Carrie Barton: Tennessee Williams?

May 23rd: over windy narrow little roads and through crazy tourist towns to get to the northwestern part of the Great Smokies. This, in order to visit a much-touted part we'd missed on our previous trip to the Smokies: Cades Cove.

At a rest stop enroute.

We stayed at The Mountaineer, a little old, kind of squeezed-in, campground in Townsend, TN. Our site looked down at the Little River, and came with a deck and table. So one morning we had breakfast outside, and tied up all the critters near (but not too close to...) the table. Here, are some very eager doggies, anticipating their next bacon bites!

Ah, Cades Cove. Wonder of wonders. At least that's the way some folks talk about it. It is an interesting and nice enough place, but it's not quite what I'd expected. And it has its drawbacks. Cool parts and not so cool parts. Basically, this valley was homesteaded by Europeans in the early 1800s (with some initial help from the Cherokees in the area).

The history of the area is interesting - it's always amazing to realize what people had to endure, adapt to, and overcome in order to survive in a land so new to them. But the history is also deeply disturbing - to me, at least. The federal government usurped the land and incorporated it into the park. And people were still living off the land there at the time! They were initially told the national park would not include Cades Cove, but the feds ultimately reversed that plan and used eminent domain to steal these peoples' homes, farms, lives, and livelihoods (see Wikipedia on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cades_Cove, look under "The National Park" part). Seizing the land out from under original homesteaders like that reminds me of denying our military a feasible way and timeline to vote. How can we allow a vote to happen without those laying down their lives for their country being able to have a say?!!! How can the government evict the very citizens who helped colonize their land?!!! To me, this is inexcusably despicable.

But anyways...here's the first part of our tour... These are photos and stops I took while with Billy, so they are with just the point & shoot. This is John Oliver's cabin (hidden back in the woods, up the trail in the previous picture). Oliver and his wife, Lucretia Frazier, were the first homesteaders in the valley.

The Cades Cove Methodist Church.

A beautiful afternoon in a beautiful place. After the government stole the land and incorporated it into the Great Smoky National Park, the park service was persuaded to maintain the farmland as a meadow (although they did remove all the more modern buildings of the previous inhabitants).

One of the more remarkable adaptations/innovations we saw was the little springhouse for storing cold foods. Water from a spring was routed with hollowed-out logs into a trough in this room, and then more hollowed-out logs directed water out again on the other side. So there was constantly flowing water keeping the trough cold, where food items could be placed. Pretty cool, eh?

Here's the trough. Maybe not cold enough for ice cream, but I'll bet it allowed them to keep their dairy goods fresh a little longer...!

The Elijah Oliver house - the cold trough was in the back a ways.

And then there was Aunt Becky, who was obviously a can-do woman (enlarge this photo to read the description of her)!

Her neat house.

One of the rooms inside.

These folks had every kind/shape/size of barn! Here's one rendition.

And a local "tour bus" of sorts! These folks were very cooperative and nice to let me take their photo. I just loved their set-up! Looked like fun to me!