Open pasture at the heart of the cove. A good place to stop, look across the fields, and picture the working community of some 700 people who once farmed every acre you can see.
Stop here a minute and just look out across the open floor of the cove. Try to unsee the park for a second — the mowed fields, the tidy fences — and picture it full. Because at its peak, in the middle of the eighteen-hundreds, this was not an empty scenic valley. It was a busy, crowded, working community. By 1850, some six hundred and seventy people lived in Cades Cove, spread across well over a hundred farms. Every flat acre you can see was cleared, plowed, planted, grazed, and fought for.
And it was very nearly a world unto itself. Think about what these families made with their own hands, right here, because they had no choice. They grew their food and put it up for winter. They raised sheep, sheared them, spun the wool, and wove their own cloth. They tanned leather, forged their own tools at the blacksmith shop, built their own furniture, ground their own meal at Cable's mill, and preached in their own churches. They had schools for the children and stores for the little that had to be bought. Hard cash was scarce — most trade ran on barter and neighborly labor.
That's the thing to hold onto about Cades Cove. This wasn't a few lonely pioneers scratching at the wilderness. It was a complete, functioning Appalachian society, generations deep, with its own rhythms of planting and harvest, its own feuds and courtships and Sunday dinners, its own way of doing nearly everything. People were born here, married here, buried here, and mostly never needed to leave.
Which is exactly what made the end of it so hard. You don't just relocate a few cabins when you empty a place like this. You end a whole world. Keep looking out at those fields, and keep that in the back of your mind as we roll on toward the last of our stops.
Photo: David Ratledge · CC BY 4.0
