Stories of People Who Once Lived in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

there's a bridge right ahead of us up here and this picture's taken looking from the other side of that bridge this way you can see where the home used to be right there with this home now i've and i just didn't put one in there's a picture taken looking up the sidewalk toward the home come down here the foundation's still there massive boxwoods yeah so basically the sidewalk sidewalk went right in between the box switch here [Applause] and continued on through that next set this is uh they call it the patterson place because and i i don't know for sure that the patterson's built it but i think probably so there was guy named bob patterson who was a sheriff of swain county for a time he was he's also the postmaster here um so they called it the patterson place by but philip russ got home on the property did acquire this and this is where lawrence heights folks lived you probably remember that but they had running water you see uh go up there up side of it just see some uh residual from that and the water came from over to ik stern's place so there's a tank up on the side of the hill up here which you can't see from here probably can see it when you get back up the truck concrete tank which was fed from spring water a quarter mile away over on the other side of the creek so they ran a pipe from the ik stearns place all the way over here and according to lawrence high who grew up in his earliest years were here in fact there's a picture of him so this this is a photograph taken by ik stearns that says a color photograph so that's lawrence hot his daddy cole hot his mother barely see her fanny brindle that's lawrence's sister with big bear skin yeah so and they lived here that family in fact i think this picture was probably taken right up here and looking in that direction and i say that based on the shape of the mountains here but ik stearns was their neighbor from across the creek who took this picture yeah so philip rust bought all this property and he wanted to run sheep and so uh he had a fenced in sheep section on up above us up near anders branch and the bears got into the sheep so he put up i think his five strand wire electrified and uh lara said one time a bear got through the electric fence got burned on the way in and did not want to go back out but then he had all those sheep in there so the sheep didn't fare too well on as an enterprise on on the nolan creek and i'm sure this is one of those now he was cold hot was a warden far field of rust [Applause] so rust owned all his property he did not want other people hunting and fishing on his property so he hired he had i think four four wardens uh lars told about there was a guy named a leatherwood fella from bryson city who came over here and uh coal hike caught him fishing on rust property and warned him off and so he he left about two weeks later caught him again fishing fly fishing and uh that time he didn't warn him he had a shotgun with him and he blew his fly out of the water so that was the end of the fly fishing for the day but rust paid his employees basically double wage double what they could get anywhere else so he was good to his employees but was not very open to sharing his property with the community and in in a sense you know there are lots of pros and cons about the coming of the park but if we did not have a park today what we would have would be philip rust empires uh lots of gay would be gated communities in here and none of us would have access to it i just wasn't this it's falling down now but it's uh the cistern that was fed from across the creek over by the ik stearns place so they ran pop all the way over here and then just slide the house down below see right here and i don't know if that's the it goes in pipe there goes out popping but this provided enough head for the water down at the house and like i said this came from across the creek and lawrence said that they uh he ran the pipe through hollowed logs packed with manure and the manure was there as insulation here's a second set of steps here at the old patterson place that's still here of course when you walk up to them you're not really going anywhere since the house is gone what a beautiful place and how inventive that they had running water that come from a quarter of a mile away gravity fed into a tank and then run into their house this is uh indian creek what's that the next time we stop him just hop in the bed i'm sorry next time we stop you just hop in the bed right when you drove by though we should have hitched a ride all right we just drove right down on decoration day for cemeteries and so on decoration day they open up the gate to allow folks to drive up in here so this isn't a cemetery we didn't pass it did we no you haven't gotten to the first one yet so the first one you're going to go up here just a little ways up there's a bridge across to the right then you're going to go about another half mile to be a bridge across the left after you cross that bridge the nolah creek trail continues on this way if you barrel you'll see another road comes in you bear off from the left of that one that takes you the first cemetery but uh i'll tell you it's it's about like that yeah well we're looking for it on the way yeah and you pass we passed the home side on the way to it that we're going to be visiting which is okay okay you're actually going to pass there's actually home site right here is that right yeah well if you owe two come on up here we're gonna talk about it you see the rope the old road indian creek road it connected no one came up through here and it goes on up in here for another two miles now i followed that road up and there's probably well in addition to this home site which is queen woody there's at least three others on indian creek going on up through here um and like i said there was no industrial grade logging in here but i'm confident that one of the reasons this this is a fine road i mean it's a wagon size row here i'm confident there was logging done at the head of indian creek which was part of the what got the road built the indian creek is a it actually breaks off where we were down that right there there's another fork of it it kind of splits off and so there's a little island right there and it's it's a fair sized little it's big enough to hold trout [Applause] this is a boxwood left over from the days the house was still here very spindly and tall trying to find light not like the box woods you typically see manicured in front of houses and businesses this so here you got the fallen brick chimney it's the only brick chimney on the creek and of course the home was here and that was built shortly before tva took it like around 1942 and it was home of a fellow named queef woody i think i've got a so this is a picture taken so you can see this the drop-off is this right here so their house kind of came out in front here so the porch is kind of hanging out where we are right now and um this is ik stearns and his two dogs uh one of them is joe goes and the other one's kit weave woody that's uh woody's mother-in-law that's psyche stearns wife that's ik stern's aunt i don't know who that girl is that's another ant by k sterns and that squeeze woody's his wife and their son so there that picture was taken kind of looking this way and you can kind of see that ridge line and you just can't see it much now but so ik had a i think we built this because rk had a place on up here and so they were only in here for probably two years before it was taken and so queen woody i don't know if can't quite tell it here he lost part of his left arm in an accident down to carolina wood turtle so ik was a you may remember me talking about ik was a president and had his place up in here which we'll go visit in a little bit so so i never knew ikay didn't know him and his son and his his wife and also new nail shank leatherwood so that that's miss jess who is who was his aunt and she was the president of carolina wood tourney company daddy absolutely adored her the day she died all the businesses in town shut down that afternoon for funeral service [Applause] so this is a perfect example of nature taking it back yeah so that that looks like a really nice house and then today right the chimney falling over is left and that's it nature taking it back the tva most likely either they took either they allowed queef to take the lumber out or sold it to somebody else or they burned it on the other or in their jargon they melted it down so this part that matt's standing on right now are kind of perched on is actually the hearthstone for the chimney that don was talking about [Applause] looks like it would have been a big nice one for sure then you can kind of see down inside the chimney that's fell over that's going up through the chimney and you can see the bricks this was the only brick chimney dawn said in this whole area which is amazing makes me wish i knew what makes me wish i could see the house of course but then i think what was the first fire ever built in the chimney the last fire that was ever built in it this beautiful beautiful place of holland creek could you just imagine having a house here listening to that wonderful water seeing the beautiful trees so this is where the chimney's laying down you can see the brick but see that round hole down there matt said that was called the thimble eight thimble and that was where another like a wood cook stove probably would have been maybe near the fireplace and then a pie piped the smoke for me into the chimney so that it went out the chimney this is where one of those houses where i actually lawrence's family lived in here for a while uh he said they and i'm not sure why they moved from down there to up here but they did he said the day they moved out buford messer who was park ranger moved in to here i guess that was pretty much when they left nolan crew that's what it looked like from back down looking up the road back then and so we're that structure right there is the house is right here and then there was a powerhouse that stood right over here i'll show you in a minute [Applause] there's that powerhouse with the flume to it and so we got the so you know driven by water over over water wheel and um in the gearing flywheel generator exciter [Applause] that's and i have i do not know where this it's not fair can't be very far up this that's the dam that basically fed and see the the beginning of the water box right there that fed that flume but it was uh uh he had three-phase power there's the base for the gear driver of course the water wheel was over here what time frame would this power have been here what what time well russ started buying property around 1930. he bought i think he may have bought some in the late 20s so sometime between then and when he left it could have been you know from the early 30s on up to the late 30s early 40s but that time period so you know now he was not the only one who had electricity though yeah fred lawless had electricity at his house from a little generator and other and others had delco systems delco farm systems but in other words they had electricity before a lot of the other areas of western north carolina they had left yes but now most to be fair most of the people on the north and south shores did not have electricity but so these basically on an individual basis that they did bryson city got electric power in the well shortly after 1910 the powerhouse on deep creek you i told you about that and then they got the ela dam in 1925 but there were many outlying areas of the county didn't have power for a long time yeah [Music] so there was no there was no power distribution in here it was strictly just local generations [Music] they're threaded too yes you see all four that was a you remember the little story i wrote about the rock walls and flowers and stuff that was the irish were out in here uh yellow eyes and there's daffodils some goggles yellow bells and so forth out there but this is home of john uh lukewarm and john and abby lee require and sandy lee and eddie eddie lukewarm anyway but i had always attributed the flowers being pursed you know but it turns out that john was a flower lover and he was the one that had the uh garden patch out there but all the new pliers there were two homes below the road here this one right here coming down here you can see you can see see the chimney base down there so that was the those were both owned by the lukewarms but in addition to that that little branch that we just passed over is the branch and uh they had children who lived up that branch like this one on that hill just right up there there's a of course we have amazon clint lukewire live in this home so that's that's one of their sons and that's the home that was right back up there the john lucor home you see they had some fruit trees out in the yard of course a dirt yard a swept sweat plane there's washing off it and i don't know who these people are that's got to be one of the lukewarm girls and then on this little knob right up here is where this clyde lukewire home was um and this is my favorite so they had two daughters named carrie and fairy lukewire who married brothers dave and reuben ball okay so the reuben ball reuben and carrie lived just a little ways up to b branch this one's about three quarters of a mile up there you see see the size of the cabin compared to the cows met um two cousins one of them was a daughter of uh one of the blue choir girls and the other was a daughter of another lukewarm girl and one of them was a daughter of a fairy who lived up here and i mentioned something about it being a small home no no it was a big place that we had we had that and you can't you see how steep the terrain is it's they got corn up there and it drops off straight down to a branch down in there i'll give you i'll give you a copy of that picture but there's a great story that um helen boone who was um a granddaughter of them uh told us so her mother was uh nelly blue choir and uh they were living here at the time but uh nellie had a grandmother lived somewhere over on the in the southwestern part of the county and so she went over to stay with her for a while and went to church with her one night and there's a fellow general george washington lowe started courtney there and uh so they she was there for a month or so and he grew real sweet on it all right how are you well you're going downhill mostly now anyway right but anyway so she came back and been back here about a week and here comes general george washington low on a horse he barred from somebody to come and he he got here and she was on her way to the spring to get some water had a bucket get some water and he went along with him tried to hold her hand she wouldn't hold his hand and she got the water brought it back and tried to kiss her and she wouldn't wouldn't kiss him and uh he's hung around a while and said nellie i'd like for you to marry me she said i can't do that he said well why not because i haven't gotten these shoes so general lowe went to bryson city bought her a pair of shoes and they got married the next day right wow what a great story so the the balls that you were just talking about so that's our line of family yeah right that's right yeah but we share oh what man it's way back so there was an osborne ball he was a civil war veteran who uh lived in cataloochee for a while came over here and he was um a great grandson of a a fella believe his name is daniel ball who was also the great grandfather of our noah ball so that's how we're like i said there were there were two of the ball brothers that lived up this branch here you know it's called it's not shown on the maps but they called it b branch and uh when you were talking about see i would say laquire so i'm saying it wrong how did you say their name well i'm just saying it's the way that i grew up here look at lukewarm lukewarm yeah so that's so it's spelled l-e-q-u-i and i didn't grow up with no i never seen that name until i met you and jim and started researching hazel creek and all that well now this the the luke wires have a they have a connection like many of the families over here particularly many of the families down toward hayes creek they've got a caged coal connection so that the lukewarms came from north carolina uh john luchar's father was a fellow named isaac lee choir they moved to cage cove isaac served in the civil war i think he's buried in caves cover but john came back over here [Music] in fact john was born in tennessee but but isaac had been born in north carolina i'm not sure exactly where in north carolina he was but they came from north carolina to tennessee and then john's case came back over that's the same way with the proctors you know the proctors had come from cage cove came over and one of their sons james after he served in the civil war uh came back and lived in cage cove for a while came back over to hazel parade real for a while went back over to cage cove that's that's where he died and it's buried numerous families connections like the proctors had come to hazel creek from caves cove and you know but they they weren't from case go they had gone two cages ago lived there while came over to hazel creek the second families that normally the second family that came to the hazel creek area was cables they had come from cage cove over and so you'll find the there's a cable mill over in paintscope it's it's all part of the you know nolan creek most most of the creeks on this north side of fontana were industrially logged hazel creek had ritter lumber forney creek had norwood lumber there's montville lumber on eagle creek and kitchen's lumber on 20 mile creek neither nolan nor deep creek was industrially grade log now there but there was logging here this field then over time that you can see clearly just some nice and this goes all the way around that cemetery you know where we work it starts place so just explain what it would have been used for just for floating logs so part of it you can see where we crossed we had to cross the road back up here but uh we just basically fed water in here to float the logs to carry them down and my presumption is got down there to above that mill site and then just slid them down the side of the hill but i have i've followed it from actually not quite this far up but maybe another 100 yards down followed it all the way around and it's just like this whole way i mean that took a lot of work just to do the digging and this they was it was water in here across the road up here and then it went all the way down to where remember the stearns place where we stopped it came out down above well up above us down there that's awesome that's why you see the rocks they dug out yeah just laid up here it was a horrible work it's probably it it was probably almost this wide you know a lot of white robin has filled in a year that's another huge face katie so you see when it's uh when you think about this being full of water then you can see why i said i always wondered if kids wanted to play in it and he said he uh lawrence wrote a log largest father that's fun it'd be like a water slide and then lawrence said he wrote it from what ball creek which is about six miles above us here yeah at least it's fun it's a very steep grade that we're on you can see up there this beautiful rock cliff goes continues on up even above that one so then it can when you think about the steepness of where we're at and then think about the work it took to dig out this flume by hand it's an amazing feat ingenuity there and then they floated the logs out just amazing [Music] i hope you enjoyed stocking around nolan creek with us today those great stories of people from days gone by that dawn shared i know you enjoyed them the beautiful scenery i have a real connection to this place it's the second time i've been here and i felt that want that connection but i feel that in a lot of places in western north carolina when i go back in the mountains i i always think about the people who wants to live there and how their descendants maybe or my family and how they're at least the family members that i live around my neighbors you know they're part of them i always feel that connection but on this trip i had a wonderful um i found out something wonderful don shared with me that he and i both have a direct connection to nolan creek way back in our families our lines both have the line of ball b-a-l-l and we had ball family members who actually called nolan creek home so i do have a real connection maybe that's why i felt that or maybe it's just the beautiful scenery but i hope you enjoyed it and as always i hope you'll continue to drop back by often as i celebrate appalachia which includes those that went before

Channel: Celebrating Appalachia

Views: 100,873

Keywords: Appalachia, Appalachian Mountains, Mountain People, People of the Appalachian Mountains, Smoky Mountains, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, People who live in the smoky mountains, Old Homeplaces in Appalachia, Old Homeplaces in the Smoky Mountains, Stories from Appalachia, Stories from the Smoky Mountains, Noland Creek, Swain County NC, Stories from Noland Creek, North Shore Cemetery Association, LeQuire Family, Ball Family, Stearns Family, Patterson Family, Hyatt family

Id: x2lIwdzQ018

Length: 31min 16sec (1876 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021