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Chapter Four New South Realities: East Tennessee’s Hinterlands as Resource Producer for Industrial America Cades Cove, as much as any single place, epitomizes the contradictions that make Appalachia so elusive. It is pristine and primitive, extinct yet enduring, remote yet teeming with humanity. As the most visited site in our nation’s most visited national park, Cades Cove is truly one of East Tennessee’s most beloved, yet endangered, settings. Surrounding peaks reach to the heavens, but the Cove itself is a very earthly place. Abandoned cabins ringed by split-rail fences evoke a quaint, pastoral charm that lures tens of thousands of visitors annually. They come from nearby East Tennessee and from around the world, mostly in private , single-family automobiles that on a typical summer or fall day leave the Cove’s Loop Road as congested as the countless cities from which many of the visitors seek escape. Indeed, the very contradictions of modernity that gave rise to the idea of “Appalachia” a century and a half ago are still alive and well in Cades Cove. Contrary to popular notions, Cades Cove prior to Great Smoky Mountains National Park was neither homogenous, isolated, and inbred, nor quaint, changeless , and idyllic. From its settlement in 1819 to the Civil War, Cades Cove was vibrant, dynamic, diverse, and surprisingly progressive. It is true that Civil War– era traumas temporarily turned some Cove residents inward and that for much of the remainder of the nineteenth century, suspicions of change and outsiders and excessive dependence on extended families and entrenched community traditions vied against instincts that were more open and progressive. At the very time local colorists, home missionaries, and other commentators portrayed Cades Cove in the most blatantly stereotypical and aberrant terms, progressive elements gradually reclaimed leadership in the Cove community. Like Henry Shapiro, Durwood Dunn persuasively argues that the views of these outsiders revealed more about their own anxieties than they did about realities in the Cove. For them, and for countless visitors ever since, Cades Cove and greater Appalachia provide an alternative to puzzling contradictions. It is hardly surprising that a place modern arrogance could ridicule and nostalgic sentimentalism could New South Realities 110 romanticize and revere all at the same time became invaluable and enduring as well as elusive. Two other Dunn assertions make the ironies surrounding popular fascination with Cades Cove more glaring and important for this chapter. Social and political life in the Cove of the latter nineteenth century, Dunn maintains, was “largely indistinguishable” from that of other rural Tennessee communities, and “were only exaggerations of existing currents in the broader mainstream of American society.” But Dunn also warns readers against concluding that life in Cades Cove was typical of the greater Appalachian region. This disclaimer should not lead readers to believe that a “typical Appalachia” existed somewhere else. Dunn makes clear that we must abandon the notion of a uniform Appalachia and begin thinking of the region in more nuanced, realistic, and honest terms.1 “Cove families differed from other Southern Appalachian families,” Dunn asserts, “in their ability to raise large surplus crops and in the availability of a regional market some forty miles away in Knoxville.”2 Those fortuitous realities assured early Cades Cove’s relative prosperity and cultural vibrancy. The Cove did not rebound as readily as Knoxville from the economic and emotional effects from the Civil War, but those effects were clearly not as permanent as many have imagined. By around 1900, Dunn reports, a distinctly progressive spirit emulating broader, national trends and sentiments reappeared in the Cove. The same attributes—rich soils and access to markets—that had assured the Cove’s antebellum fortunes continued to minimize the effects of partible inheritance in the latter nineteenth century. Nearby, less-blessed hollows of the Smokies, and remote, rugged locales such as the Clearfork Valley, were less fortunate. In these hinterland settings, Civil War–era traumas exacerbated economic, environmental , and demographic crises that were in the making even before the war commenced. In the war’s aftermath, as the greater United States rushed toward urban modernity and an industrial-consumer economy, the crises in these hardscrabble locales became ever more apparent to local residents and outsiders. As we explore how the former adjusted to these new circumstances and how the latter came to represent a distinct “Appalachia,” I must reiterate the assertion from the prologue that Appalachian images (positive and negative) were not mere fabrications but instead drew from regional realities. Secondly...

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