A Sense of Place

Not long ago I hiked to the Walker Sisters’ home in the Smokies and sat on the porch. It was an hour or so before dusk, my favorite time to arrive. At that time of day, I had the place to myself. I planned to stay until dark and hike out by headlamp; something I’d done before. 

On this visit, I sat and looked around the grounds, letting my mind wander. I started to think of the six unmarried sisters sitting on this same porch on an evening just like this one, looking out at their grounds after a day of house and garden work. A new thought crossed my mind: How many actual days and nights did the six unmarried sisters spend over their lives at this house? It was an arcane thought that came out of the blue, but one that intrigued me.  I didn’t have a list of the births and deaths of the sisters, but I knew that the oldest one, Margaret Walker, lived to be 91 years of age. So, I played around by computing 365 days a year times 91 years to get a good estimate of just one of the sisters. And even though I knew the figure would be high, I was mildly astounded at the figure, which totaled more than 33,000 days and nights in the same house.  

I leaned back and reflected on the number. It struck me that if only one of the sisters lived that many days in this one house, the total for the combined six sisters would be enormous, even with their different dates of birth. I was immediately astounded by the enormity of those individual days and nights over the course of the Walker Sisters’ lives, almost all spent in their 20-foot-by-22-foot, hand-hewn cabin in the Smokies. The Walker Sisters actually refused to live elsewhere, even battling the State of Tennessee and the National Park Service to remain on their land when Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established. To say they loved the heritage of their family and the land of their birth is an understatement.  I marveled at the sisters’ incredible and enduring sense of place as I hiked back to the trailhead that evening in the dark.    

The Walker Sisters attachment to their ancestral land began in the middle of the 19th century in Little Greenbrier, a small valley in Tennessee in the Smoky Mountains. The valley is drained by a stream called Little Brier Branch. In the early 1860s, a man named John N. Walker (sometimes referred to as “Hairy John” because of his long whiskers) walked over Cove Mountain into Little Greenbrier and courted a young lady named Margaret Jane King. Soon, they planned a wedding. But the darkness of the Civil War threw a cold shadow on their lives, and John Walker answered the call for volunteers and delayed the marriage by traveling to Kentucky to join a pro-Union artillery unit. His military service included time in the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, before he was paroled back to Union lines. 

After the war, John Walker returned to the Smokies. He and Margaret married on March 29, 1866, and they inherited a cabin and the majority of her parents’ land, acquiring the rest later on. Over time, John Walker expanded the wooden cabin and improved the land as the family grew. 

In the family cabin, Margaret Jane Walker brought four boys and seven daughters into this world in the 1870s-1880s. As the children grew up, they learned to manage livestock and harvest wildlife. They learned to grow corn, beans, squash, cabbage, and many varieties of apples. (Their father planted numerous varieties of apples and was referred to as the “Johnny Appleseed” of Little Greenbrier.) The girls also learned to make quilts, coverlets and clothing, and to can vegetables and fruits. They lived just like other mountaineers in the Smokies and Appalachia, making a living on their mountain farm.

The family didn’t grow up in a vacuum. They had neighbors in Little Greenbrier who also farmed and made a living. The residents even built a community church in the early 1880s, a structure that also served as a one-room schoolhouse. John Walker worked on this structure, as he was an accomplished “corner-notch” man. The children attended the school, along with going to church with their parents. Interestingly, the school term was sometimes only six weeks a year, depending on the availability of teachers. Not far from the church/school, a cemetery served as the final resting place for local residents.

 Over time, the boys in the Walker family moved away or married, setting up residences elsewhere. By all appearances, the remaining daughters of the family appeared to be destined for the demanding life of married women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the southern mountains. But, interestingly, only one of the daughters - Sarah Caroline — married and left the house, although two other sisters got engaged, only to see their men die in work-related incidents. Some commentators have speculated that Margaret, the oldest sister, had determined to stay single and stay on the land, so she pressured the others to do likewise. 

By 1921, the parents were both dead, so the sisters inherited the family cabin and land. The cabin, which still stands, contains a main room with a fine fireplace and a loft above. There’s another wooden structure immediately adjacent which served as the kitchen, with an attached porch.  A nearby springhouse provided fresh water. A barn, which no longer stands, and a wagon/gear shed, also stood nearby. 

The Walker sisters who inherited the cabin and worked the land were—from oldest to youngest—Margaret, Mary Elizabeth (called “Polly”), Martha, Nancy, Louisa (pronounced “Lou-EYE-za”), and Hettie. Margaret was the leader of the household; the other sisters deferred to her, even calling her the “Boss Cook.” In the household there developed a division of labor, with specific sisters working on such things as canning vegetables and fruits, cooking, and quilting, and clothes-making, to name a few jobs. The sisters were on their way to living out routine lives just like thousands of other mountain dwellers. 

But the relatively peaceful life of the Walker Sisters changed in the 1920s when a political movement developed in the region, a movement designed to establish a national park or forest in the southern mountains. Prominent citizens in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina broached ideas for a national preserve, extolling the benefits of tourism to the area. Ultimately, the proponents joined together and pushed for a national park along the Tennessee/North Carolina border in the Smoky Mountains. The idea gained momentum and by 1926 a national park was authorized and finally established in 1934, with Tennessee and North Carolina working with the federal National Park Service (NPS) to acquire the necessary land. That acquisition of land for the new park dramatically changed the lives of the rural mountaineers of the Smokies, forcing hundreds to sell out to the government and move on.  It was a very trying time for most of the residents.

The Walker Sisters resisted efforts by the government to buy their land, even when faced with the threat of physical removal. Local and regional newspapers in the 1930s and ‘40s, and even the famous Saturday Evening Post (a national publication that reached millions of readers) picked up on the plight of the sisters and their fight to stay on their land. Feature articles were written about the so-called “old-maid, spinster sisters” of the Smokies who stood up to the government. The sisters became regionally famous. 

But after years of negotiations and counter-offers, the sisters ultimately sold their 122 acres to the federal government for $4,750 and got a “life lease” which allowed them to stay on their land. 

Now that the area was part of a national park, Little Greenbrier became a very different place for the sisters. Their neighbors and friends—who did not get life leases—were moved out by the government, and the last school session occurred in 1936. A quietness descended on the valley as the sisters became the sole residents. 

But even with these major changes to their lives, the Walker Sisters adapted and carried on. They didn’t feel isolated and they knew all about the outside world. Two of them even worked outside the valley for short periods. Their brothers and married sister visited them and brought along their children. Some of the sisters even took automobile trips outside Little Greenbrier. They certainly knew about the modern world and its technological advances, but they figured they had everything they needed in their own world in Little Greenbrier, which was fine with them.

Over time, though, the sisters did have to accept the numerous park visitors who regularly drove or hiked to their home to observe them practicing the “old ways” of mountain living. To many visitors, the rustic lifestyle of the sisters was a true “living history” demonstration, showcasing a way of life more in keeping with the 19th century than the current mid-20th. 

The sisters accepted these intrusions as the cost of staying on their land. But they were smart. They figured that if people were coming to see them, then they’d sell canned goods, quilts, coverlets, and craft items to them. Louisa Walker even wrote poems about their home and land and sold them at the cabin. The sisters became rustic tourism entrepreneurs. 

As the years advanced, however, the sisters began to die, starting with Nancy in 1931. By 1951, only Margaret and Louisa survived on the land. Two years later, they sent a poignant letter to the national park superintendent asking that a sign that directed visitors to their homesite be removed, stating they were too old to handle visitors. These two sisters remained on their land until Margaret died in 1962 and Louisa in 1964. Interestingly, even though the sisters fought to stay on their land during their lives, when they died they all found their final resting place outside of Little Greenbrier in their father’s ancestral cemetery. 

With the passing of the Walker Sisters, a fascinating period of Smoky Mountain history died with them. But the heritage of the sisters is maintained today in historic photos, archival interviews and recordings, articles, books, and memories, and in the historic structures and grounds which survive today.

A hike to the Walker Sisters’ homesite today provides an opportunity to sit on their porch and reflect on the southern Appalachian heritage they represented. They weren’t poor “backward” people who lived in squalor. Rather, they were self-sufficient and resourceful mountaineers who dealt with the daily hardships of mountain living, and with the challenge of living inside a national park after all their friends and neighbors had moved away. 

The Walker Sisters are celebrated today for their resourceful and self-sufficient lives. A fitting summation of their fascinating heritage was made by Robert R. Madden and T. Russel Jones, two National Park Service researchers, who wrote the following: “The Walker Sisters are remembered, not as eccentric, old-maid mountain women, but as warm human elements in the story of the Great Smoky Mountains.”