The Leaving

We're near the end of the loop now, and I've got one story left — the hardest one, and the one this whole valley is really about. Because for everything you've seen today, the churches and the cabins and the mill, the plain fact is this: the people who built all of it were made to leave. Every last one.

Here's how it happened. In the 1920s, folks decided the Southern mountains needed a great national park to match the ones out West, and they picked these Smokies. Beautiful idea. But out West, the government mostly protected land it already owned. Here, the mountains were full of people — farms, communities, whole valleys like this one, near about seven hundred souls in Cades Cove alone. To make the park, all of them had to go. The state used its power of eminent domain — the right to force a sale — and began buying out the cove, family by family, whether they wanted to sell or not.

Some took the money and left quiet. Others fought like the devil. And nobody fought harder than a man named John W. Oliver — a direct descendant of that same John Oliver whose cabin we started at, the family that had farmed this cove since 1818. He took the government to court to keep his home. And he won the first case. And they came back at him again, and again, until a man simply can't fight anymore. John W. Oliver finally gave it up and walked off his family's land for the last time on Christmas Day, 1937 — one of the very last people out of Cades Cove.

Think on that. An Oliver was the first to make a home in this valley, and an Oliver, on Christmas Day, was near the last to be put out of it. And remember what I told you back at that first cabin — the Cherokee were driven out of these same mountains a century before. Two peoples, one valley, both told to go, so that the rest of us could drive through and admire it.

I don't tell you this to spoil the view. I tell you so you'll see it true. That empty, peaceful, gorgeous cove out your window is beautiful — and it's beautiful because it's empty, and it's empty because people were moved off of it. Both things are true at once. Carry them both out with you. That's the real Cades Cove.