The first frame house built in Cades Cove (1879), later home and store of Becky Cable, an unmarried woman who ran a farm and business on her own terms.
Just past the mill stands the Gregg-Cable House — and it earns a footnote in cove history for being the first frame house ever built in Cades Cove. Every home before it was hand-hewn logs. This one, raised in 1879 by a man named Leason Gregg on a single acre he bought from John Cable, was built of sawn lumber — milled, most likely, right at Cable's sawmill next door. It was a sign of the times: the cove was modernizing.
Gregg ran a store on the first floor and lived above it. But the name most tied to this house is Becky Cable. Rebecca Cable and her brother Dan came to live here and run the place, and Becky in particular became one of the most remarkable figures in the valley. She never married. In an era when a woman's security ran through a husband, Becky Cable ran a farm, a store, and a boarding operation on her own account — buying and selling stock, managing land, keeping the books — and she did it well enough to be remembered by name a century later, when most of her neighbors are not.
Walk the grounds around the house and you'll find the full working farm gathered here: the drive-through cantilever barn, corn cribs, a smokehouse, the blacksmith shop. The park moved several of these structures here to create a kind of open-air museum of cove life. Boone's got a tale about Becky herself — but look around first at what one determined woman held together.
Photo: Billy Hathorn · CC BY 3.0
