Smoky Mountains Park still hot at 75
GATLINBURG, Tenn. — The ancient blue-green mountains with breathtaking vistas and distinctive mists are home to salamanders and black bears, 19th century log cabins, rippling streams, waterfalls and more than 800 miles of trails, including a large section of the Georgia-to-Maine Appalachian Trail.
It’s little wonder the Great Smoky Mountains attracts more than 9 million visitors a year, twice as many as any other national park in the United States.
It’s little wonder the Great Smoky Mountains attracts more than 9 million visitors a year, twice as many as any other national park in the United States.
The 520,000-acre preserve straddling the Tennessee-North Carolina border, named by the Cherokee Indians as “The Land of Blue Smoke” for its signature natural mist, marked its 75th birthday June 15.
The 520,000-acre preserve straddling the Tennessee-North Carolina border, named by the Cherokee Indians as “The Land of Blue Smoke” for its signature natural mist, marked its 75th birthday June 15.
A ceremony Sept. 2 at Newfound Gap will mark President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original dedication of the park “to the free people of America” in 1940. President Barack Obama has been invited.
Dozens of related activities are occurring throughout the year in surrounding communities — museum exhibits, parades, family reunions and a Dolly Parton-penned musical about the Smokies at her Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge, with CD profits benefitting the park.
“Our anniversary has been a reason for so many people to pause and think back,” Smokies Supt. Dale Ditmanson said. “It has been a time of reflection [and] a jumping off point.”
uuu
Don Shoulders of Goodlettsville, Tenn., remembers the first time he saw the Smokies in 1936.
The Depression-era farmboy was barely 17 when he signed up with hundreds of other young men in FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps. As many as 4,000 at a time would work in the Smokies, laying the foundation for the park by erecting stone bridges and buildings, cutting trails and planting trees.
“It is the first time I heard of the Smokies,” the 90-year-old Shoulders said.
After a long trip by train and truck, Shoulders and his comrades arrived in the middle of the night at the former logging camp of Tremont.
“We had some boys that were just so homesick they was a-crying. I felt like I had done the wrong thing ... until I woke up the next morning, and I said, ‘I am in a new world!’ ”
Shoulders would spend three years in Tremont, earning $30 a month — $25 of which was sent home. He ate well, gained weight — 127 pounds when he arrived, 150 pounds when he left — and developed an enduring fondness for the Smokies.
When he finally returned 27 years later, he said the park had been transformed, the forest restored. “It was a different place. It really changed.” He’s been back with his family every year since.
uuu
In his 1940 dedication, Roosevelt said Americans had “used up or destroyed much of our natural heritage just because that heritage was so bountiful.”
In the Smokies, he said, “are trees ... that stood before our forefathers ever came to this continent; there are brooks that still run as clear as on the day the first pioneer cupped his hand and drank from them.
“In this park, we shall conserve these trees, ... the trout and the thrush for the happiness of the American people.”
In fact, the Smokies had been heavily logged by timber companies, muddying the streams and leaving only about a quarter of the old-growth forest intact. Boar from nearby game preserves moved in, non-native rainbow trout were stocked in streams and a blight soon killed off the massive American Chestnut trees. Park managers continue to battle these issues.
Still, Supervisory Ranger Kent Cave said, “It is a testament to the regenerative powers of Mother Nature that the forest has regrown. It looks, I am sure, similar to the way it did when Native Americans used the land or the first European settlers came.”
The park is designated an International Biosphere Reserve and a World Heritage Site with one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet, supporting 2-foot-long salamanders, 300-pound black bears, a small herd of reintroduced elk and growing numbers of native brook trout.
A continuing inventory by scientists and volunteers of the park’s 100,000 estimated species of plants and animals has discovered thousands previously unseen in the park and hundreds unknown to science.
uuu
Twenty national parks were created before the Smokies, mostly in Western states. The Smokies was the first in the southern Appalachians and the first to require purchasing land from individual owners. Congress authorized the park in 1926, but it would take eight years to raise the money to buy some 6,000 tracts.
The government gave money along with the John D. Rockefeller family and school kids and civic groups around the country.
With that background, the park’s charter stipulates that no entrance fee will ever be charged.
AP