Metro Pulse/Secret History/Ruins

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Reflections on unexpected weekends in Elkmont

by Jack Neely

A couple of years ago I was having dinner with some elderly gentlemen I respect. The conversation had been jocular and cavalier, and at points they had me envying the nonchalance that comes with a comfortable retirement. They seemed to have reached a point in their lives where they didn't have to worry about the petty problems trumpeted in the daily paper.

But then the conversation turned to Elkmont, and their easy tones turned suddenly grim. One of the gentlemen was still bristling about the fact that he was no longer allowed into the cabin his family had long considered their own.

"You want to know why we're not there now?" he asked, his bitterness palpable. Then he answered. "Jealousy," he said. "Pure jealousy."

His remark surprised me, but it occurred to me later that he's right. And that maybe it was jealousy, broadly defined, that was the motive behind the establishment of the entire national park. Back in the 1920s there were people up there, about 3,000 of them, who had much bigger and better backyards than we did, who had waterfalls and clifftop vistas and rhododendrons and trout streams right there where they could get to them. So, we got the government on board, and the Rockefellers, and we booted them out.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have.

I was half-raised in the Smokies, on frequent weekends, hiking, fishing, picnicking on a Sunday afternoon. Usually we were along the trails and streams of the park, but once in a blue moon, we got to spend a weekend in one of the 60-odd houses at Elkmont. We never owned any part of one, but through family and friends and friends of friends, I got to spend maybe a month up there, all told, in one cabin or another, on unexpected weekends in the '60s and '70s.

The cabins, most of them lined up along one gravel road by a creek, were all small, simple affairs: board-and-batten cottages with tin roofs, deliberately unfinished, drafty, musty, with a fireplace, a small kitchen, and a few leftover paperback mysteries here and there. Most of them had plumbing and electricity, but I never saw a television or even a telephone in Elkmont. I knew from early on that there was some kind of rule that they couldn't be added onto or improved much, and that fact, this notion that they were slowly returning to nature, added to the mystique of the place.

They all had a decadent smell to them; you wouldn't think the mixture of mold and wood smoke would be something you'd miss, but I do.

There was much to do. Often we'd go for a hike across the creek; often we'd go down to the swimming hole, an eddy in the creek bottled up by an old stone dam, where the dare to skinny dip was implicit; sometimes we'd venture up the long road to buy some honey from the ancient beekeeper, who must have made his own deals with the park. He was called Uncle Lem; I don't know whether he was friendly to some people, but he wasn't friendly to me. That was a big part of why he was so much fun to visit.

We'd usually see Knoxville people we knew, down the road, and sometimes visit for a game of cards or a slow conversation. Elkmont was, in effect, Knoxville's southernmost neighborhood. At the times I was there, it was usually in the chilly off season, and very quiet; many of the cabins seemed empty. I was never there for Labor Day, but heard the stories.

As a child I enjoyed the place as you enjoy being in on a grownup's secret. Later I got to enjoy the being away, from traffic, from telephones, from television, from all electronic communications. If President Nixon were shot, we'd probably catch wind of it the next day, or maybe we wouldn't. At Elkmont we'd sit on the porch, drink a beer, talk, read, and avoid all subjects of importance.

Of course, that's what a lot of people used to do on vacation, whether at Elkmont, or at the beach. It was the main point of a vacation, as I understood it, the getting away from nearly everything. The kids understood it, and the grownups craved it. But bring up the prospect of taking a vacation to a place without television or air-conditioning or a computer or a telephone with anybody, old or young, and you'll hear murmurs of hesitation. Never mind TV—it's not the era of email and cell phones. Even to older folks, the non-electronic vacation seems a dim and puzzling memory.

I'm a little bit of a crank on the subject, but I still think the incommunicado vacation is the best kind. But it's hard to argue that Elkmont is important on the basis that the Elkmont kind of vacation is important.

The problem with Elkmont is, and was, that it wasn't available for everybody. There are 60 something cabins, no more. Even if the cabins of Elkmont were fixed up and rented to a different family every weekend of the year, at prices they could afford—which would be far below the market value—only a fraction of the people who live in the Knoxville metropolitan area would ever get the opportunity to stay there even once. Most would die waiting. You can't expect them to care, and to make an exception based on the advantages of an Elkmont vacation.

We were just plain lucky.

I grew up thinking of Elkmont as a private ancestor-based fraternity, to which I was admitted only as a guest, and only at the pleasure of a descendent, and that's exactly what it was. The first time we ever went, I enjoyed it so much I asked my dad if we could come back next weekend. He admitted he wasn't sure if we could ever come again.

I was grateful that we did. Later on, I had friends my age who had the right blood connections, and I came up with them, too. I came to understand that some families were just a little more blessed than mine. Maybe I could become president, maybe I could be a millionaire, but I couldn't have a cabin in Elkmont. Maybe I was jealous, at times. But most of the people who had proprietary connections to Elkmont were such friendly, easygoing folks I could never bring myself to resent any one of them very much.

I had friends who had bumper stickers that said "Elkmont Will Shine." You used to see it a lot, especially in Sequoyah Hills. I admired the quaintness of the old motto, but at the same time wondered what it communicated to the reader. It could be read to mean, "I belong to a club you can't ever join."

Elkmont was not a particularly American idea.

Preservationists and environmentalists are most often on the same side of an issue. They rarely have an opportunity to spar with each other; it makes for an interesting match.

These houses are, by standard measures, historic. They're plenty old enough, to begin with, some of them nearly a century old. The community dates to around 1901. It's not named for the animal, but for the Knoxville chapter of a fraternity. According to the stories, a contingent of Elks—the BPOE kind, from the downtown lodge then located on Gay Street—began convening there and gave the place its name. Over the next few years it evolved into a sort of retreat for influential pioneers of the conservation movement. Elkmont gained popularity with non-outdoorsmen when the Little River Railroad reached it in 1909, and even adventurous Edwardian ladies could make it up here without hiking boots.

Several of them are associated with major figures in the remarkable development of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a national project spearheaded to an unusual degree by progressive-minded local people; most were Knoxvillians.

Col. David Chapman, lumberman W.B. Townsend, who named the tiny Blount County hamlet of Tang for himself, Willis and Annie Davis�the first female state legislator from Knoxville, she got the park movement rolling�were Elkmont regulars. Townsend in particular is kind of a paradox in conservation. Some revile him for being a profit-motivated lumber baron who built lumbering railroads into the mountains, and into Elkmont, and got rich from cutting down the old growth; some admire him for his desire to be the last who could do so.

Furthermore, Elkmont has several historical associations recognizable on a national scale. Patricia Neal and her husband, writer Roald Dahl, stayed there on occasion. Catherine Wiley, the eccentric impressionist painter, knew the place well. Clarence Darrow retreated to Elkmont just after his gallant loss at Dayton in 1925; he was reportedly enjoying some moonshine with friend and Knoxville businessman Gen. Cary Spence on the back porch of cabin #7 when he heard that his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, had died. (I don't know whether it was there at Elkmont where, when someone remarked that Bryan had died of a "broken heart," Darrow rejoined of his sometimes-gluttonous colleague, "Broken heart, nothing—he died of a busted belly.")

Elkmont also appears in some literary biographies. Playwright Tennessee Williams was not a Knoxvillian but was a member of one of those old Knoxville families, and his aunt and uncle, of the Brownlow family, owned an Elkmont cabin. Williams spent part of the summer of 1926 at Elkmont; the teenager learned to swim. "It was Aunt Belle who taught me, in the pool of fabulously cool, clear water fenced by the dam, which offered a sparkling waterfall ove the bone-white rocks," he wrote. And, judging by his memoirs of "that wild jazz-age summer," began to understand that he was somewhat different from the other boys.

Elkmont always had a little bit of a reputation for lost inhibitions, our Key West.

I don't think I've been to Elkmont in 25 years; the last time I remember staying there was with some friends for a beery weekend in the summer of '79. You'd think I would have gotten it out of my system by now.

You can do Elkmont anywhere, of course. Stow the TV in the basement, unplug the computer. Open the windows, and a beer. Take off your shoes, and find a deck of cards or a battered paperback with a skull on the cover.

You can do Elkmont in other places, and I strive to do so occasionally, on a Sunday afternoon on my back porch. But maybe we ought to leave a little room for the real Elkmont, too. One of the things that sets the Smokies apart from other national parks is that human beings�mining, farming, swimming, drinking human beings�have been very much a part of its history for more than 200 years. They've left their marks, in the handsome old stone fences in Greenbriar, and the stripped 1930 Cadillac that's still rusting away up in Tremont.

Though it would be logically problematic to allow families to return to private-ownership status at Elkmont without allowing the thousands of descendents of property owners to return to Cades Cove and Greenbriar, too, some of the cabins at Elkmont might be worth saving, as have some in Cades Cove and elsewhere. Col. Chapman and others of his surprising generation of conservationists are as much a part of the history of these mountains and as worthy of remembering as the farmers and sorghum makers of the coves.

Or, at least, the cabins of Elkmont are worth leaving alone, to let nature take its course as it has in such interesting ways with other traces of man in these hills. One thing we lack, I think, is a thoughtful appreciation of ruins.