Discover the pioneer spirit, deep-rooted heritage, and historical struggles of the early Great Smoky Mountain settlers.
Cades Cove was once a remote place in the Great Smoky Mountains. One of the few ways through the Smokies and into the cove was along Indian trails. Some of those trails were improved into roads. One of those trails was called, appropriately enough, Cades Cove road. The name was later changed to Rich Mountain Road. By either name the road was one of the main routes through the Smokies between Tuckaleechee and Cades Cove.
Rich Mountain Road has a number of famous views of Cades Cove and today’s Smoky Mountain visitors face the temptation to travel up Rich Mountain Road to see those views. Smokies tourists may use the road but shouldn’t unless they don’t mind leaving Cades Cove before finishing the auto tour most of which lay beyond the roads turn off. Rich Mountain Road is a one way dirt road which exits The Great Smoky Mountain National Park after twelve mountainous miles.
Cove roads which went to Maryville through the Smoky Mountains could be difficult to travel for the Cades Cove population and their teams of horses. You see the trip to town and back took three days. One to go. One to buy or sell goods, or perhaps visit and one to come home again.
Though Cades Cove was generally a self sustaining community, pioneers bought things from Maryville such as medicine and remedies such as Camphorated oil, catnip tea, Castor oil, Epsom salts. As time went by, general stores such as the Giles Gregory store, sprang up in Cades Cove where medicine, seeds, sugar, kerosene, yard goods and hardware supplies. Products could be purchased with money or by trading products such as eggs. Still, the larger town of Maryville had a more appealing selection and so the trips from the Cades Cove continued. If on a trip to Maryville, the family was selling rather than buying, chances are they were selling chestnuts which grew in abundance in Cades Cove. Unfortunately disease eventually killed the majestic chestnut groves.
Life in Cades Cove in the early history of settlement in the Smokies was very different from life today. There were none of the modern conveniences that we take for granted and the pioneer mind set was quite a bit different from our own. The Cades Cove pioneer was profoundly influenced by the serene pastoral environment of the Smokies cove. As a people they were closer to God as well as the land. As you walk through their cabins, farms, mills, and churches you can feel times in which they lived.
Therefore, as you stand before the beautiful vistas on which they stood, look at Cades Cove through their eyes. A sense of awe will come over you for the majesty of the Great Smoky Mountains and the graceful cove they enfold. Those who do will have a better understanding of the men and women who came to this Smoky Mountain valley before you.
Traveling through Cades Cove, many like to project themselves backward in time. Should you do the same, you will learn a little of what it was like to live in the Smokies in the 1800’s. It is helpful to ask yourself the following questions:
• What might it have been like to bump over this Smoky Mountain road in a wagon pulled by horses?
• What would it have been like to move to the Smokies where the native inhabitants may be angry at your coming, lived a very different lifestyle, and spoke a different language?
• What would it be like to face the daunting task of clearing the land in hopes of creating a prosperous farm?
Of course you would need to do that while as quickly as possible also planting a garden so you and your family would not starve over the first winter. What would it be like to tend and harvest the garden and preserve the yield and to know your families survival depended upon your success. Imagine slaughtering your own livestock if you were lucky enough to have it and preserving the meat for later consumption. Imagine chopping down the deadened trees to use for buildings and fences or to burn them into fertilizer. In short image what was it like to be a Smoky Mountain pioneer.
John and Luraney Oliver were poor and had to be frugal in their preparations for their move to Cades Cove. They could have had little more with them than their seed, and a few tools yet, in 1818, toting one child and expecting another, the Olivers struck out from Carter county to the promise of the Smoky Mountain cove, Cades Cove one hundred miles away. Their journey was exhausting and yet, whether out of necessity or pure pioneer grit, John and Luraney simply walked into Cades Cove, rolled up their sleeves and went to work building their dream.
Though the Oliver’s historic settlement in Cades Cove may have been simple, it certainly was not easy. For one thing, the Olivers had to be convinced to move to Cades Cove in the first place by their friend Joshua Jobe. Once he brought them to the cove, they must have questioned the wisdom of having followed him into the wilderness. Once the Olivers were in the cove Joshua left them, intent on going back for more settlers. They would not have been concerned that Joshua would want to return to the cove as he had purchased land in Cades Cove from his father-in-law and intended to settle there. But would he return? It was common knowledge that settlers in the Wautauga Valley had been forced by the fierceness of the Cherokee Nation to live in forts. And so the issue of safety and living among the Cherokee was a real concern. With such stories about, the Olivers must have wondered would Joshua Job be killed by the Indians before his return? Would they?
As it turned out, the Olivers plight of living alone with the Native Americans turned out well after all. With the work of clearing the land and building their cabin, the Olivers didn’t get enough crops harvested and preserved before the harsh winter set in. Had it not been for the kindness of the Smokies tribe, the Cherokee, who shared their food with the Olivers, they would have surely starved.
Life for the young couple had been so grueling that come spring when Joshua Job returned, he had to give Luraney two milk cows in order to convince her to stay in the Smokies! And stay they did. The Oliver’s offspring still lived in Cades Cove when the Great Smoky Mountain National Park was formed in 1934.
The Oliver’s original Cades Cove cabin stood fifty yards or so behind the cabin now identified as their cabin. It like all the Smokies cabins was built of the same natural materials found in the Great Smoky Mountain Park today. Even the shingles on the roof were made of the trees.
In the Smokies in the 1800s even the needs of youth were taken care of in a practical way for their day. The cabin still standing and preserved by the NPS as the Oliver’s cabin is actually the honeymoon house which their family built for their son to use when he married. Typically honeymoon houses were built on the parents property near the main house.
Built in the 1850’s it had a good roof with a strong stone chimney. It boasted two stories of living space and was constructed of logs hewn into timbers. Timbers are logs that are squared off with a broadax. Notches are cut in the ends of the timbers and placed one on top of the other to form the walls. Spaces between the logs were filled with mud to keep out pests and wind.
Life expectancy was much shorter before the modern age of medicine so the average life spanned was approximately forty-five. Perhaps this is one reason many Smoky Mountain people were married as teenagers. Courtship often began at social gatherings which included all ages such as church meetings, picnics, chestnut harvests, corn huskings, molasses makings, and beanstringings.
Cove life reflected the premise that each family member had an important place and a job to do. Honeymoon houses allowed newly weds a stable environment in which to begin marriage. The groom’s education about running a farm could continue, as could his bride’s education about running the house.
Some log homes had a hole cut beside the chimney. Appropriately named a "granny hole," the makeshift window allowed the elder woman to cook while keeping an eye on the younger children.
Typically, a cove family included a mother and father, children (nine in the case of the Olivers), and often a grandparent or an unmarried aunt. Though the cabins were small and the families large, there was much love among the family members who watched over and cared for each other.
With all the early marriage going on in Cades Cove, you might think divorce must have been rampant—but divorces were extremely rare in the Smokies as elsewhere in the country in the 1800’s. Smokies couples often raised ten to twelve children most of whom were delivered by “granny women” (midwives).
Children everywhere play and in Cades Cove it was no different. Their toys were often home crafted out of wood. Some other common toys were flips, marbles, and tops.
Drawn by the fertile limestone-based soil of Cades Cove, the population reached 700 by 1850, just thirty-one years after John and Luraney began their Smokies home. All the children who grew up there did not stay, however; some leaving for other nearby settlements while others joined in the great western expansion known as “Manifest Destiny” in the late 1800’s.
Eventually, modern conveniences came to Cades Cove. Progress did come to the Smokies as in other places in the United States. There was a post office which opened in the 1830s and Cades Cove residents had phones by the turn of the century. Refrigeration was achieved by using the springhouse as a cool place to store butter or milk.