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 Wilma Cope Williamson Wilma Cope Williamson was born in Sevier County, Tennessee, on April 27, 1915, the oldest of ten children. Her father worked for the Little River Lumber Company, and the family spent much of Mrs. Williamson’s childhood living in various lumber camps in Sevier and Blount counties. The lumber industry was a fickle one, with frequent layoffs because of an oversupply on the world market, fires in the forest, or the logging out of an area. Mrs. Williamson’s father, Frederick Cope, was often out of work. During these periods of unemployment, the family sometimes moved in with Mrs. Cope’s parents, Robert and Delilah Woodruff, at their farm on Sevier County’s Middle Creek. The Woodruffs proved to be the strongest influences on Wilma Williamson’s life. First settled in the 1780s, Sevier County is situated in the Great Smoky Mountains in east Tennessee. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Sevier County’s economy was agricultural. In the rich river bottoms and valleys of the northern part of the county, large farms that balanced commercial and subsistence enterprises developed. Sevier County’s commercial farmers sold fruit and livestock in nearby Knoxville. Most Sevier Countians like the Woodruffs lived on more marginal farms located on the upland slopes. The coming of the lumber industry in the late nineteenth century provided these struggling farmers with an opportunity to supplement their meager farm incomes with wage labor for the timber companies. Mrs. Williamson’s grandfather Robert Woodruff worked for Little River Lumber Company off and on for most of his adult life and used his wages to pay for his small farm. He worked on the crew that built Little River Lumber Company’s railroad line up the middle prong of the Little Pigeon River into a mountain valley known as Elkmont. Here the lumber company built a hotel and housing for workers. In the early years of the twentieth century, Sevier County was gradually transformed by the lumber industry, but the 1920s and 1930s brought other sources of change. Pi Beta Phi, a service organization for college women and alumnae, established a settlement house in the county in 1912. The settlement Wilma Cope Williamson 29 workers opened a school near the village of Gatlinburg, and they soon established a program to revive traditional mountain handicrafts as a way of providing mountain people with additional income. They hired elderly local residents who remembered the old crafts to train many county residents, including some of Wilma Williamson’s relatives, in weaving, wood carving, and other traditional handicrafts. Pi Beta Phi products were sold in northern cities and to local tourists. Tourism in Sevier County predated the arrival of the national park. Once the lumber company’s railroad provided easy access to the mountains from nearby Knoxville, city residents began to frequent the Elkmont Hotel for day trips. Men from the city came to Gatlinburg for hunting trips. These tourists fueled the growth of the handicraft industry and a fledgling tourist industry including small motels and restaurants. The establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1925 simply accelerated the process of developing tourism in the county. Today Sevier County’s economy is almost totally dependent on tourism. The economic changes in Sevier County shaped a very different life for Wilma Cope than for her grandmother. Wilma married Tommy Williamson, a Civilian Conservation Camp worker, in 1934. Although Tommy worked as a logger for a time, much of the land logged by Little River Lumber Company was purchased for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the early 1930s, curtailing logging activities. When Little River Lumber Company shut down its operations in 1937, Tommy Williamson took a job with the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) in Blount County and moved the young family to the Sevier County town of Pigeon Forge. Like Hettie Lawson’s husband, Tommy Williamson commuted the forty miles to his job on ALCOA’s series of “work buses.” After World War II, the couple moved to Blount County, Tennessee. Mr. Williamson worked for ALCOA until his retirement. He also worked as a vocational (non-seminary trained) minister for a number of Southern Baptist Churches in Blount and Sevier Counties. In Pigeon Forge and later in Blount County, Wilma Williamson continued her subsistence patterns, raising a large garden and keeping a few cows to supply milk for her family and to sell for extra income. In the process of trying to identify potential oral history...

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