Chapter 10

MIGRATORY LIVES

DEPARTURES, RETURNS, AND ARRIVALS

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THOUGH A NUMBER OF valley residents stayed put on their land throughout the nineteenth century, not everyone did, or could. Some were lured away in hopes of a brighter future elsewhere, and others were pushed to find employment and opportunity. Oconaluftee families felt the same strains and temptations as other southern citizens looking for ways to rebuild after the Civil War. It is an illusion to conceive of the valley as a Shangri-La, as can be observed by the relocations of some who went to nearby towns and cities, some who went to Tennessee, and one other who went across the Mississippi. Also, two of the most famous personalities of the valley were among those who did not just stay put all their lives but left and returned.

HUGHES SONS TAKE LEAVE

Asoph Hughes was the son of Rafe and Elizabeth Hughes, one of the first families to settle in the valley along Raven Fork at the foot of the ridge that carries their surname. Asoph served in the Thomas Legion during the Civil War but unfortunately died in 1865, in his forties, leaving his wife, Mary Nations Hughes, to raise eight children who were between infancy and age sixteen. Consequently, many of the children of this family needed to seek their fortunes outside of the valley; at least four of the sons did, and they traveled varying distances. The oldest son, Taylor, moved to the Camp Creek section of Jackson County and became a carpenter. William moved to Waynesville and also worked as a carpenter and later moved to Andrews, where he owned a general store. Thomas Irvin married an Enloe daughter and moved to Quallatown, then to Yellow Hill, where he clerked in the store of another valley descendent, D. K. Collins. Ultimately, he relocated to Bryson City and opened a store of his own, T. I. Hughes General Merchandise, later Clampitts Hardware Store. A fourth son, Asoph Hamilton (called Ham), who was less than a year old when his father died, married in his midtwenties and lived in the Conley Creek area of Swain County for a few years, where his wife’s family was from. Seeking more opportunity out west, he and his wife left North Carolina in 1894 for Harrison, Arkansas, where it was possible to get a homestead from the federal government for free under the Southern Homestead Act. But the venture was poorly timed because of “low [crop] prices, erratic weather, and periodic boll worm infestation” in 1899. In response, the family returned the next year, but they moved to a farm west of Bryson City, Swain County, where Ham also worked as a carpenter like a couple of his brothers.¹

EDD CONNER: ECCENTRIC CHARACTER OF THE VALLEY

As the youngest child of Edward Franklin and Mary Caroline Conner, who were both deceased by 1867, Edd was an orphan needing care. Initially, he was sent to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to live with his Aunt Betsy (Elizabeth) Mingus and her husband, Wilson Bradley. He may have stayed there for about two years. Edd was close in age to Wilson and Betsy’s two youngest children, Lula and Sarah, so he had playmates. By 1870, Edd’s oldest sister, Clarinda, had married William Aseph “Ace” Enloe, and he returned to North Carolina to live with them. On his return trip he spent a night at the home of Joel and Katherine Conner, his uncle and aunt, on Couches Creek, which he recalled in a memoir with details about the cold weather and his delight at seeing pierced-tin candle lamps for the first time. Most of the details available about his life are presented in his memoir, which was penned in the 1920s when he was in his sixties.² Edd settled in with his sister and her family at Stecoah Bottom, where they were renting from William Holland Thomas, the one-time Cherokee agent and Confederate colonel. Subsequently, the family settled in Big Cove adjacent to Cherokee families and relatively near his mother’s childhood home. Edd spent most of his childhood there. He developed friendships with some of the nearby Cherokee children, such as Standing Turkey Wolfe, the son of Joe Wolfe, who owned the farm Ace Enloe rented early on in Big Cove. When he could, Edd attended school and church in Oconaluftee, though it was eight miles away from home. In all, he claimed to have attended five terms of school from age seven to sixteen. In his teen years he boarded with Dr. John and Polly Mingus, his great-uncle and aunt; this arrangement shortened the one-way distance to school to about two miles on the turnpike, a much easier daily trek than going home to his sister’s. At that time, Miss Maggie Monteith was the schoolteacher; Abram Mingus had likely given up the teaching post once he was occupied with building a new house in the 1870s.³

At age seventeen, Edd was saved by Christ in Lufty Baptist Church at a revival on December 28, 1880. In his memoir, he credits the Reverend Henry Conner (no relation) for calling him to Christ that revival week, by saying, “Eddy, do, do, don’t you wa, wa, want to ga, ga, get saved?”⁴ Then he felt forever changed: “I raised my face to see if I could realy behold his cross and in that very act, of obedience, my Soul was just fluded, and filled with an inexpressible joy of light, love, and a wonderful peace, the audience was singing a hymn, of which the couris was like this; who will come and go with me? I am bound for the promiced land.” Once the service ended, Horace Gass, a deacon, invited Edd to spend the night at his home on Couches Creek rather than make the long journey home. At some point, Edd wrote a poem about the conversion, describing his elation in the ninth and final verse:

And as the waves rolled on and on

Ore Lufty’es sparkling shoals

They seemed to give God perfect praise

For saving precious souls.⁵

This event figured greatly into his subsequent notoriety because Edd was nothing if not evangelical. His memoir describes many moments when he stopped his activities, whether he was walking along a road or in his home, because he was moved to kneel and pray. Once at age twenty-six, shortly after one of his brothers had been killed and the other had been injured in a mill accident outside the valley, he became overwhelmed with concern that they had not been saved. At the time he was hiking Becks Bald in search of his hogs. He had intended to round them up that day. But the spirit overcame him, and he “just kneeled down in the brush, asking Him, who giveth all to men liberaly and up braideth not; to bless my troubled heart with his love.”⁶ Feeling no relief, he resumed his walk but again and again knelt to pray, finally asking that his brothers and sisters find salvation with Jesus. Feeling consoled at last, he rose and wandered the mountains “shouting, and praising, ‘God’s precious Holy name,’” and he did so for so long a time that he scared all his hogs away. He concluded his tale by explaining that “instead of finding my hogs as I had pland that day I just found Jesus in the hog range, to my happy surprise, and I judge that we scared all the hogs out of the woods as those old-time log-house revivals were not common in the hog range any-way!”⁷ Sadly, when he returned to his sister’s home late that night he learned that a telegram had arrived saying that his injured brother had died in the afternoon.

Edd’s memoir also chronicles his struggles securing a livelihood throughout his adult life. At first, in the 1890s he seemed to be moving toward security as a farmer. He used the $300 he inherited from the sale of his parents’ land to buy land, cattle, and hogs. His farm was in Otto, North Carolina, some fifty miles south of Oconaluftee Valley in Macon County, and he met Flora Guffey there and married her. They had five children, though two did not survive more than a couple of years. Records indicate that three, Katherine, Cassie, and Loretta, lived to adulthood. In June 1900, Edd fell from his horse and broke his thigh in several places and dislocated his hip. During his slow, difficult recovery, tensions arose between him and his wife, most likely because of the loss of work and income; this strain eventually ended their marriage, after an acrimonious period when Edd claimed that Flora and her friends falsely accused him of abusing his wife in order to force him off his farm. As he told it, at several points he nearly ended up in jail because of charges of abuse and abandonment, but in each case reasonable authorities freed him. To support himself and to help his children, he began a long period as a vagabond, wandering, usually on foot, though North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia in search of work. He got seasonal and short-term jobs on farms, in sawmills, in textile mills, and with logging companies even though he walked with a marked limp and was weakened by his original injury. In spite of his travels, he was never long away from Oconaluftee Valley. He occasionally worked for John Mingus, his uncle, and lived alone sometimes at his sister’s home in Big Cove.⁸ Clarinda’s family seems to have moved away about 1901,⁹ and she died in 1917 in Judson, North Carolina.

Edd helped others with his cures for skin cancers, warts, moles, corns, tumors, and wens (or boils). Though his memoir does not divulge the precise remedy, others reported that he would peel a square of bark from a tree, place Bible verses inside, and replace the bark. The cure was supposed “perfected” once the bark healed over again.¹⁰

A telling story about Edd emphasizes his Christian faith. As a young man in his twenties, Edd planted three walnut trees to shade his sister’s home. Two of the three grew; one flanked the door on the south side of the home and the other was set in the corner of the yard. By 1918, the trees were sizable and the land had been sold to Parsons Pulp and Lumber Company. On a trip to the old farm, Edd stopped by to see the trees and determined that he wanted to use the lumber from the one by the door for his casket, even though he was in good health and not expecting to die anytime soon. He spoke to the watchman, Mr. Lucus, about his idea, and was referred to Frank Blankenship, the general manager of the site. Once Edd explained that he had planted the tree thirty-four years before, Blankenship gave him the tree and, along with his son Lewis, even helped him cut it down, on November 12, 1919. Edd gathered a half bushel of walnuts as a thank-you gift for Blankenship and then got two Cherokee men to help him drag the trunk to the railroad, where it was taken to the Ravensford sawmill. Workers there met some difficulty sawing it into boards because spikes had been hammered into the tree, but eventually enough was salvaged to be delivered to Jim Ayers’s mill shop in Oconaluftee, where it was made into a casket. Edd also made a walking cane from the tree. The resulting casket was fancy. The panels were of solid walnut with cherry molding and a face glass, and the wood was stained to highlight the color differences, with walnut for the panels and red cherry stain for the trim. Edd himself finished the interior with “white bleaching” and padding.¹¹

Once the casket was done and a white painted coffin was constructed to encase it, Edd hired a tailor to make a “snow white sleeping suit.” The jacket and pants were sewn from a length of bleached Irish linen costing $22.50. The pants were designed so that Edd’s body could be easily dressed after death; buttons lined the outside seams. The outfit was completed with white underwear, shirt, collar, tie, socks, and gloves. When he was laid to rest, Edd explained that he would be an “emblem of purity,” ready to meet his maker on Judgment Day.¹²

By the time the ensemble was complete, the fortieth anniversary of Edd’s conversion to Christianity approached, so he arranged an evening service at Lufty Baptist Church to commemorate the event. On December 28, 1920, forty years to the day after he had been saved, he brought the casket and coffin to the church and set them down over the spot where he had kneeled years before. Dressed in his “burying garb,” he asked that a photo be taken of himself with his coffin and casket, and it was subsequently published in newspapers. His message to the peopled gathered at the service was to show them how his conversion in that very place had been a “lasting power and spiritual influence for good” that they might also enjoy if they were saved.¹³ Even though Edd was ready for eternity in 1920, he did not need his casket and suit for seventeen more years. On May 19, 1937, he died in Bryson City and was buried, as planned in suit, casket, and coffin, in the Bryson City Cemetery.

ADEN CARVER: THE QUINTESSENTIAL MOUNTAINEER

After the Civil War, Mary Bradley, a daughter of that large family, and Israel Carver had a growing family of their own. Israel had bought land adjacent to Mary’s parents along Bradley Fork and began farming there in the late 1840s. Mary bore fifteen children between 1840 and 1862, and eleven survived to adulthood. Once the war ended, perhaps because Israel’s family was in Tennessee, most of the children moved over the crest of the Smokies to Sevier County.¹⁴ Son Aden, who was named the most typical mountaineer by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park during its fiftieth anniversary celebration, lived an episodic life in Tennessee and North Carolina—both in the Smokies and in its foothills.¹⁵ He pursued a variety of trades to support his family. Instead of staying put, he went where he could find training and a livelihood.

After serving as a teenager in the home guard for the Thomas Legion, Aden met his wife, Martha Roberts, in Tennessee. They were married on April 14, 1869, by the Reverend William Henry Conner, in his home. But the newlyweds went back to Tennessee to begin their family, which grew to eleven children, including two sets of twins. Late in life, Aden stated in an interview that he learned the trade of being a millwright and carpenter in Sevier County, Tennessee. He helped build a mill at the head of Flat Creek, which is now near one of the fingers of Douglas Lake, also known as the Bird Community. He observed that the people there were heavy drinkers and law breakers, so he established a Baptist church that changed the flavor of the town. Even so, it seems that he left Flat Creek and lived elsewhere in Sevier County most of the time his family was there.¹⁶ The 1880 census lists the family as living in Harrisburg, about four miles east of Sevierville; Aden’s occupation is listed as a general laborer.¹⁷ In total, Aden claimed that he lived in Tennessee twenty-six or twenty-seven years. Most of the children were born in Sevier County, but at least four were born in Swain County, so this family, like others, moved around. Aden came back to the Oconaluftee Valley on at least two occasions during his young adulthood to help Sion T. Early with the carpentry of the Mingus home in 1877 and again with the construction of the Mingus Mill in 1886. Oconalufty Baptist Church records state that both he and Martha were “dismissed by letter” to another church in November 1876 and once again in August 1881.¹⁸ During some of the time when the Mingus home was being built they must have attended church there.

By the late 1880s, Aden’s father, Israel, was in his eighties and ailing, so Aden returned to take care of his father or, perhaps more likely, his father’s farm because his mother, Mary Bradley Carver, was still living. Aden continued on the farm until the old man died in 1890. By 1892, Aden had bought his father’s one hundred acres on Bradley Fork from his mother and siblings as well as an additional adjacent one hundred acres. The latter property was purchased for twelve dollars.¹⁹ Presumably, at this time, most of Aden and Martha’s children would have moved to North Carolina as well, though some may have stayed in Tennessee with other Carver relatives. By 1900, Aden’s mother, Mary, died at the home of Eliza Jane (Carver) and John Watson, her daughter and son-in-law, in Sevier County. She was buried among numerous family members in Oldham’s Creek Cemetery, located in what is known today as the Boogertown Community of Sevier County. Aden carved her headstone.²⁰

With his return to Oconaluftee to help his father, Aden had come home to the valley to live the rest of a long life. From the 1890s until after the end of World War II, he made his living farming, keeping bees and selling their honey, and growing an orchard, as well as, no doubt, doing odd carpentry jobs when called upon. The homestead was a one-story-and-loft cabin with many outbuildings and acres of cleared land. A great-granddaughter, Janice Carver Mooney, described the cabin as similar to the restored house at the Mountain Farm Museum with “a porch on both sides, the smaller one facing the stream of water. A large porch at the back facing what they always called the yard, which had some shade trees, snowball bushes, rose bushes, flowers, and things like that. And there was a fireplace in the two major rooms. There was two major rooms, the fireplaces were there, and there was an upstairs. And then the ell kitchen.”²¹ The kitchen was equipped with a stove for cooking.

Many of Aden and Martha’s children and their families lived close by during these years, off and on, but some moved out of the Smokies entirely. Aden served as a deacon in the Lufty Baptist Church and was known for his work ethic, geniality, and skill as a storyteller and practical joker. Great-granddaughter Janice recalled how he let her believe that he had known the biblical Noah in answer to a fanciful childhood question. Actually, Aden knew his own younger brother named Noah, not the Old Testament figure, but he did not mind letting Janice think otherwise.²² Aden and Martha provide an excellent example of the resourcefulness and flexibility that mountain families exercised to feed their children and gain a measure of comfort by middle age. They were never rich, and they always worked hard. But they had enough money, were always well fed, and owned their own land.

NEWCOMERS JOIN AND STRENGTHEN THE COMMUNITY

The Queens were one family who arrived in the valley after the Civil War and became major landowners on choice sites. Patriarch James Smith Queen helped his children buy land from the state, the Floyd family, the Conners, and others in the 1870s and 1880s. Eventually the Queens purchased the area known as Bradleytown. For a time, Beck’s Bald, the mountain above Bradleytown to the northeast was known as Queen Mountain, so the size of this family’s holdings was significant.²³ This location placed the family in the midst of the community, very close to the Lufty Baptist Church and, eventually to the school, once a separate building was constructed for it in the 1870s.

J. H. Queen was ordained to preach in Oconalufty Baptist Church in 1882 after several years’ service as a deacon. In 1888, the congregation paid him forty dollars for his service with an additional eight dollars for a saddle. After four years, he moved on to another church, but other members of the Queen family remained.²⁴ Notably, Wilson Ensley Queen married Alice Bradley in 1892, after he was widowed by his first wife, Amanda Catherine Queen, and Alice was widowed by her first husband, J. F. Harvey. They raised the children from their first marriages at Smokemont, very near to the church where they were devoted members.²⁵

As the nineteenth century ended, a number of new families moved into Oconaluftee. Together, new and established families donated land, raised the money, and constructed a new building for Lufty Baptist Church at its present location. The project took time to realize. Church records state than in 1880 M. Treadway, F. M. Barton, H. J. Beck, W. H. Conner, William Alexander, and J. H. Queen formed a building committee.²⁶ Two years later, H. J. Beck and J. L. (James Leander) Queen jointly donated about four acres of land, two each, carved from property along their shared boundary line. This land was donated “for the use of Public School and Public Worship to the School committee in Dist. No. 16 & other Successors in office and the Deacons of the Baptist Church. To have and to hold from us and him and assigns so long as it is used for that purpose otherwise the land is to refer back to the said Beck & Queen or heirs.”²⁷ In the deed, J. L. Queen reserved “the liberty of cultivating the cleared land in the said boundary” even after the land transfer, so perhaps he had crops already in the field and wanted to continue planting there. Also, in the passage describing the tract’s boundaries, the deed states that a school building already sat on this tract, but it is not clear whether a church building did. It seems that the precise site of the new church was not immediately decided. One source says that H. J. Beck suggested placing the church near the graveyard in his field, but this site was rejected.²⁸ How the current hillside site was chosen remains a mystery. Nonetheless, by January 1896, deacons J. R. Kinsey, J. H. Queen, and William Jenkins formed a committee to “take subscriptions elect means and materials for and contract and superintend the building of a church house upon the platt of land deeded to said church for church purposes.”²⁹ Also on this date, twelve benefactors signed up to donate cash, lumber, and “work or trade.” A total of ninety-eight dollars was pledged. Only ten dollars came in the form of cash, five dollars each from J. Treadway and J. H. Conner. Ten contributors pledged work or trade, and two donated lumber. The cash “subscriptions” were due the first of June and the lumber was due the first of July, while trade and work were due when it was called for. With this plan, the committee constructed a log church at the present site of the church that year.

The log church building of 1896 was replaced around 1910 with the frame building that now stands. In 1906, Wilson Ensley Queen donated an additional acre of land to the church deacons. The deed states that he did so

It seems that the permission to cut firewood was for wood from Wilson Queen’s land, not from the acre covered by the deed. Perhaps this extra acre and privilege to cut firewood were intended to replace the loss of use caused by J. L. Queen’s reservation to cultivate the cleared land mentioned in the deed of 1882.

As the eventful nineteenth century came to a close, the valley continued to experience an increase in population. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of white families more than doubled in Oconalufty Township, according to census records. In 1880, about 75 white families are listed in the census; by 1900, 135 families are.³¹ New families came into the area and settled. These included McMahans, who had the farm and informal inn highest up the turnpike, as well as the Treadways, Lamberts, and Parkers up Tow String Road. Mountain and Cherokee families developed ties and intermarried, establishing strong relationships between the neighboring communities. In his old age, Thomas Irvin Hughes recalled this period “as a time of great neighborliness.”³² The first two decades of the twentieth century saw an even greater influx of people as logging came into the valley. But the three and a half decades between the Civil War and the advent of logging were the years when the Oconaluftee community took shape as a distinctive place, a home of independent and resourceful people united by faith, neighborly collaboration, and family. These are the years that many descendants of Oconaluftee find most compelling because valley residents had their own culture, with their own characters and legends. The valley was never entirely isolated, but it was removed from many of the forces of change and industrialization that would arrive in the 1900s. There is good reason to be a bit nostalgic about these years. Yes, there were hardships and tragedy, but the families had autonomy and opportunity to build and improve their own farms and, in some cases, their fortunes.