Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community, 1818-1937 (review)

Southeastern Geographer Vol. 29, No. 1, May 1989, pp. 66-70 REVIEWS Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community , 1818-1937. Durwood Dunn. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1988. xvi and 310 pp., photographs, bibliography, and index. $12.95 paper (ISBN 0-87049-554-2) Much of the popular and scholarly literature written about Appalachia over the past century touches more or less directly on the theme of relative development. Whether the writers were "local color" essayists of the 1880s and 90s or more recent scholars arguing the cause of the economic maladies that seem chronic to large sections of the region, most have observed that Appalachia seemed economically detached from the rest of America. Of course, the region was (and is) exploited unmercilessly by Northern and Eastern industrial corporations as its wealth was carted away in coal hoppers and log trucks, but what of indigenous economic endeavor? Did the folk ofthe region establish a kind of market-oriented economy like the rest of small town and rural America, or was one likely to find either subsistence farming entrenched in rural areas or a corporate-wage-resource removal economy in those places where timber and coal were plentiful? And what of the people's cultural heritage? Did residents of the region re-establish a culture derived from European roots or create an essentially new folk culture? Durwood Dunn is a direct descendant of the people who settled and farmed Cades Cove, that wonderfully fertile limestone-floored fenster now within the boundary of Smoky Mountain National Park in East Tennessee. Dunn was fortunate to become heir to an extensive collection of documents, including diaries, church records, unpublished descriptions and histories, store receipts, tax records, and more. Through careful analysis ofthis material, he reconstructed the evolution offamily life and economy in the cove. The original occupants were Cherokee farmers who were displaced by Anglo migrants from Virginia and Pennsylvania beginning in 1818. Pennsylvania Dutch technology allowed the drainage of swamps and the emergence of rich farm land. Initially, frontier subsistence conditions prevailed, but by the eve of the Civil War, prosperous farms were producing sufficient commodities for trade in markets outside the cove, especially in nearby Maryville and Knoxville. Vol. XXIX, No. 1 67 This access led to a complex blending of a market and non-market economy in the cove. Much of the substance of the book then illustrates how these two economies evolved and interacted with the outside world. Dunn argues that a local folk culture, meaning a shared experience, knowledge, and mythology, developed within the cove. But the evolution of this distinctive culture is not attributable to geographic isolation as many outsiders, including Ellen Semple, have suggested. Nor can it be explained as a diffusion of traits from some Anglo-Saxon hearth in Europe. Instead, the distinctive lifeway of the cove grew out ofcommon Civil War experiences, economic difficulties, and a sense of alienation from the surrounding region. Once established, cove culture did not slide into a static lethargy but was refined and expanded. The progressive theme of cove economy and culture depended on a link with the outside that helped ameliorate the tendency toward fundamentalism and resistance to change so often experienced in more remote Appalachian communities. This link was often in the person of one individual, a rural mail carrier, who maintained a consistent long-term connection with the outside world and acted as a diffusion agent for state and national views as well as new technology. One might quibble with Dunn's contention that the record of cove residents as frontier entrepreneurs and curators of a folk culture substantially different from that of their collective forebears can be generalized to other isolated settlements in Appalachia. Cades Cove did not offer a typical physical environment for agricultural pursuits, nor, with Great Valley cities and transport routes only a ridge or two away, was the area as isolated as vast stretches ofthe Blue Ridge, Ridge and Valley, or Plateau. Nor can one fully accept an argument that difficulties in establishing and maintaining an exchange economy were based in the hardships of frontier life, for those conditions were found across much of 19th century...