Glenn Cardwell

Two years before his death, Glenn Cardwell led me up a path in the Smokies to where he was born in 1930. Cardwell, a renowned former Great Smoky Mountains National Park ranger and, at that time, the mayor of Pittman Center, Tennessee, had taken me to the site a few years earlier, but I wanted to document this visit with photographs and explore his personal history deeper. So I met him at the Greenbrier Ranger Station in the national park on an August day and we started up a path locally known as the Injun Creek trail. 

When you hiked with Glenn Cardwell, you got information. He was a humble and soft-spoken man in his business world, but he waxed poetic and enthusiastic when you got him on the trails. As we hiked, he pointed out flowers and trees and talked about his humble beginnings in a mountain house up the drainage.

I’d known Glenn for years and we’d worked together on an annual Christmas event in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and on other projects. As we hiked that August day, I told him I’d always been impressed with his knowledge of the plants and trees of the Smokies, along with the human history of the area. He stopped on the trail and smiled. “I owe that to my mother,” he said. His voice then got excited and his face beamed as he talked, a trait I’d always noticed about Glenn when he got on a subject which interested him. “When I was young I used to follow my mother around in the woods here and on nearby Hills Creek where we moved to after the national park was established,” he said. “Mom was what you might call an ‘herb doctor,’ someone who knew the nutritional and medicinal value of local wild plants and used them every day,” he said. “I grew up fairly healthy because of mom’s plant knowledge, and she also shared her knowledge with other residents of the area, before they all had to move away when the park came about.”

We hiked on. “I actually owe my career as a national park naturalist to the information mother gave me,” he said as we crossed a foot bridge. “The knowledge I got as a kid from her led me to study on my own as an adult. I learned a lot about the hundreds of plants in the Smokies, and I used that knowledge when I became a park ranger. Over my 34 years with the park service, I led thousands of people into the Smokies on field trips, showing them the natural and cultural heritage of the mountains where I was born. So, I owe my career, in a sense, to my mother, who got me interested in the wonder of wild plants and animals in these mountains.”

Being from these mountains came to mean a lot to Glenn. As a young man he did his duty during the Korean War on a stint in the Navy. For someone who’d hardly ever left Sevier County, Tennessee, it was a challenging time being away from home so long. He told me while we hiked that day that when he was halfway around the world in the Navy he vowed that if he ever got home he “would never, ever venture farther away from the Smokies than the local hardware store in Sevierville.” 

Cardwell did venture just a little farther away, to attend the University of Tennessee to get a degree. He worked a spell as a teacher and said he’d wanted to become a school counselor. But in 1960 he heard about an entrance exam for federal jobs in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and he took it. Based on his score, he got an offer in 1961 to be a park naturalist in the Sugarlands Visitor Center area, and he accepted the offer. He stayed in the Smokies for more than three decades, never contemplating a move to another park site.

“When I was with the park service all those years my supervisors would now and then call me into their office and say, ‘Glenn, you ought to move up in the ranks by going to other parks and broaden your experience. Here’s an opportunity at another park I think you should take.’ Now, I’d made up my mind early on and had told my wife, Faye, that I was not going to leave the Smokies ever, even if it meant that I’d have to resign if the park folks insisted I leave. I always told my bosses that I was flattered by the offers, but I was happy here in the Smokies and had a family and home and was not interested in leaving. After a while, they finally got the message and knew that it was useless to try to talk me into a new position elsewhere. I never did leave the Smokies, ever. And over my years in the Smokies I mentored dozens of park rangers, something I really enjoyed doing.” 

He retired from the National Park Service in the mid-1990s.

Retirement from the park service didn’t mean real retirement, however. Cardwell was too active in his community and his church to fade away into watching television on the couch. I asked him why he didn’t just play golf or get a lake boat and take it easy like many other folks, and he laughed. “I have a slogan that I use to describe life. It says, ‘If you rest, you rust!’ And I believe that.”

So, when the position of mayor of Pittman Center, Tennessee - where he lived - came open, he ran for office and won. Talking in his mid-80s, he said: “I figure that I’m the oldest elected mayor of any municipality in the state of Tennessee.” In addition to his mayoral work, he served as a deacon in his church and was an active member of a local historical society and other civic organizations.

While we hiked on, I asked him what his mission was as mayor of a small town situated on the borders of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the burgeoning city of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. He said he and like-minded residents of the little town wanted to keep unfettered development from obliterating their heritage and historic sites. He wasn’t against development, but felt strongly that the rural heritage of his mountain community needed to be protected and not plowed under. That philosophy is mirrored in city signs along U.S. 321 on the edge of the town. They proclaim: “Pittman Center—A Community Dedicated to Preserving Our Mountain Heritage.”

‘A Friend for Life’

We finally arrived at an open area along the trail. Cardwell stopped and looked around. “This is it,” he said. “This is where I was born in the Smokies.” I detected just a trace of emotion in his quiet voice. He showed me the site of the long-gone house and the old spring, along with the remains of the first automobile that his dad purchased. The highlight of the visit occurred when Cardwell picked up some sticks and, shaping them up, commenced to walk with the sticks pointed forward. He was dowsing, he said; a way to “flesh out” an abandoned area to discern old home sites, graves, and even underground water sources. The sticks, he said, detected irregularities in the ground, and the way they changed direction in your hands indicated things. He traced out the corners of his family’s home for me by using the sticks.

After taking photos and looking around for the better part of an hour, we started back down the trail to the ranger station. As we got near it and our cars, I asked him one more question: “Of all the things your mother taught you when you roamed the forests with her years ago, is there one thing that stands out more important than anything else?” He stopped hiking, looked down and said, “Well, she showed and told me many things.” I could see that he was thinking about something as he continued to look down. Then he gazed up and beamed, and got his excited voice again. “Well, I guess one thing that has stuck with me all these years is a saying she gave me, which I use even today. Her words to me years ago were, ‘Glenn, once you fall in love with nature, you’ve got a friend for life.’ And that has been true all my long life.” 

Over the years I’d whimsically thought that Glenn Cardwell would live forever, since he was so engaged in life and had such vigor. But, sadly, he died in November 2016 at the age of 85. His legacy includes his 34 years as a park ranger, almost 18 years as mayor of his small town, and the writing of two books on the history of Greenbrier in the Smokies and Pittman Center. Additionally, before his death he was honored as one of “The 100 Most Influential People” in the history of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by the Great Smoky Mountains Association, and a history museum was established in his name at the local school. At the time of his death, he and his wife were still living in the house they bought in the early 1960s - a home that is only about three miles from where he arrived on this Earth more than eight decades earlier. 

Glenn Cardwell was a genuine man of the Smokies. He wanted to live nowhere else. While he was legally the mayor of Pittman Center, Tennessee, for many years, I also like to think of him as “The Eternal Mayor of the Smokies.” 

Arthur McDade is a retired Great Smoky Mountains National Park Ranger and the author of Old Smoky Mountain Days and The Natural Arches of the Big South Fork. He’s also a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, and is the author of over 40 magazine articles on the natural and cultural heritage of the Smokies and the southern Appalachian Mountains.