Great Women of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Defining Nature and the National Park Service

Roberts, Rachel

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, located in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, epitomized a new type of national park. When the federal government established it as a national park in 1934, it was only the second in the eastern United States, and the first to be created through the purchase of private land. The creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park represented a change in the purpose behind park creation. The federal government created previous western parks, like Yosemite and Yellowstone, based on their unique, natural scenery; a need to monumentalize the greatness of the United States in the face of European criticisms; and the desire to shape and define American culture. However, following the flooding of Hetch Hetchy Valley and more fervent, economic arguments to use rather than preserve the natural resources out West, a new argument for national parks emerged. Dollars from tourism rather than scenic nationalism drove park creation. Utilizing the cases of three previously overlooked women—Anne May Davis, Laura Thornburgh, and the Walker Sisters—who participated in the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park this thesis argues that the GSMNP was representative of this change in the National Park system. The women’s personal letters, notes for speeches, novels, guide books, poems, and interviews along with records from the Tennessee House of Representatives, newspapers, and interviews with family members reveal three very different cases that support a move away from the scenic nationalism that inspired previous park promotion. This thesis addresses how these women shaped their definitions of nature and actions towards it, looking closely at class, broader developments in American and Appalachian cultures, and gender. Understanding how each of these women defined nature—whether as a commodity, a moral authority, a means of extraction, or a combination of these—allows one to understand not only how, but why the movement to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park succeeded. The women’s definitions of and actions towards nature reveal a park movement based heavily—though not entirely—on its potential economic worth through tourism. The case of Great Smoky Mountains National Park reveals that the National Park system was not born in a complete and final form. Rather, it has evolved and continues to evolve with changing American definitions of nature.