Settled in the mid 1800s, “Upper Cosby” was a far flung community of small farms in the watershed of Cosby Creek. The 1900 federal census shows over 1,800 people lived in or near the area of Upper Cosby that became Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Upper Cosby included several loose-knit communities including Gilliland Town, Mountain Rest, Cosby Creek, and Caton’s Grove. Most had their own country stores, churches, grist mills, and schools.
When the national park was created in the 1920s and ‘30s, residents had to sell their land to the state and move away. Some considered it an exciting second chance, some were heartbroken. Here’s their story in their own words.
Hazel Bell Kuszmaul: “We did not have any plumbing in our house. There was a spring some distance from our home, and sometimes in bad storms that spring would have so much water run through it that we couldn’t use the muddy water. So then we had to go to the spring house where my grandfather had lived. His water source was more secure, so we carried water from there–it was half a mile at least to carry water back to our house.”
Vole [Mathes] recalls he only had a little bit of schooling, “maybe a couple of months at Liberty School,” so he never learned to read or write. But, he says, “that has never slowed me down.” He says he started working seriously, around age eight or nine, when “I got old enough to be of some use to the moonshiners. I made moonshine myself when I was strong enough to carry two sacks of sugar (100 lbs. each), one on each shoulder.”
Clyde Bell: “The moonshiners were always in the market for something that they could make liquor from, and since brandy was more expensive than white lightening moonshine…we picked blackberries and blueberries by the bucket full.
Over the summer, we picked hundreds of gallons, and we were paid 10 cents for a gallon bucket. That’s the way that we got our shoes for the new school year.
Another way we made money was to hoe corn…we worked twelve hours a day for about 25 cents per day.”
Wilma Bell Proffitt: “So the only activities that we ever had that you could call social life is in the summertime on Saturdays the boys would get together over at Liberty (a little community) and they would compete against each other with baseball.
And we girls would go and sit on a post or something and watch them play baseball, but we had so much work to do at home, carrying our own water…We had no modern facilities–no furnace or anything like that…”
Hazel Bell Kuszmaul: “In the summertime, when we would work in the cornfield and garden, we’d get so hot, we would climb to that falls and take along some old clothing. We could sit in a stone that had been shaped by the flowing of the stream into a seat.
In fact, it was almost like a bathtub. It had a little place in it, and you could get in there and sit down, and would that ever feel good when we’d come in and it’d be so terribly hot!”
Dewey Webb: “I was young when I sold my part of the land to the Park, and though they didn’t give me much, I put what I got in the bank in Newport.
Then the bank went bust and I lost everything, though I eventually got part of it back.”