Cades Cove: The Life and Death of A Southern Appalachian Community, 1818 - 1937.
2002 · Knoxfille
by Dunn, Durwood.
Knoxfille: The University of Tennessee Press, (2002). Octavo, softbound (slick, black & white photo. illus. stiff wrappers), xvi + 319 pp. Fine (As New). From lower cover: To millions of people who visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park each year, Cades Cove is a major attraction, its cabins and other structures forming a living museum of Southern Appalachian culture. But for more than a century before the park’s creation, Cades Cove was an isolated mountain community, first inhabited by the Cherokees, then by a few intrepid pioneers. This book traces in moving detail the founding, development, and demise of this rural settlement. Drawing on a rich trove of documents never before available to scholars, the author sketches the early pioneers, their daily lives, their beliefs, and their struggles to survive and prosper. In the process Durwood Dunn painstakingly corrects earlier stereotypes of the mountaineer -- the romantic vision of local colorists such as Mary Noailles Murfree, the picture of degradation and desperation painted by the “Mountain Muckrakers,” and Horace Kephart’s contention that among mountain people no leadership or sense of community existed. The finding of commercial agriculture and widespread tenant farming also challenges Ronald Eller’s recent portrayal of a society of independent homesteaders. In Cades Cove, geographical isolation did not lead to cultural or economic deprivation but to a close-knit community with a strong sense of tradition and local pride. This conclusion, in a remarkable case study, calls into question many widely held assumptions about the evolution of Appalachian society as a whole. (Inventory #: 51722bd)