Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Homesteads
John Oliver Place
The Olivers bought land in the Cove in 1826 and this cabin site remained in the family until the Park was established. The house is typical of many found on the eastern frontier in the mid-1850s, and reflects the skills and techniques brought into the mountains by descendants of British and European immigrants.
The round logs were scored first along their length with a felling axe, then hewn with a broad axe. The notched corners need no pegs or nails, as gravity locks them together. Chinks (open spaces between the logs) were filled with mud to seal out wind and rain. The stone chimney was laid in mud mortar. Windows and doors are typically small, to conserve heat, and maintain the strength of the building. Split wooden shingles, the most common material used here, cover the roof. The materials to build this house are growing or lying all around you.
Privacy in the home was rare. Life centered in the main room. Children were welcomed. The more kids, the lighter the farm work. Older folk lived here, too. A head count of ten to twelve under one roof was not unusual. The home was a business, school, hospital, orphanage, nursing home and poor house.
Elijah Oliver Place
Buildings speak to us clearly if we will listen. They reflect the needs, skills and wealth of the owner, and the dictates of the environment. Today our homes are compact with most of our needs filled under one roof (stove, refrigerator, freezer, pantry, living quarters and garage). We can build of almost any material, in any style, and engineer out the local environment. The life of the farmer was more scattered out, with whole buildings given over to one function. The smokehouse and corn crib stood between him and hunger. The springhouse cooled his food. The kitchen was often a separate building, while the barn sheltered his livestock from the winds of winter.
The location of the buildings is significant. The house faces west, its southern shoulder against the prevailing winds and summer heat. Nearby, the garden sprawled on a warm south slope convenient to the house. The smokehouse huddles close to the kitchen, secure from animal and human intruders. The springhouse looks down on everything else, insuring a clean water supply; while the barn stands below all other buildings.
Although “they all look alike, there are notable differences in workmanship and use of wood material among these structures. Several show the same hasty selection of logs, with very little hewing and many knots and limb stubs remaining. Another shows much more care in the choice and use of materials, with corner notching of a more durable type and better executed. Yet another is made of split logs, each half going into an opposite wall, reducing the number of trees needed to build it. Do you think that they were all built at the same time by the same man?
There are other things to look for -- points of function and beauty. Peg holes in the logs on the porch tell that a weaver lived here. Smoke from thousands of fires still clings to the kitchen walls. The creamy smoothness of the mud chinking sets off the rough texture of the logs -- run your fingertips across both. In the chimney, bees have made a home in someone else’s home. The spring -- in winter the water’s so cold it’ll crack your teeth. Pause, and feel this place with your whole being.
Everything around you here speaks of an organic society, one living in and off of things that could be found or grown at home. The human settler that lived among these logs was almost as much a child of the forest as the other beasts. They pressed close to the breast of the earth and danced with the seasons far more than we. Like the beaver and the paper hornet, he built shelter from native woods. He and the bear robbed bee trees and berry bushes. He took live prey, as did other predators. These buildings merely refined man’s life here. Rugged as it was, the pioneer at least understood the hows and whys of his existence. If a dough bowl split, he knew the cause lay in the seasoning of the wood, not in the miscalculation of some unknown plastics technician in a far away land.
Henry Whitehead Place
The ultimate log house, built in 1898. From logs sawn square at a nearby mill, a tight-fitting crib was built with hardly any spaces left to chink. The corners are worked to near perfection. Most of the interior log faces, ceiling joists and boards were dressed with a hand plane. How many endless strokes brought them up to this smoothness? The wall toward the prevailing wind was weatherboarded to keep out wind and rain, and to preserve the chinking. A brick chimney, rare for the Smokies, was made of brick molded and fired on the property. A transition house, this one is a beautiful blend of log work and sawmill technology.
By contrast, the older cabin was built almost entirely with a felling axe under emergency circumstances. Rough-hewn logs with jagged ends, and the rubble stone chimney show the most hasty kind of construction. This pair of dwellings represents about the roughest and finest of log construction in the Smokies.
