in at least a score of communities throughout the area of the cut-down and
future park: in Big Cove; in Noland, Deep, Baskins, and Mill Creeks; and in
Cataloochee, Sugarlands, Junglebrook, and Cades Cove, among others. The
communities represented generations of Euro-southern settlement, with
the expected farmsteads, churches, schools, and cemeteries. Since living
adult males could vote, it comes as no surprise that influential promoters
of a national park—principally in Asheville and Knoxville—repeated over
and over that a park would never displace communities filled with descen-
dants of pioneers. The campaign and the promise persisted almost un-
abated from the s into the s.
During less time than this, the timber operators clear-cut fully per-
cent, or , acres, of the Smokies, taking away about billion board
feet of lumber. Meanwhile the predictable fires came, further degrading the
cut-over mountainscape and burning down yet more trees. Now that the
range had become in substantial part a ruin, progress was made toward
federal purchases and creation of a southeastern Yosemite.^21
The Park Service and a host of New Deal agencies constructed the park
during the Depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps established fire
protection and planted seedlings to reforest cut- and burned-out swatches.
The corps also helped build trails for horses and hikers, plus other ameni-
ties Park Service officers deemed necessary and appropriate. Others built
roads. Then President Franklin Roosevelt came to dedicate the park in .
Shortly the nation was at war, and another federal power in the region,
the, demanded a new dam and lake along the southwestern perime-
ter of the park, to supply electricity to the war effort. An addendum to
’s imperative was more than incidental to the Park Service’s mission:
While Fontana Dam’s turbines fed the power grid, Fontana Lake offered
a marvelous recreational opportunity to park patrons. Unfortunately, the
dam/lake area was mostly good cove land and had long been populated by
humans as well as wildlife. The people were moved and the site was flooded,
but not without ugly exercise of legal and police power. Fontana communi-
ties merely followed others within the new boundaries of the park. For the
old promise of leaving resident humans inside the park was reneged upon
early on. Eminent domain ruled as law, and police executed the law. Both
expulsions came hard on s removals of rural folks who lived on sites
planned for the firstdams and lakes.
Like Yosemite and the other famous western parks, the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park was to serve the automobiling public. Paved high-
ways entered the park from all convenient directions, and ‘‘bear jams’’—