This photo from about 1930 shows an area near Tremont, in the Great Smoky Mountains, that had been completely cleared of trees
PHOTO: Blount County Library
Millions of Americans have followed in the steps of the Little River Lumber Company without realizing it.
Before the national park was there, a large part of the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountains was owned by the Little River Lumber Company. Between 1901 and 1939, this company cut down hundreds of thousands of trees in the Smokies, turning a forest full of massive trees into a barren landscape.
In the eighty years since, the trees have grown back and wildlife has returned. But we cannot even begin to imagine what this part of the Smokies looked like when it was a “virgin” forest.
To tell this remarkable story, we have to explain a few things about the history of the logging industry.
This view, from Charlie’s Bunion,
is the type of view we associate today
with the Smoky Mountains
In 1900, the England-Walton Company of Philadelphia decided to build a tannery in a remote part of Blount County called Walland. (A tannery is where animal skins are boiled with tree bark and turned into leather, which is used in clothing.) This company invited W.B. Townsend, who was already in the lumber business, down to Tennessee to explore the land for timber possibilities.
As he explored the area, Townsend realized that there was a lot of money to be made harvesting trees in the nearby Smoky Mountains. This lumber could be sold to other companies that built houses, furniture and other things.
Townsend and his partners started the Little River Lumber Company. Before long, it had purchased 80,000 acres of land, was building a sawmill, and was working on plans for a railroad to deliver logs from the mountains to the mill.
A log raft on the Cumberland River in Nashville
PHOTO: TN State Library and Archives
People were so excited that they named the town around the mill after Townsend!
The lumber business (also known as the “harvesting of trees”) comes up throughout Tennessee history. In areas with a less challenging terrain, it consisted of a few simple steps: You cut a tree down, you lop off its branches, you drag it by mule to the nearest river, you latch it to other tree trunks into a raft, and you float it downstream to a sawmill, which cut the tree into lumber.
All of Tennessee’s large cities had big lumber industries at one time or another. Before cotton took over, lumber was the biggest business in Memphis. For generations, log rafts were a regular sight on the Cumberland River in Nashville.
A splash dam in the Smoky Mountains
PHOTO: Patricia Moore
In 1900, there were thousands of enormous trees in the Great Smoky Mountains; there were poplar, ash, chestnut, oak and maple trees in the Smokies as much as 10 feet or more in diameter. The reason that most of the trees in the Great Smoky Mountains had not been “harvested” prior to this time was because the land was so steep, and the rivers weren’t big enough to float huge tree trunks downstream.
Granted, there had been attempts in the 1890s to harvest trees by use of splash dams. Splash dams were temporary wooden dams built upstream from an area where were trees cut down and placed in the river bed. When enough logs had been collected, the splash dam would release a huge amount of water, which forced all the logs downstream to the sawmill.
Splash dams didn’t always work, especially in creek beds with rocks the size of the ones in the Smokies. To harvest all the trees from the Smoky Mountains, “Colonel” W.B. Townsend and his people came up with a better plan.
A steam shovel cuts through the Little River Gorge to lay railroad tracks for the railroad.
PHOTO: National Park Service
Starting about 1900, the company began creating a rail line which started in Walland and went into the mountains, following the course of the Little River and its main tributaries. These tributaries can be seen on any map today, and have names such as West Fork, East Fork, Middle Prong and Jakes Creek.
The creation of this rail line alone was a difficult task, as much of it had to be blasted through solid rock. As the company did this, it pushed a lot of these rocks into the Little River. Today, we don’t really know how many of the boulders in the river were put there by nature and how many of them were put there when the railroad bed was created.
A sawyer sits atop a stump of a poplar tree cut by the Little River Lumber Company
PHOTO: National Park Service
The harvesting of trees began even as the rail line was still being created.
Most of the trees were cut down the old fashioned way–by two men called sawyers working together, with a hand saw.
This process was physically demanding as well as dangerous, as one can never tell for certain in what direction a tree will fall.
A team of horses drags logs on Blanket Mountain (near Elkmont), in 1922
PHOTO: National Park Service, Hooks collection
Once the tree had been cut down, and the branches cut off, the tree trunk had to be dragged to the nearest rail line.
This process was known as skidding. As you can see, most of the actual work involved in skidding was done by horses, mules and oxen.
A skid road along the
West Prong of the Little River
PHOTO: National Park Service,
Tipton collection
In areas where the terrain was very steep, workers would create a skid road, a long wooden path along which a log would be slid down the mountainside with the help of a mule.
The skid road shown in this photo was actually two and a half miles long!
A log loader
PHOTO: National Park Service
Once the logs had been dragged to the railroad, they were lifted and placed on a rail car by use of a steam powered log loader, such as the one shown here.
These workers worked long hours, and lived with their families in communities built and owned by the Little River Lumber Company.=
The two best known of these communities were Elkmont and Tremont.
Elkmont, around 1912
PHOTO: National Park Service,
Vance Collection
Like coal miners in other parts of Tennessee, workers for the Little River Lumber Company bought their groceries, rented their homes and even paid their electric bill to their employer. They worked six days a week, usually taking Sunday off, when they would go to church in the morning and take a free train ride to Townsend in the afternoon.
Working for the Little River Lumber Company may sound like a rough life, by today’s standards. However, the people who worked for the company didn’t necessarily see it that way. “The logging operation was a blessing for the mountain people who were given the opportunity to have jobs and earn a living,” says Sandy Headrick, a board member of the Little River Railroad and Lumber Company Museum. “Colonel Townsend was well liked and respected for all that he did for the workers in terms of jobs, pay, health care, and the quality of life that came with the community.”
A stringtown
PHOTO: National Park Service
Many loggers’ families lived in portable houses that were moved by train to different areas as they were being harvested. These houses were located right on the train tracks because the terrain was so steep, and because the log loader couldn’t reach very far from the train tracks.
“The railroad tracks were in front of our house and the river was in back,” recalls Gladys Oliver Burns, whose father worked for the Little River Lumber Company. “We were really in a dangerous situation, but we didn’t realize that; we didn’t know.
“We were happy, actually. We had a happy life.”
These mobile communities of portable houses became known as stringtowns, and they were located at various places in the Great Smoky Mountains.
The Elkmont Excursion Train
PHOTO: National Park Service, Vance Collection
Always on the lookout for a new way to make money, in 1911 the Little River Lumber Company developed a hotel in the community of Elkmont known as the Wonderland Hotel. They used their railroad to take tourists, hunters and fishermen from Knoxville and other locations to the hotel.
These day-long and weekend-long excursions gave many people their first experiences in the Great Smoky Mountains.
The Little River Lumber Company clear cut almost all the land drained by the Little River, which is most of the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountains. W.B. Townsend’s company laid 150 miles of train track; cleared about 75,000 acres of land, and cut 560 million board feet of lumber.
The Chimneys, a popular trail
destination in the Smokies
It did so at a time when many activists, such as Knoxville residents Willis and Anne Davis and North Carolina resident Horace Kephart, were trying to preserve the Smokies and have it turned into a national park.
W.B. Townsend was against the idea of a national park, preferring the idea of a national forest (which could still be logged). However, in 1924, he agreed to sell his 75,000 acres in the Great Smoky Mountains to the state of Tennessee as part of the process under which the national park was formed. As part of that deal, the company reserved the right to log a portion of it for more 15 years.
By the time the Little River Lumber Company and other logging businesses were moved out, about two-thirds of the national park had been clear cut.
President Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt and Tennessee Governor Prentice Cooper at the dedication of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1940
PHOTO: Library of Congress
W.B. Townsend died in 1936. By that time, thousands of workers with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) had begun the process of building roads on the railroad beds created by the Little River Lumber Company. Once that job was completed, CCC workers created new trails in the Smokies–many of them also on former railroad beds.
It took many years, but the trees have grown back in the Smoky Mountains. However, “the magnificent forest we see today is a pale shadow of the immense original natural blanket which spread before pioneer settlers when they came to farm in ever-increasing numbers in the early days of the nineteenth century,” says a book about the Little River Lumber Company called Whistle Over the Mountain.
Because of logging and hunting, the population of animals such as bear, deer and hawks in the mountains fell to almost nothing in the 1930s. However, it has recovered now to a point now that hikers frequently encounter animals such as black bears in the park.
Tremont
The Wonderland Hotel remained at Elkmont until the 1990s, when the national park service closed it. Today Elkmont is the largest campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Tremont is now used as an educational institute, where thousands of students from across the country come for overnight retreats.
One of the few reminders of human civilization within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the fact that there are more than 100 cemeteries there.
A cemetery in the Cades Cove section of the park
If you stop in at one of these cemeteries, remember that some of the people buried there used to work for the Little River Lumber Company. Some even died in accidents that took place while cutting down trees and moving them from the mountains to the sawmill in Townsend.
