. We have a federal mandate to do that, and I feel like we also have a moral obligation to all of the people who once lived here. I think we have an obligation to do our best to maintain their history and make that history available to the public as we can.

What is one of the most interesting items you’ve come across in the course of your work?

I think for me the most important item we have is the ceremonial ostrich quill pen that [Tennessee] Governor Austin Peay used sign the legislation that authorized purchase of Little River Lumber Company land in the 1920s. That 78,000 acres became the core that the rest of the park was built around. It’s important because it is a very clear line of demarcation. It spells the end of White European settlement and existence in the Great Smoky Mountains. It also sort of underscores the importance of the early natural conservation movement in the region, and it spells the beginning of the end for logging in the mountains and the beginning of the most visited national park in the United States.