Meet the Managers: Cultural Resources

Elkmont, a gently sloping area crisscrossed by rivers, has a rich human history. Here, a cabin from the 20th century.

NPS photo.

There are seven main programs in Resource Management and Science: Air Quality, Cultural Resources, Fire, Fisheries, Inventory and Monitoring, Vegetation, and Wildlife.

In this issue, meet the managers of Cultural Resources. The area where Great Smoky Mountains National Park is now has a rich prehistoric, historic, and ongoing culture. It is the park’s job to preserve and share the stories of changing human life on this land.

For thousands of years prior to European settlement, these smoky mountains were the home of people who fished the swift rivers, hunted on high grassy meadows, and gathered food in forested coves. These people—the Tsalagi or Aniyvwiyai, as they called themselves, or the Cherokee, as they are known now—mark their place of origin as a valley tucked between the river and the shrugging shoulders of hills outside Bryson City.

In the 1800s, settlers of European descent began displacing the Cherokee, culminating in the 1838 Trail of Tears, a grueling, forced journey that forced most Cherokee to relocate—on foot—to reservations in Oklahoma and Arkansas. The few remaining Cherokee gathered in what became the town of Cherokee, North Carolina, the community at what is now the south entrance to the park. The settlers of European descent farmed in the valleys and long coves throughout the rest of the Smoky Mountains.

 

Mossy rock walls edge many old homesites in the park.

NPS photo.

The faces on the land changed yet again in the early 1930s, when ownership passed from private hands to those of the nation. In 1934, President Roosevelt dedicated the park to the people of the United States, which meant that families living within the new park boundaries had to leave.

Although the people have moved, many traces of their lives remain in these mountains. Walk through the woods and you may see old millstones, mossy lines of old stone walls, or daffodils bursting yellow at someone’s long-gone doorstep. You may not see what lies under the ground: sherds of pottery, chips from stone tools, and even evidence of posts from centuries-old Cherokee houses. All of these cultural resources—seen and unseen—need our protection, because they represent a lifestyle long past.

 

Each cultural resource that the park protects has “cultural significance,” which means, in a nutshell, that the resource is sacred or part of ongoing culture, represents an important event, was made by an important person, represents an important time, or was made with important materials. The science of cultural management becomes an art when managers use their discerning and experienced eye to decide what is significant and what is not.

 

John McDade, the previous Smokies' curator, organizes the park's archival history.

NPS photo.

Museum Collections

In the Smokies museum collections are some of the keys to the park's past. This time, we're not talking about artifacts buried underground, but rather park archives and 3-D pieces of history. These resources are being brought together in a new facility in Townsend, TN opening in 2016. The new Collection Preservation Center will be a climate-controlled space built specifically to house the wealth of Smoky Mountain culture. Ranks of carefully arranged shelving and museum cabinetry will hold everything from letters, photographs, newspaper articles, proclamations, and oral histories telling the story of the park's people and places to household goods representing Southern Appalachian lifestyles and fragments of prehistoric pottery.

The previous curator of the both the park's cultural and natural museum collections was John McDade through 2016 (the current curator at the Smokies is Baird Todd). John worked in several museums before coming to the Great Smoky Mountains. Being a curator in a park as large and culturally rich as the Smokies is a huge job, and John stays busy improving collection storage conditions, maintaining accurate collection records, assessing the condition of historic materials, preparing for exhibits and loans to other museums and assisting researchers studying the materials held in the park's museum collections.

 

Books such as Heirlooms and Artifacts of the Smokies document not only the items that past residents owned, but the rituals and customs that surrounded them as well.

Photo courtesy of the Great Smoky Mountains Association, publisher.

Ethnographic Resources

An ethnographic resource is one held in the minds, memories, and customs of people who live in an area. In the Smokies, examples of ethnographic resources include Cherokee ceremonies, the stories that European settlers of these mountains tell, and the customs that many local families still have of visiting their relatives’ gravesites in the park each year.

Ethnographic resources are often intangible: we cannot hold an origin story, or a song that settlers sang to their grandchildren. What we can do is write these remembered pieces of culture down, as researchers do when they film interviews with former park residents and their relatives, and as the non-profit Great Smoky Mountains Association does in published books about local life. In addition to documenting lifestyles, the park can help preserve memories of the people who were here before by respecting their gravesites and the places they hold sacred.

To find more books such as the one pictured here about Smoky Mountain culture and stories, visit the Great Smoky Mountains Association website.

 

The park headquarters building is a historic structure. Cultural resources manager Dianne Flaugh indicates one of several fixtures that light the front porch. They were recently removed and sent to experts for restoration, and now they gleam like new.

NPS photo.

Historic Structures

Drive on any road or delve into the woods at any point in the park and you are likely to come across a historic structure. In some cases, you may actually be driving on or walking over the structures in question, because they include not only old houses, churches, and other buildings but also fence rows, bridges, tunnels, drinking fountains, and even some of our sturdy stone restrooms. Cultural Resources manager Dianne Flaugh oversees the protection of these buildings, as well as cultural landscapes (see below).

Any structure built over 50 years ago is a candidate for preservation as a historic structure, although many do not qualify because they are not—as described on the main page—“significant” in terms of the style in which they were built, who build them, or why they were built in that place. Some of the best-known historic areas in the park are Cataloochee and Cades Cove. Railroads used to bring wealthy families from Knoxville and Asheville to the mountain towns of Elkmont in Tennessee, and Smokemont in North Carolina. Once there, families could forget the heat of the city by soaking in streams under the lattice of thick rhododendron branches. Many of the summer homes that these families built remain in Elkmont, and were occupied into the 1980s. Some are listed on the National Register as part of the Elkmont Historic District. When family leases ended, the park took over their management, which presented many challenges including long-term maintenance and upkeep. After consulting with the Tennessee State Historic Preservation Officer, cultural resource managers developed a long-term plan that preserves some homes while allowing for the removal of others. A core area of homes at Elkmont near the Appalachian Clubhouse will be restored and preserved, along with a two other homes that help to tell the story of Elkmont and the park.

 

This historic comfort station at Chimneys Picnic Area exemplifies the fine stonework of Civilian Conservation Corps crews.

NPS photo.

In both Cataloochee and Cades Cove, dozens of families used to own farms, mills, and orchards. They built cabins, churches, bridges, and schools, several of which still stand today. Visitors to these areas continue to enjoy these cultural sites to relax on cabin steps, step into a cool springhouse, and stroll through shady churchyards.

Even buildings that thousands of visitors still use today are historic: the comfort stations at the Chimney’s Picnic Area are an example of rustic stonework done by Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) members when they were here during the 1930s. The CCC also pieced together many of our arching bridges and tunnels. Their stone work is renowned as high quality and very long-lasting. In most national parks that had been founded by the 1930s, CCC handiwork endures.

You can read more about preserving the buildings at Elkmont in the NPS Partner Profile: Documenting Elkmont.

 

Park archives include this photograph of President Franklin D. Roosevelt riding to Newfound Gap to dedicate the park in 1940.

NPS photo.

Historic Landscapes

Cades Cove, Cataloochee, Newfound Gap Road, Elkmont, and Twin Creeks. What do these park locations have in common? They represent historic landscapes, or areas of land that we recognize as vital to understanding the past in this park. Take Newfound Gap. It has great natural resource value because it represents a high-elevation spruce-fir forest, and many of the plants and animals there are relics from the Ice Age, living things that we find in Canada, Maine, and here. It also has tremendous cultural value: in the 1830s Davenport mapped the state line by walking across it, and on September 2, 1940, then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt drove up to it in a grand presidential parade and dedicated these lands as a new park. Roosevelt had, the year before, sent thousands of young men to our mountains’ flanks to build many of our rock walls and arching bridges over our roaring rivers. Newfound Gap represents all of those events in human—and park history—and it is therefore a prized cultural landscape, used daily by eager visitors and park rangers alike.

 

It is a crime to take historic resources from the park. These hinges were stolen from a historic archeology site in the park, and are now both artifacts and evidence.

NPS photo.

Archaeology

Less visible than many of the historic sites are remnants of life before—and sometimes overlapping with—the earliest European settlement in these mountains. Archaeology is the study of past human behavior through the materials people leave behind and, potentially, through the remains of people themselves. Sometimes historic documents provide information about the past, but often these records are written by those in power or those able to read and write. Oftentimes, the only way to learn about people for whom no written record exists or in which the written record is sparse is through the field of archaeology. Archeologists refer to the period of written records—generally after the 16th century—as historic, and the period of time prior to written records (and the 16th century) as prehistoric. That means archeologists look for clues as far back as thousands of years ago and as recently as the past century.

Heath Bailey is the park archeologist in the Smokies. A park archeologist spends part of their time in the field monitoring the condition of known archeological sites and investigating other areas for evidence of archeological sites. For example, when fire managers plan a prescribed burn in the park, archeologists survey the area for prehistoric or historic archeological resources and then work with the fire managers to ensure those resources remain unharmed. But not all of an archeologist's time is spent in the field. Time is also spent in the laboratory cleaning, studying and recording the artifacts recovered as part of fieldwork. This work helps reveal what those artifacts have to tell archeologists about the past life in the Smokies.

 

In the search for traces of human activity, archeologists often find things that people discarded: a broken pot or a bone with the meat removed. Most people would refer to this as trash. To the archeologist, however, this is scientific data. The archeologist can recognize patterns in the placement of these items or in the frequency of their occurrence and build a picture of what life was like in the past.

Archeologists can also tell who people traded with, what types of houses they built, what types of food they ate, what and how they hunted, and how their society was structured. Finally, archeologists can use clues about how artifacts are layered in the ground, which can tell them when people lived in certain areas, and what happened in the time since they left.

You can learn more about an archeological excavation in the park by watching the podcast in the NPS Profile: Uncovering the past.

 

Lichens almost obscure the names etched into this historic gravestone in the park.

NPS photo by Ben Zank.

Click on these links to find more information about the topics in this Dispatch:

Great Smoky Mountains Culture and People:

• People of the Smokies
• Brief history of the Cherokee people
• Biographies of park founders
• Books and information for sale from the Great Smoky Mountains Association
• Trail of Tears National Historic Trail

Archeology Information

• Society for American Archaeology (SAA)

National Historic Buildings & Information

• American Memory collections of Library of Congress photographs and images
• Built in America: for teachers

To find more information about volunteering opportunities or internships with vegetation managers, visit these links:

• Volunteers in Parks (VIP) program

Return to History and Culture main page.