Free Republic

"Casual visitors learn nothing about the true character of the mountaineers, nor can anyone be trusted to portray them if he holds a brief either for or against this people." Horace Kephart, Our Southern Mountaineers (1913). The images in this article are taken from various public domain sources. The descriptions are from the writings of Kephart, who lived in a cabin on the North Carolina side of the Great Smoky Mountains from 1904 until 1907 and who had a good eye for the folkways and a fine ear for the dialect of the Backcountry folk of this place and time.

Life in the mountains of East Kentucky has been demanding since the early days of European settlement. In the many isolated valleys and hollows, it is a hardscrabble life, even today, yet many of the mountain folk wouldn't trade that life for the city, even when they could -- isolation and self-sufficiency being primary reasons why the first settlers came here to put down roots.

Two major Federal projects, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Tennessee Valley Authority, brought the outside world irrevocably into the Tennessee high country, displacing whole communities from ancient abodes and altering forever the way of life that had endured from the Colonial period. Among the archives from that time are a scattering of photographs which recall an independent, hardy, resourceful, and industrious people, worthy descendants of the Backcountry settlers of long ago. [Many vintage photographs.]