July 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of a critical meeting at Grove Park Inn, in Asheville, in July 1924 among supporters of the park proposal and federal national park commissioners scouting Southeastern sites for a new national park.
It’s a long and complicated story, but the history of the Smokies movement from a Knoxville perspective is boiled down over two days of lectures, discussion and analysis.
“We’re essentially telling the story from the end of 1923, up to 1940, when theSmokies was dedicated,” said Knoxville History Project Director of Publishing and Development Paul James.
The two-day program, dubbed “Birth of a National Park in the Smokies”, will feature scholars and authors sharing stories of how an assortment of odd bedfellows — conservationists, preservationists, business leaders, economic boosters, artists, writers and photographers — overcame great odds to land the park on the Tennessee-North Carolina line.
Both days of lectures downtown are booked, but James urged those interested in the history of the Smokies to take advantage of two free events:
On Thursday, Central Cinema will screen Stark Love, a 1927 silent film starring Knoxville actress Helen Mundy. It was shot in the mountains near Robbinsville, and describes two young people escaping the drudgery of a primitive mountain life. The film was thought lost but a copy surfaced in then-Czechoslovakia, and only a few copies were made. Tickets are limited.
On Friday, Bijou Theater will host a “special multimedia evening, in partnership with the Knox County Public Library’s McClung Historical Collection and the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image & Sound, featuring new high quality film transfers and stunning images of mountain views, vistas and outdoor enthusiasts including Jim Thompson, Jack Huff, Carlos Campbell and others. A highlight will be some rare 1920s color film footage of the Smokies,” according to organizers. Robin Wilhoit of WBIR will emcee, and speakers include Jack Neely, James, and Eric Dawson.
In keeping with its Knoxville-centric theme, the program includes two walking tours (already booked) highlighting places of note in the city’s original link to the Smokies.
Some of the stops highlight events largely contemporary to the aforementioned Grove Park Inn gathering in 1924, which was attended, last-minute, by a Knoxville contingent that included photographer Jim Thompson (and his remarkable photo prints); and park advocates Col. David Chapman (of Chapman Highway fame) and Willis Davis (whose wife, Anne Davis, is known as the “mother of the Smokies”), members of the then-recently formed Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association (which was originally a highway booster). The group was a prime organizer and hustler for the selection of the vast mountain tracts along the Smokies crest to serve as the newest national park in the eastern U.S.
“People were wearingdifferent hats in the movement. You had the civic boosters, you had the Knoxvilleleaders, but you also had conservationists and naturalists like Harry Ijams. And you had artists,” said James, who will discuss the creative forces that drove early support for the park.
And indeed it was the photography of Thompson that helped fuel more interest in the effort.
The fed’s reaction: “’Wow, it’s so amazing and so stunning thatwe really need to go and see the Smokies for ourselves,’” James said. “So they agreed to do that.It came about two or three weeks later in early August of 1924.
“The Knoxville contingent wentnuts trying to put together what ended up being a six-day expedition.And they took them to Gatlinburg, stayed at the Mountain View Hotel, and then they tookthem on this guided hike up to the top of Mt. LeConte and there were barely trailsthere in 1924.
“They spent a wet night and then they kind of almost scurried down the other side of the mountain, down via Alum Cave, and there was no trail there at all. It was a rough trip. But they spent six days in (parts of which became) the park.”
Great Smoky Mountains National Park opened in 1935, and was dedicated during a Sept. 2, 1940 visit by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Newfound Gap.
It inspires awe in artists to this day.