39th Anniversary - A Step Back In Time

Well now, let's see what else we did on Thursday, our day in the sun. After completing our tour of Ober Gatlinburg, we turned the trusty Buick steed toward the Great Smoky Mountains, specifically Cades Cove. After Claude and I moved to Maryland, my parents would tour through sections of the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Great Smoky Mountains that they had come to love as they returned home to Louisiana after visiting us. One of those places was Cades Cove in the southwest corner of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. I have heard how lovely this place was for 24 years now. Claude and I determined we should see it for ourselves. So off we went through the Wear Valley area and into the Park. I'm posting another slide show (best way to get lots of pictures out there) of the Cades Cove Loop Road tour. It was late in the afternoon when we arrived so we saw as much as we could in the few hours we had to drive and walk to some of the sites. Cades Cove was settled by the Joshua Jobe family in 1821, who found no Cherokees living in that area when they settled it. They did encounter them prowling around but none resided there when they settled it. By 1850 it had 132 families living there. Primarily it was a farming community but they also added grist mills and blacksmith shops. At one point they tried a forge for smelting iron. Two residents were licensed distillers of apple and peach brandy and corn whiskey. From the land around them they ate wild game and fish and they valued their huge harvest of chestnuts each year. In this community, neighbors would have helped each other and entertainment would have been the dinners at a church. We saw lots of deer who didn't care how close you were. They seemed to know they were protected and we were just there to watch them. One of the old homes reminded me of a smaller version of the home my mothers parents lived in. It had a little room that was added using a portion of the front porch. This room was used if a stranger came thru and needed a place to rest. Gramma & Grampa Fisch used their little room as a "fruit" room where they kept all the items bottled in glass jars from the garden. All the little homes had a fireplace in the main room with a set of stairs going to the upstairs where the boys would have slept. The girls traditionally slept on the main level. These homes set on top rock pedestals to keep them off the damp ground. Our home in Shreveport was built up on brick pedestals to keep it off the damp ground. These homes had no running water or electricity and no indoor plumbing. So in many of them I felt like I was back at Grampa and Gramma Fisch's home in Louisiana. I experienced a lot of what these homes would have been like when I grew up and visited Mimi's parents. The cantilevered barns were fascinating. Cades Cove would have been a very peaceful place to live. We missed a couple of the preserved homes but really saw most of these buildings. I was talking with another couple who stopped at the same house we were visiting and we were both commenting about the way the walls were made. They had huge spaces between the logs or boards in the walls. These had been filled with mud but in many places that mud had fallen out. These would not have been warm places in the winter. Maybe I'm still reeling over the power outage and single digit temps outside and trying to keep the inside of our home at 50 degrees. But I don't remember ever seeing that big a space in the walls between logs or boards. One home had a shed to shelter bee gums. I didn't even know bees chewed gum!!! There were a few smoke houses. This made me remember being in Grampa and Gramma Fisch's smokehouse. It smelled so good and maybe that is why I love bacon so much today. Good memories. This is a drive that is worth your time if you are ever in that area. Allow time to just enjoy the calmness of being in that spot. And then to appreciate how fortunate we are to live with all the niceties we are blessed with...like being able to share this thru a blog!!