Museum exhibit chronicles start of Great Smoky Mountains National Park

In 1935 the National Park Service received a list of suggestions to draw tourists to the new Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The ideas came from the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association, a local group that helped start the park. Some are posted in the Museum of East Tennessee History's newest exhibit, "Pennies for the Park: The Grassroots Campaign to Establish the Great Smoky Mountains National Park."

Those suggestions are an interesting read decades later when the Smokies are the country's most visited national park. One suggested building an "elaborate entrance lined with flags and an electric sign proclaiming, "Welcome to Mankind." Another wanted to dam Abrams Creek to make a Cades Cove lake that would be 3.4 miles long and one mile wide. A third suggested eliminating the mountains' "skunks, water snakes, bobcats and foxes."

"Pennies" is at the museum, part of the East Tennessee History Center, through July 5. The exhibit was created in conjunction with the national park's 75th anniversary. While it highlights local efforts to create the park, the display also tells a larger story of the region's history.

Starting with the white settlers who moved west from North Carolina and Virginia, "Pennies" traces the lives and culture of mountain people. It also addresses the influences and changes brought by 20th-century logging companies before it chronicles the park's start.

"Pennies" incorporates the various perspectives as the park and change came to the mountains. Among its artifacts is a loaned scrapbook filled with images by Knoxville photographer Jim Thompson. Park proponent and Knoxville resident Col. David Chapman used the scrapbook to sell legislators and others on the idea of a park. The exhibit also tells how mountain residents were forced to leave their land to create that park and how some politicians had promised that would not happen.

Many artifacts - from a moonshine still, broadax, handmade doilies and quilt to two of Thompson's bulky cameras on tripods - help tell the exhibit's story. Two videos run continuously. One is an early promotion of the park and area tourism. The second, from the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, includes movies of 1934 park road construction, images of early Gatlinburg and part of President Frank Delano Roosevelt's 1940 park dedication.

Among the most interesting objects is a 20th-century gasoline-powered blue enamel iron ordered from a mail-order catalog. With a small brass fuel tank behind its handle, the appliance was useful for women living in regions without electricity.

A poster-sized reproduction of a 1926 letter from the Knox County Board of Education details an essay contest where students competed for prizes by discussing the topic "What the Great Smoky Mountains National Park will mean to Knox County."

That same letter details a campaign where students would be encouraged to donate money for the park. School board secretary W.W. Morris wrote: "It is not so much the amount given as the spirit of enlisting all the folks in Knox County solidly for the National Park."

Amy McRary may be reached at 865-342-6437.

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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