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Tonight we'll read a section from, at home in the Smokies, a history handbook for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, produced by the National Park Service and written by Wilma, Dykemen and James Stokeleyley. The Great Smoky Mountains, a subrange of the Appalachian Mountains, are renowned for their breathtaking beauty and rich history. Straddling the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, they boast the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most visited national Park in the United States. This majestic area draws millions of visitors each year with its ancient mountains, diverse ecosystems, and vibrant displays of wildflowers, which bloom year-round. The Smokies are named for the natural fog that often hangs over the range, appearing as large smoke plumes from a distance. This mist is caused by vegetation exhaling volatile organic compounds, a phenomenon that adds to the mystical quality of the landscape. Tonight tonight's selection, we'll be reading the section titled Birth of a Park. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes.

Relax your body into the softness of your bed.

Now, take a few deep breaths. Logging dominated the life of the great Smoky Mountains during the early decades of the 20th century. But there was another side to that life. apart from the sawmills and the railroads and the general stores, which were bustling harbingers of new ways of coming, the higher forests, the foot trails, and the moon-shime stills remained as tokens of old ways of lingering. One person in particular came to know and speak for this more primitive world. Horace Kephardt was born in 1862 in East Salem, Pennsylvania. His Swiss ancestors were pioneers of the Pennsylvania frontier. During his childhood, Kephart's family moved to the Iowa Prairie, where his mother gave him a copy of the novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel DeFoe. In the absence of playmates on the vast Midwest grassland. Young Kephart dreamed and invented his own games, fashioned his own play soards and pistols out of wood, and even built a cave out of prairie sod, and filled it with booty collected off the surrounding countryside. Horace Kepphart never forgot his pioneer beginnings. He saved his copy of Robinson Crusoe and added others, the wild foods of Great Britain, the secrets of polar Travel, Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West, Camping and Outdoor Cooking, Ballistics and Photography captured his attention and careful study. Capheart polished his education with periods of learning and library work at Boston University, Cornell and Yale. In 1887, he married a girl from Ithaca, New York and began to raise a family. By 1890, he was Librarian of the well-known St. Louis Mercantile Library. In his late thirties, Kepphard grew into a quiet, intense loner, a shy and reticent man with dark, piercing eyes. He remained an explorer at heart, a pioneer, an individual secretly nurturing the hope of further adventures. Opportunity arrived in a strange disguise. Horace Kephard's largely unfilled visions of escape were combined with increasingly prolonged periods of drinking. Experience with a tornado in the streets of St. Louis affected his nerves. As he later recalled, then came catastrophe. My health broke down. In the summer of 1904, finding that I must abandon professional work and city life, I came to Western North Carolina looking for a big primitive forest where I could build up strength and indulge my lifelong fondness for hunting, fishing, and exploring new ground. He chose the great smokies almost by accident. Using maps and a compass while he rested at his father's home in Dayton, Ohio, he located the nearest wilderness and then determined the most remote corner of that wilderness. After his recuperation, he traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, where he took a railroad line that wound through a honeycomb of hills to the small way station of Dillsboro. And from there, at the age of 42, he struck out. With a gun and a fishing rod and three days rations for the Virgin mountainside forest, after camping for a time on Dicks Creek, his eventual wild destination turned out to be a deserted log cabin on the little fork of the sugar fork of Hazel Creek. Crake. His nearest neighbors lived three kilometers or two miles away in the equally isolated settlement of Medlin. Medlin consisted of a post office, a corn mill, two stores, four dwellings, and a nearby schoolhouse that doubled as a church.

The 42 households that officially collected their mail at the Medland Post Office inhabited an area of 42 square kilometers, 16 square miles. It was, as Capark describes it, The forest primeval, where Rome some sparse herds of cattle, razor-back hogs, and the wild beasts, speckled trout wherein all the streams, bears sometimes raided the fields, and wild cats were a common nuisance. settlement was a mere slash in the vast woodland that encompassed it. But it was also, for Horace Keppart, a new and invigorating home. He loved it. He thrived in it. At first he concentrated his senses on the natural beauty around him. On the purple-rooted dendrin, the flame-azalia, the fringed orchid, the crystal-clear streams. Yet, as the months passed, he found that he could not overlook the people. The mountain people were as solidly a part of the Smokies as the boulders themselves. residents of Branch and Cove, of Medlin and Proctor, and all the other tiny settlements tucked high along the slanting creek beds of the great Smoky Mountains, these distinctive back of beyond hillside farmers and work worn wives, and wherey moonshine distillers lodged in Keppart's consciousness and imagination with rock-like strength and endurance. Initially silent and suspicious of this stranger in their midst, families gradually came to accept him. They approved of his quietness and his even-handed ways, even confiding in him with a simple eloquence. One foot weary distiller, stiller, after leading Kep heart over kilometers of rugged terrain concluded, everywhere you go, it's climb, scramble, clamber down, and climb again, you can't go nowhere in this country without climbing both ways. The head of a large family, embracing children who spilled forth from every corner of the cabin confessed, were so poor, if free silver was shipped in by the carload, we couldn't pay the freight.hart came to respect and to wonder at these neighbors who combined a lack of formal education with a fullness of informal ability. Like him, many of their personal characters blended a weakness for liquor with a strong sense of individual etiquette As Horus Keppart regained his health the sustained energy of his probing mind also returned Keeping a detailed journal of his experiences. He drove himself as he had done in the past.

He developed almost an obsession to record all that he learned, to know this place and people completely, to stop time for an interval and capture this mountain in wailed life, in his mind and memory.

For three years he lived by the side of Hazel Creek. Though he later moved down to Bryson City during the winters, he's been most of his summers eight miles up deep creek at an old cabin that marked the original Bryson Place. Capheart distilled much of what he learned into a series of books. The book of camping and woodcraft appeared in 1906 as one of the first detailed guide books to Woodenmanship, first aid, and the art we now call backpacking, all based on his personal experience and knowledge. There is even a chapter on tanning peltz. But the most authoritative book concerned the people themselves. Our Southern Highlanders published in 1913 and revised nine years later. Faithfully retraces Kepp Hart's life among the Appalachian mountain folk after he left the tame west and came into this wild east. And Paramount among the wilds of the east was the luring saga of the moonshiner. In Horus' Keppart's own eyes, his greatest education came from the spirited breed of mountain man known as blockade runners, or simply blockaders. These descendants of hard-drinking Scotsman and Irishmen had always liked to still a little corn whiskey to drink and on occasion to sell. But as the 1920s opened into the era of prohibition, the mountain distiller of a now contraband product reached his heyday. He found and began to supply and expanding and increasingly thirsty market. Stealth became the keynote in this flourishing industry. Mountaineers searched out laurel-strangle tallows and streams that seemed remote even to their keen eyes. There they assembled the copper stills into which they poured a fermented concoction of cornmeal, rye and yeast known as sour mash or beer. By twice heating the beer and condensing its vapors through a water cooled worm or spiral tube. They could approximate the uncolored liquor enjoyed at the finest New York parties. And by defending themselves with shotguns rather than with words, they could continue their approximations. In this uniquely romantic business, colorful characters abounded on both sides of the law. Horace Kephart wrote about a particular pair of men who represented the two legal extremes. The famous moonshiner, Aquila Rose, and the equally resilient Revenueer from the Internal Revenue Service, W. W. Thomason. Aquila or Quill, Rose, lived for 25 years at the head of sparsely populated Eagle Creek. After running from the law on a matter of self-defense and hiding out in Texas a while, Rose returned to the smokies with his wife and settled so far up Eagle Creek that he crowded the Tennessee North Carolina state line.

Quill made whiskey by the barrel and seemed to drink it the same way. Although he was occasionally seen playing his fiddle or sitting on the porch with his long beard flowing and his Winchester resting across his lap. His 11th commandment, too, never get kitched, was faithfully observed, and Quill Rose remained one of the few mountain blockaders to successfully combine a peaceable existence at home with a dangerous This livelihood up the creek.-Tomasen visited Horace Kephardt at Bryson City in 1919. Kephardt accepted this sturdy, dark-eyed stranger as simply a tourist interested in the moon-shining art. While Thomas Inn professed innocence, his real purpose in the smokies was to destroy stills which settlers were operating on Cherokee lands to evade the local law. He prepared for the job by taking three days to carve and paint a life-like rattlesnake onto a thick, sour wood club. During the following weeks, he would start whole many a moon-shiner by thrusting the stick close and twisting it closer. When Kepart led the snake-stick man into whiskey coves in the sugarlands or above the Cherokee reservation, he found himself deputized and a participant in the ensuing encounters. More often than not, shots rang out above the secluded thickets. In one of these shootouts, Thomasine's headband, solidly woven out of hundreds of strands of horse hair, saved this fearless, revenues life. All the wonders of the great smoky mountains, the nature, the people, the stories, and the battles and the jests, affected Horace Keppart Maitaly. This man, whose own life had been saved by the smokies, began to think in terms of repayaying this mountain area in kind.

For during his years on Hazel Creek and Deep Creek and in Bryson City, he saw the results of the logger's steel, results that caused him to lament in a single phrase, slash, crash, go the devastating forces. In 1923, he summarized his feelings about the lumber industry. When I first came into the Smokies, the whole region was one superb forest primeval. I lived for several years in the heart of it. My Sylvan studio spread over mountain after mountain, seemingly without end, and it was always clean and fragrant, always vital, growing new shapes of beauty every day. The vast trees met overhead like cathedral roofs. Not long ago I went to that same place again. It was wrecked, ruined, and desecrated. Keppart began to think in terms of a national park. He and a Japanese photographer friend, George Masa, trekked the smokies and gathered concrete experience and evidence of the mountains wild splendor. At every opportunity, Kepphard advocated the park idea in newspapers, in brochures, and by word of mouth. He probably acknowledged that, I owe my life to these mountains, and I want them preserved that others may profit by them as I have. The concept of a national park for these southern mountains was not a new one in 1920. 40 years earlier, a retired minister and former state geologist, Drayden Smith of Franklin, North Carolina, had proposed a National Park in the mountains. In 1885, Dr. Henry O'Marcy of Boston, Massachusetts, had discussed future health resorts in America and had considered the advisability of securing under state control a large reservation of the higher range as a park. By the turn of the century, the Appalachian National Park Association was formed in Asheville, North Carolina, and publicized the idea of a national park somewhere in the region, not specifically the Great Smokies. When the federal government seemed to rule out this possibility, the association devoted the bulk of its time and effort to the creation of National Forest Reserves. But people like Horace Kephardt knew the difference between a national park that safeguarded trees and a national forest that allowed logging. In 1923, a group supporting a genuine Great Smokies Park formed in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mr. and Mrs. Willis P. Davis of the Knoxville Iron Company in the summer of that year had enjoyed a trip

to some of the country's western parks. As they viewed the wonders preserved therein,

Mrs. Davis was reminded of the natural magnificence near her own home.

Why can't we have a national park in the Great Smokies?" She asked her husband. Back in Knoxville, Mr. Davis began to ask that question of friends and associates. One of these was Colonel David C. Chapman, a wholesale drugist, who listened but did not heed right away. Not until I accidentally saw a copy of President Theodore Roosevelt's report on the Southern Appalachians, did I have any idea of just what we have here? In reading and rereading this report, I learned for the first time that the great smokies have some truly superlative qualities. After that, I became keenly interested in Mr. Davis' plan and realized that a national park should be a possibility. The Davis' and Chapman led the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association. Congressman and Secretary of the interior Hu, work were contacted. Work endorsed the project, and two years later, Congress passed an act authorizing associations in Tennessee and North Carolina to buy lands and deed them to the U.S. Problems immediately presented themselves. The citizens would have to buy this park. Unlike Yellowstone and other previous land grants from the federal government, the Smokies were owned by many private interests, and therefore presented a great challenge to hopeful fundraisers. To further complicate matters, no group had the power to condemn lands. Any property, if secured at all, would have to be coaxed from its owner at an appropriately high price. Finally and most discouragingly, Park enthusiasts faced an area of more than 6,600 separate tracks and thousands of landowners. Yet events conspired to give the park movement a sustaining drive. The lumber companies had made the people of the Smokies more dependent on money for additional food, modern day clothing, and new forms of recreation. World War I and the coming of the highways had instilled a rustlessness in the mountain people, a yearning for new sites and different ways of living. Some began to echo the sentiments of one farmer who, after realizing meager returns for

his hard labor on rocky fields, looked around him and concluded, Well, I reckon a park is about all this land is fit for.

Determined leadership overcame obstacles large and small. Behind Chapman's professorial appearance, his wire-rimmed glasses and three-piece suits and unkempt hair was a man who had been a colonel in World War I, a man who had resolved to make the dream of a national park into a reality. Along with Chapman as the driving force, Associate Director of the National Park Service Arnono B. Camerar, provided the

steering and the gears. Camerar's market enthusiasm for incorporating the great smokies into the National Park System added a well-placed Infliential spokesman to the movement.

By spring of 19... added a well-placed influential spokesman to the movement.

By spring of 1926, groups in North Carolina and Tennessee had raised more than a million dollars. Within another year, the legislators of the two states each had donated twice that amount. With $5 million as a nest egg, park advocates turned to the actual buying of lands. Camerer himself defined a boundary which included the most suitable territory in which, as it turned out, conformed closely to the final boundary. Chapman and his associates approached individual homeowners. they received greetings similar to one on a homemade sign. Colonel Chapman, you and host are notified. Let the cove people alone get out, get gone. 40 mile limit. The older mountain people clung desperately to what they had. Even though the buyers were prepared to issue lifetime leases for those who wanted to stay, they found it difficult to remove this resolute ban from their homeland. Many of the Smoky's residents, the younger, more mobile, more financially oriented ones, accepted the coming of the park with a combination of fatalism and cautious hope. Gradually they acknowledged the fact that a park and its tourist trade

might be a continuing asset, whereas the prosperity from logging had proved at best only temporary. After John D. Rockefeller, Jr., through the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, doubled the park fund with a much-needed gift of an additional $5 million. Renewed offers of cash completely melted many IC objections. The lumber companies followed suit, but for higher stakes.

Champion Fiber, Little River, Suncrest, Norwood and Ritter

were among the 18 timber and pulp wood companies that owned more than 85% of the proposed park area.

They fought to stay for obvious economic reasons, yet they were prepared to leave if the price was right. Little River Lumber Company, after considerable negotiation with the state of Tennessee and the city of Knoxville, sold its 75,000 acres for only $3.57 per acre. The vast holdings of champion fiber company were at the very heart of the park, however, and the results of the company's resistance to a national park were central to success or failure of the whole movement. Champions 90,000 acres included Upper Green Briar, Mount LeConte, the chimneys, and a side of Klingman's dome, crowned by extensive forests of Virgin Spruce. The news-splendid domain was the cause of hot tempers, torrid accusations, rigid defenses, and a hard fought condemnation lawsuit. In the end, however, on March 30, 1931, Champion Fiber agreed to sell for a total of $3 million, a sum which took on added appeal during the slump of the disastrous depression. Four days after this agreement, Horace Kepphard passed away. Nate T boulder was later brought from the hills above Smokmont to mark his grave in Bryson City. Only a few years earlier Kephard had said, here today is the last stand of primeval American for a status best. If saved and if saved at all, it must be done at once. It will be a joy and a wonder to our people for all time. The nation is summoned by a solemn duty to preserve it. And it was indeed preserved. The federal government in 1933 contributed a final two million dollars to the cause, establishing the figure of twelve million dollars as the grand total of money raised for the park. On September 2, 1940, with land acquisition almost completed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the great Smoky Mountains National Park for the permanent enjoyment of the people. The park movement's greatest victory, coming as it did at Keppart's death, lent a special significance to his life. For his experience symbolized the good effects that a national park in the great Smoky Mountains could create. These mountains and their people inspired him to write eloquently of their truth and endurance. His own health seemed to thrive in the rugged, elemental environment of the Sm smokies. Perhaps most important of all,

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