Info Magzine: Great Smokies aims to tell lost stories of Black people in park’s past

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Great Smoky Mountains National Park drips with the wonders of ecological mysteries and human historical past.

The practically 90-year-old park is known for its analysis and documentation of plant and animal species from fungi to fireflies, bees to black bears, archaeological digs of Cherokee and different Native American websites, and preservation of white settlers’ properties, church buildings and mills.

But there was a gaping omission.

Long-missing from the wealthy palette of the distant Smoky Mountains wilderness is the story of Black Americans, many of whom have been forcibly introduced to the area as enslaved people.

Researchers on the nationwide park, which spans a half-million acres throughout the rugged, forested border of jap Tennessee and western North Carolina, are lastly aiming to proper that incorrect via the African American Experience Project.

“It’s so important to tell the African American experience as a story of equity, but it’s also a fabric of this park,” mentioned Antoine Fletcher, the Smokies science communicator and director of the Appalachian Science Learning Center.

A 32-year-old man died in the Oconaluftee River June 27. The river runs behind the Mountain Farm Museum in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Cherokee.

A skilled anthropologist who has been with the National Park Service for 15 years, Fletcher was raised in the foothills of northeastern Alabama and earned a level from the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. He took over in August because the lead on the Smokies venture, which started in 2018 and picked up steam final summer season.

That’s when a crew from Western Carolina University carried out ground-penetrating radar on the Enloe Cemetery, a graveyard in the park the place enslaved African Americans are identified to be buried. The findings, which can assist fill in clean areas in the park’s data base, are due this spring, he mentioned.

The venture is a collaboration with companions Great Smoky Mountains Association, Greening Youth Foundation, universities, and neighborhood members, to doc and share the stories of African Americans who lived in the area, each inside and outdoors what’s now the park.

“We’re looking at telling a complete story, not one that is fixated step by step from 1619 to current time, but from a 30,000-foot level we can say enslaved people lived in this area,” Fletcher mentioned.

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Antoine Fletcher, science communicator for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is leading the park's African American Experience Project.

“We can talk about how slaves got here, what they were doing, and then come down to the park level and say, ‘We have these grave sites or we have these accounts from owners about these slaves,’ and we can build a story,” he mentioned.

Other artifacts can tell stories, too, Fletcher mentioned, just like the George Washington Turner homestead on Meigs Mountain in Tennessee, the place solely a partial chimney stays in the present day.

“We know that his mother, who was enslaved, lived in the park. He had a couple of acres and a stone house. And we know he lived around the area of the park well into the 1960s,” Fletcher mentioned.

The remains of George Washington Turner's homestead lie in the Meigs Mountain area of Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Cades Cove. Park research shows that Turner's mother was enslaved.

Telling extra full stories can be no small feat. It can be a endless venture, Fletcher mentioned, as park employees and companions pay attention to oral histories of descendants, comb via paperwork generally known as slave schedules and use previous and new archaeological methods.

“From Day One, this has been a little tougher story to tell because we’re not finding a lot of journal entries,” he mentioned.

Who have been the Black people in the Smokies? It’s not simple to discover solutions.

White settlers started bringing enslaved people into the Smokies area round 1790, Fletcher mentioned, based mostly on information from slave schedules – lists of people as property accounted for each decade by the U.S. Census Bureau. He mentioned slaveowners’ names are listed and the way people they owned, however they have been normally recognized solely by age and gender, with out names.

“Sometimes if you have a name you can trace them every 10 years, but a lot of times, you don’t have a name and that name just disappears. So you don’t know if they were sold to another owner, you don’t know, if they died,” he mentioned.

The Great Smoky Mountains African American Experience Project relies on slave schedules, such as this one from the 1860 Census in Jackson County, which list the slaveowners' names and the people they owned only by age, sex and color, to research early Black people in the Smokies region.

Other vital instruments for anthropologists are cemeteries and the revealing particulars on headstones, Fletcher mentioned. There are dozens of cemeteries in the current-day park, together with 5 African American cemeteries.

But park researchers are as soon as once more stymied – the African American cemetery headstones solely say a “Black man” or “6-month-old boy” or say nothing in any respect.

Stephanie Kyriazis, Smokies deputy chief of useful resource training, mentioned guests can discover burial landscapes on the park web site, with GPS coordinates, “so descendants, amateur historians and visitors can find them and pay their respect.”

‘They did not need Blacks up there in the park system’ – even after slavery

Fletcher mentioned enslaved people weren’t as generally discovered amid the forested terrain of the Smokies and Blue Ridge Mountains as they have been on the huge agriculture operations of cotton and tobacco plantations of the Deep South.

But via their pressured labor, African Americans toiled on farms, ran sorghum mills, fished, logged forests, did masonry work and made moonshine, Fletcher mentioned, mainly studying and performing all of the mountain expertise wanted by white settlers and slaveowners.

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Some of these expertise got here into play in the constructing of the Smokies in the Thirties, mentioned Lewis Oats Jr., who has been helping in the park’s venture with stories from his household.

He mentioned Black people constructed park roads and buildings on Clingmans Dome, the best level in the park at 6,643 ft, one of the preferred spots in the Smokies, which is essentially the most visited park in the nation.

Visitors to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park check out Mingus Mill April 11, 2019.

Even after slavery ended, the Smokies was a racist space. Black employees weren’t welcome to eat or sleep in the closest main city, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Oats mentioned.

“They had guys out there with guns and everything else and they didn’t want Blacks up there in the park system. They didn’t want them anywhere near Gatlinburg,” Oats mentioned. That pressured Black people to commute from Haywood County, the place they might discover lodging.

National parks are nonetheless not identified for attracting guests aside from white people. According to a 2008 Smokies customer use examine, only one% of guests to the park recognized as Black or African American.

Cassius Cash, superintendent of the Smokies since 2015, is the primary Black particular person to maintain that place. He has tried to enhance visitation of underrepresented people, for instance along with his “Smokies Hikes for Healing program,” launched in 2020 to present a secure house for people to focus on racism, variety, and inclusion.

Follow Karen Chávez on Twitter: @KarenChavezACT