Smoky Mountains: Cades Cove

After a late night, it was understandable that we slept in a little on Monday. What we didn't expect was that nobody woke up until 9:00am. With the Smoky Mountains to our east and the canopy of trees blocking the light, it was rather dark in our cabin when we finally woke up. So after a quick breakfast we set out for our day in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

When you say you are going to the Smoky Mountains, the first question you are likely to be asked is, "Have you been to Cades Cove?", and with good reason. Cades Cove is a valley within the Smoky Mountains that was home to small farming community founded in the 1820s. Today it is a 11-mile loop with over 80 historic buildings dating back to that bygone era. It is a historic treasure located in an incredibly beautiful valley.

The first building you come to is also the oldest. It is the John Oliver home. He was one of the first settlers of the cove and his family remained there until the park was established in 1934. Surprisingly, even though this is the most visited location in the park, each building had relatively few parking spots. We went during the off season and frequently struggled finding a place to park. The house was a small distance from the parking spot, and the kids had a blast running through the grass to get to it and hiking through the woods to get back. On our way back to the car, Rebekah would run through the woods up ahead of us and pretend to be a scarecrow as we passed by.

There were three Churches in the cove, although we only visited two of them. The first was a Primitive Baptist Church, the oldest church in the Cove, The building itself was built in 1887, with a large cemetery behind it. The Church stopped meeting during the Civil War, and official correspondence explained why,

We the Primitive Baptist Church in Blount County in Cades Cove, do show the public why we have not kept up our church meeting. It was on account of the Rebellion and we was Union people and the Rebels was too strong here in Cades Cove. Our preacher was obliged to leave sometimes, and thank God we once more can meet.

Apparently, they were largely Union in a majority Confederate town. When we went up to the podium, we were disappointed to see that there was an ESV Bible on the pulpit. Somehow I just don't think that was the translation in use in 1887. Once up there we thought it would be fun to sing from the hymnal. I browsed through it and while I was unfamiliar with most of the hymns, I eventually found "Onward Christian Soldiers". A small group watched as we sang and commented that we were the next Von Trapp family. It was awful sweet of them given we didn't get on the same key until the 5th or 6th measure. After that we walked around the cemetery where many of the Oliver family was buried.

We skipped the Methodist Church and went straight to the Missionary Baptist Church. This Church followed a long tradition of Baptists by forming after a Church split from the Primitive Baptist Church. These people believed in the importance of missionaries, while the Primitive Baptists didn't see any need for such nonsense. The Church formed in 1839, built its final building in 1915 and closed its doors in 1944.

Given that we wanted to take a hike, there wasn't enough time to see everything in Cades Cove, which leads us to our one mistake of the day. That was visiting the Elijah Oliver home. You can't see it from the road, but given how far everything else was we assumed that it was just out of sight. We turned out to be wrong as it was nearly 1/2 a mile from the car. While the house was well worth seeing, the 1 mile hike prevented us from stopping at the village near the Visitor's Center. Elijah's house was the biggest house in the valley. It had a separate kitchen and what must have been truly extravagant, a "stranger's room", a room reserved for visitor's to spend the night.

We finally made it to the Visitor's Center for a late lunch, but given how late we had started the day nobody seemed to mind. After a nice lunch on the grass, we went into the Visitor's Center to buy a magnet before going on our afternoon hike. As we were leaving, a ranger stopped us and taught our kids how to open the trash cans in the park. He was the best ranger I have ever seen. He was very engaging with the kids, asking them questions and keeping them interested. When he was done with the lesson, he told the kids they had to go teach someone. He quickly realized that if he didn't do something, they would soon forget his instructions. So he grabbed three random people and had our kids teach them how to use the park trash can. The kids loved it.

Due to the park design, we couldn't backtrack the short distance from the Visitor's parking center to the trail-head. We had to instead go half-way around the park. We then started our 5 mile round-trip hike to Abram's Falls. It was a lot of fun, Elisabeth spent it looking at flowers and birds and Matthew got to take a lot of pictures. Almost 2 miles in, Dad's hip started hurting so he and Stacy turned around while the rest of us finished the trip to the waterfall. On the return trip, we hiked a lot faster and even though we were going significantly faster than Dad and Stacy, we didn't catch up to them until we were less than 1/2 mile from our car.

By then it was well after 5:00, so we skipped the remainder of the buildings in the cove and went back to the cabin where Mom made a delicious meal, we all played a game of Carcassonne, and everybody went to bed tired after the long day.