Rain Fizzled, So Cades Cove Exploration Happened

Awww! It’s April already and my Great National Retirement Tour is almost over. It rained hard all night. I was afraid my campsite might flood. There was a mountain peak right behind me and across the road. I could just picture water pouring down from the mountain and taking my poor little camper down into Walden Creek.

It was bright and sunny by 10 am, and only Campsite #12 right beside me is flooded. I was high and dry. Spent the morning (Friday, April 1st) downloading photos and adding them to the blog. Finished blogging about Charleston and started the Raleigh stop. Didn’t get going anywhere until after 1 pm.

Had breakfast at Mel’s Diner on Wear Valley Road. Very friendly staff. Huge meal! Don’t order the sausage patties – everything else is pretty good.

Wasn’t going to do anything because of the rain, but it stayed mostly sunny all day, so I decided to do Cades Cove – an auto tour loop of an historic farming community inside the National Park. First stopped at Sugarlands Great Smoky Mountain National Park Visitor Center to buy a stuffed animal (a request), and a long-sleeved T-shirt for me. Then drove to Cades Cove. A cove (in mountain lingo) is a flat valley between mountain ranges where farming can happen. The landscape, nestled at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountain chain, was gorgeous. The National Park Service explained that Native Americans had been planting and harvesting grains here for thousands of years, and they are engaged in a process of burning off the European grass and replanting native grasses and grains. One of the photos below shows this. Another shows baby fir trees trying to grow to replace the dead and dying ones.

Cades Cove is an 11-mile road loop thru an historic site where few people live now and most of the homesteads are owned and managed by the National Park System as historic preservation sites. The road is a one-way loop thru the cove that no one but tourists use – so the speed is less than 20 mph not because it is signed, but because people are going that slow to see stuff along the way. The oldest homestead is from the 1820s, the newest from the 1870s.

Wildlife:

Saw my only wildlife in the Smoky Mountains so far on this drive – a total of 4 ducks and about a dozen deer foraging in a fenced pasture. I’m sure they can, and likely do, jump the fence. Oh, and I saw a dead red fox on the road on the way to Cades Cove.

Cades Cove Homesteads:

1. The oldest homestead belonged to John Oliver, built in 1826, round log home. I did not walk up to see it because I was doing the map the wrong direction at this point.

2. Two churches: I walked up to and inside the Methodist Church. It was disbanded during the Civil War because the congregation was divided in their loyalties.

3. Elijah Oliver, son of John Oliver, 1865. I did walk up to this house and its 4 outbuildings, and took some photos. It was built from some round and some square logs, but a log home none-the-less. It was interesting to me that the kitchen was separated from the house by a covered porch. I suppose that kept the house cooler in the summer.

4. Grist mill: The mill was built on this site and operated by the side of Mill Creek. John Cable built the two mills here in about 1870; he operated them and did some farming. There are 5 other buildings on this site now, but 4 of them were moved in by NPS. One was a “drive through” barn. The mill is what was called a “slash” sawmill. Most of the milled log homes in the cove show signs of being slash milled, according to the brochure. I did park and walk around, took some photos. There was also a water powered sorghum molasses mill there. Both pretty moss covered. NPS could probably do a better job of making sure they are not moss-covered if they mean to preserve them. The other building on the site was a house that was built some years later and rented out by Cable to a couple who ran a general store out of it.

5. Dan Lawson house, 1856, son-in-law of the grist mill owner, has a brick chimney which was unusual for this time. This is called a “transition house” since it has some milled logs and some lumber construction. It also has a very Scandinavian looking storbord – or granary. I walked around a little and took some photos.

6. Carter Shields cabin. Still in remarkably good shape. I did not walk around. Did text Richard that I was parked in front of it.

It was very easy to see why people call places like this a “hollow.” That is exactly what it looks like. It was also easy to see why people had to leave – everyone here was eventually related. And I can better understand why the National ParkService is so involved with the National Historic Register. They own a lot of historic buildings like these inside Park boundaries.

I realized on the way out that the road is much shorter taking the Townsend Road to Wears Valley Road, which is just a stone’s throw from my campground. Wears Valley Road has a lot of river tubing businesses, a couple of really local restaurants, and a few moonshine distilleries that it might pay to investigate on a return trip.

I stopped at Boss Hogg’s little roadhouse for some BBQ since I noticed the smoker outside. It was fabulous and had a sauce that defied description, but seemed to owe more to mustard than to tomatoes. I would go back. And they were so nice. When I said I wanted to buy some sauce, she just gave me some since they had closed out the till already.

The internet worked tonight, so I loaded a couple of blog posts on there. I did talk to the guy in the office who promised to reboot it. Must have worked.