Somewhere in your drive around this cove, I want you to spare a thought for the children — because a valley full of families was a valley full of young'uns, and getting them any schooling at all up here took some doing.
The first schools in Cades Cove were what they called 'field schools' — and don't picture anything like a schoolhouse you know. Picture a rough log building set in a cleared field, with a dirt floor, windows without a scrap of glass in them, a fire pit dug in the middle for winter, and a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. That was it. Families who lived near each other would throw in together, share the building, and scrape up whatever they could between them to pay a teacher — often just for a few months a year, in the slow season, because a farm child's first job was the farm. And when there was no schoolhouse handy, they used what they had: the churches sat empty six days a week, so the children learned their letters in the pews.
Think about what it took to value learning under those conditions. When survival is the whole game — when a hard winter can end you — sending a child off to sit and read instead of work is very nearly a luxury. And these families did it anyway, as much as they could, because they wanted better for the next ones coming up.
The last school left standing in the cove was the Cable School, and it held on right up until 1944 — a good ten years after the park came in — before it finally closed, in a squabble between the county and the Park Service. And when that last schoolhouse door shut, it was really the sound of the whole community winding down. No more children meant no more cove. Just fields, and cabins, and the quiet you're driving through now.
Photo: Zhou Yu · CC BY-SA 3.0
