A Conversation with the Smokies’ History Guardian

Baird Todd has done collections and museum curation work at National Park Service units across the country, but since November 2016 he’s been the museum curator at the at the National Park Service Collections Preservation Center in Townsend, Tennessee. 

Newly completed in spring 2016, the $4.2 million facility houses north of 1.7 million items, more than 1 million of which relate to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It’s Todd’s job to oversee this vast collection, which includes everything from old land deeds and photographs to barn looms and firearms. 

What brought you to the Smokies? 

I did my masters degree at the University of Tennessee back in the late ‘90s, and I enjoyed living in the area. Then, they had the new facility built. That was the real appeal, to be able to work in a facility that was designed to do the job and had the space to do the job and to properly store things. I have worked in a variety of collections facilities that have been everything from converted meat processing plants to cavalry barracks to a hospital morgue, and so to get something that was designed for the work was really appealing.  

You work for the Smokies, but the center contains more than just Smokies-related collections, right? 

That’s one of the things that makes the center unique here in the Southeast is it’s a multi-park collection storage facility. We house collections from five units of the National Park Service—Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Andrew Johnson National Historical Site, Obed River Recreation Area and Big South Fork, as well as Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. In addition to the little over 1 million items from Great Smoky Mountains National Park that are stored here, there’s another 400,000 from those four other parks. Our partner parks are only delivering to us historic and archeological materials that they’re not actively using for exhibits or putting out on loan. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the only park unit that has their archives stored here at the Collections Preservation Center. 

Do you have a favorite artifact, or a type of artifact that you find especially interesting? 

We have a little kerosene-powered clothing iron, and these were not uncommon prior to World War Two or even up into the 1950s. They had a Coleman-type burner inside them. You pressurize the kerosene inside a tank and ignite it, and it would heat up the surface of the iron. It really stands out as an object physically. The other thing—and this is something that was made locally in the Gatlinburg area—is we have a hand-whittled crossbow that was apparently made by someone’s uncle for the nieces and nephews to hunt small game, and it’s in really good shape. It’s probably from the 1920s or early 1930s—it’s something that was still in use within the memory of people who are still alive. It was just really unexpected to see that here. And then we have oddball things like a piece of dried meat that was hung inside a cabin wall for 100 years where we just never know what we’re going to do with that. 

Why is it important to continue preserving these collections? 

These objects are physical and tangible examples of the people who lived here and who may have been forced out of their homes at the creation of the park. We feel we have a moral obligation on that end to preserve what was lost, but the other thing is that getting people to understand the past is not always easy and objects are a real way for people to get a better sense of what life was like in the past—and in a lot of ways they may be our only evidence of how people were living. If you look at the prehistory here, those little rock flakes from when somebody was making a tool are really important for us to demonstrate how people were living in the park. At the same time the objects that were abandoned by the people who left tell us a lot about their lives in the period before they left. The objects keep that story alive in a way that a lot of times written documentation just can’t.