Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Cades Cove: The Scenic Valley Was a Community Before It Was a Loop Road
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
Cades Cove is one of the most visited places in the park because open fields make wildlife easy to see.
The fields exist because people farmed the valley.
Non-Native settlement began in the early nineteenth century after Cherokee land cessions.
By the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of residents lived here.
Families built farms, churches, mills and roads.
The community was connected to markets and politics beyond the mountains.
During the Civil War, loyalties were divided, and violence from both sides reached the valley.
Mountain isolation did not protect residents from national conflict.
Park creation transformed the community again.
Land had to be acquired from owners.
Some residents accepted sale.
Others resisted.
Lifetime leases allowed certain people to remain temporarily, but traditional activities such as unrestricted hunting, timber cutting and farming could no longer continue as before.
Eventually the living agricultural community largely disappeared.
The National Park Service preserved selected cabins, churches and fields to interpret mountain life.
That preservation created the pastoral landscape visitors now love.
Without mowing and management, many open areas would return to forest.
The scenery is therefore cultural landscape, not untouched nature.
For tourists, Cades Cove can feel like an idealized rural past.
For descendants of residents, it may hold family memory and loss.
Both belong.
The national park protected the valley from subdivision and industrial logging.
It also ended a community's ability to continue on its own terms.