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Published: February 18th 2012
Cades Cove
Cades Cove, the most beautiful spot in the Smoky MountainsCades Cove
I spent the first part of today once again in Great Smokey Mountains National Park.
Cades Cove is a small valley surrounded by mountains.
Before the park was established, it was the site of a small farming community.
It is often called the prettiest part of any park east of the Mississippi River, which is high praise indeed.
Visitors now see it on a
looping road, which is nearly as popular as the one over Newman Gap.
Before seeing the cove, one must reach it.
These days, that requires following a narrow road along a stream.
The stream is very pretty, shaded by pines and covered in moss.
The road is pretty slow.
This is just the appetizer for what lies ahead.
The road leaves the stream and climbs a rise, and a grassy valley appears in the distance.
This is Cades Cove.
The view from the entrance is nice, but the view from within the valley is even better.
The entire central section of the valley is open grass, so it has jaw dropping views in every
Cades Cove Horse Farm
Shenandoah National Park keeps its horses in Cades Cove. Here they are. direction.
The road is known for its photo jams, where people stop in the road to take pictures.
Please remember to pull over to the side first!
The first thing I encountered driving in was a wildlife jam, with lots of people parked on the side of the road.
This particular jam was for horses.
The park has a horse herd, and they live in a ranch near the entrance to Cades Cove.
The handlers were out, talking to people about the horses.
Primitive Baptist Church
From here, the road weaves in and out of forests.
It eventually reaches one of the most important sites in the valley,
Primitive Baptist Church.
This church for settlers was founded in the 1830s.
It is called “Primitive” because the members did not engage in missionary work.
The church is one of the best preserved early setter’s churches in Appalachia.
Since it was acquired by the park in the 1930s, it has never been modernized with the electric lights and other features seen at old churches still in use.
The church bears
Primitive Baptist Church
Primitive Baptist Church in Cades Cove. 'Primitive' refers to the worship style, not the building. a striking resemblance to the better cabins seen in this area.
The walls are unfinished wood.
It has no steeple.
Inside is a simple row of pews with an equally simple altar at the front.
The only book in the building is a bible.
Behind the church is a cemetery.
Most of the graves date to the early 1900s, although more modern ones do appear here and there.
Descendents of former church members still have the right to be buried here.
After the church, I had yet another wildlife jam to contend with.
This one was for the wildlife jackpot in these parts, a bear (see
The Majesty of Trees).
By this point, I found it more interesting to take pictures of all the people taking pictures of the bear than the bear itself.
Thankfully, most people knew to stay on the road and away from the animal.
The next site, aside from the scenery all around, was yet another church, the
Methodist Church.
The Methodists were not as numerous as the Southern Baptists in this area, but they had enough to organize
Tourists and bear
Tourists taking a picture of a bear (in the center of the photo), violating the safe distance limit in the process a congregation.
The contrast between this church and Primitive Baptist, which was built earlier, is interesting.
This church is a little larger, and it has a steeple.
Inside, the main room has more ornamentation.
There is a cross behind the altar.
This church also has prayer books and hymnals in addition to the Bible.
This church also has a
cemetery behind it.
The most notable graves are for a family where three of five siblings died in child birth, and another only lived to age three.
From this church, the road passes through yet more stunning scenery, and past gristmills and farmer’s houses.
I preferred the presentation on the Noah Ogle trail (see
Roaring Forest) to this one, because I saw how everything was used by a single farm family.
The variety of items here all blended together after a while.
I spent most of my time just staring at the views.
Some of the farm buildings, sitting in front of distant mountains, were a photographic scene to die for.
Museum of Appalachia
The other major item for the day was related
Methodist Church
Methodist Church in Cades Cove. Unlike Primitive Baptist, this one has singles and a finished interior. to the first.
The
Museum of Appalachia, north of Knoxville, tells the stories of the settlers of this region through the buildings and items of their lives.
It’s run by a native,
John Rice Irwin, whose love for the people of this area comes through every exhibit.
The museum is the exact opposite of a slickly produced history museum, with everything crammed together and hand-typed labels.
It reflects the region’s culture very well.
The museum has two main collections,
buildings and
artifacts.
The buildings have all been brought to the museum from elsewhere.
I found them less interesting than the similar buildings in Great Smokey Mountains National Park, which mostly are in their original locations.
The artifacts are something else entirely.
People lived very isolated lives in this region, so they had to make literally everything they had.
Their ingenuity in doing so is breathtaking.
Men in Appalachia were incredibly skilled with whittling wood.
They had to be.
Most started as young boys, when they carved
toys.
The museum has a number of examples.
One of them is a circus train with
Memorial to What Might Have Been
The Smokies most famous graves, three children who died in infancy. twenty cars.
Later on, they carved farming tools and furniture.
The museum has a small plow carved entirely from whittled wood.
It has a display of work from one of the most famous artisans in recent memory, Alex Stewart.
It also has a collection of furniture owned by the curator’s grandfather; only one piece was bought in a store.
On the more whimsical side, it has an amazing piece of
folk art, a devil carved from a twisted tree stump.
Women were skilled at weaving, both baskets and quilts.
The museum has an entire room of
grass baskets.
They come from all over the mountains.
The very best of them belong to the Cherokee (see
The Majesty of Trees).
The museum also has a number of
quilts on display.
The ages range from very recent to the earliest settlers.
One of them celebrates the Bicentennial of Tennessee being admitted as a state, with famous state landmarks covering the quilt.
The museum has a quirky display on two local residents, born less than ten miles apart within ten years of each other.
One,
Alvin York, became
Cades Cove settlement
Approaching one of the main settlement of Cades Cove. Look for the buildings at the base of the mountain. the most decorated soldier of World War I while the other, Jim Smith, became a hermit who lived most of his life in a cave.
Both had the determination and self-sufficiency needed to survive in the region, despite their widely divergent life stories.
The display includes an authentic German machine gun; the story of how it got to the museum is worth seeing by itself.
Musical Instrument Gallery
Pride of place in the museum belongs to
musical instruments.
Southern Appalachia was the birthplace of what is now called country music.
My big complaint with the Country Music Hall of Fame (see
Mountain Music and Big Business) is that it starts at the point where country became commercialized.
This museum fills in the missing history.
Country has a remarkable parallel with the Blues.
Both were created by people living in isolated and poor rural communities, and both grew out of older folk traditions.
Like the Blues Museum in Clarksdale (see
Nature’s Aftermath), this museum focuses in part on particular key individuals.
Most are known only to roots music fans these days, because they were never recorded.
All of them
Hand-carved Planter
An incredible seed planter carved entirely by hand, at the Museum of Appalachia were travelling entertainers.
The museum has instruments, lyric sheets, and other items.
One famous player had a fiddle he made from the jawbone of a goat, which is now in the museum.
In addition to the lives of the people who made the music, this museum also has a gallery of early instruments.
In the early days, music was made using fiddles and banjos.
The guitar, which is now so identified with country music, only showed up in the 1920s.
The harmonica came soon after that.
Part of the reason is that the latter two had to be manufactured to sound correctly, while the former two could be homemade.
The museum has a number of examples.
One banjo consists of stings across a hubcap!
K-25 at Oak Ridge
My last official site of the day is a landmark of engineering.
In the late 1930s, the US and Britain decided to consolidate their atomic research projects.
World War II was raging, so finding a bomb before the Nazis did was a high priority for both countries.
They ultimately established three sites
Early fiddles
Display on the evolution of the fiddle at the Museum of Appalachia in remote areas of the US, two to produce fuel and one to design the bombs.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee was designated as one of the fuel sites.
At the time, it was a remote mountain community, and there was a ready supply of electricity from the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The city was built from scratch and it was top secret, with all roads guarded by gates manned by soldiers.
Two of the gates still stand.
These days, the city itself is no longer a secret, but the lab still is.
Thanks to heightened security concerns,
tours are restricted and hard to get.
For those who don’t want the hassle, the only view is an overlook on a ridge south of town.
It has a distant view of
K- 25, the most important historic building of the project.
Oak Ridge was built to create weaponized uranium.
Uranium ore contains two isotopes with different numbers of neutrons, U238 and U235.
U235 easily splits in a reaction, while U238 requires more energy.
The goal at Oak Ridge was to increase the ratio of U235
Unusual banjoes
Residents' inginuity when building instruments knew no bounds, as these banjoes show. relative to U238 in the natural ore to the point where a fission reaction would be self-sustaining.
These days, the process is called
enrichment, and it’s all over the news thanks to events in Iran.
Back then, the only method known to work was called
gaseous diffusion.
The uranium ore is mixed with floride to turn it into a gas, and passed through special filters made of metal.
The slightly heavier molecules with U238 have a chance of getting stuck in the filter.
Unfortunately, the chance is low enough that the difference in the gas is measured in micrograms.
Scientists ultimately solved this problem by creating a string of thousands of these devices, the longest production line in existence.
The government built an enormous building to house it all, shaped like a U to maximize linear space available.
It was the largest building in the world at the time of its construction.
That building is K-25.
The overlook has a view of what looks like an industrial park.
In the distance is a very brown and very large old building that looks
Oak Ridge guardhouse
One of two remaining guardhouses in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, artifacts from the Manhattan Project. like some sort of factory.
This is K-25.
It was decommissioned over thirty years ago, so these days it looks more like an abandoned eyesore than a piece of history.
Local activists have petitioned the government to
tear it down for years.
That isn’t easy, because it’s still radioactive!
The overlook also has one of the gaseous diffusers, which looks like a large round cylinder with pipes sticking out.
Without the plaque in front of it, I would have no idea this was a crucial part of wartime history.
After Oak Ridge, I drove into eastern Kentucky.
I stopped at the welcome center to get more hotel coupons.
It was after dark at this point, hot, and humid.
The combination triggered my earliest road trip memory.
When I was 11, my family took a road trip to a conference my mother was attending.
We camped along the way.
One night, we slept overnight in a highway rest stop to save funds.
Such a thing would be very dangerous these days (and probably illegal) but back then people could get away with it.
My memory
K-25
The huge brown building behind the trees is K-25, the largest and one of the most important buildings from World War II. Sceintiests created atom bomb fuel inside. is trying to fall asleep in the back seat, watching the big trucks rumble past on a night very similar to this one.
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