Hensley Settlement Cultural Landscape Report, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

Suzanne Turner Associates, LLC.

The Hensley Settlement Cultural Landscape Report (CLR) documents the history of Hensley Settlement and provides the basis for making sound decisions about its management, treatment, and use. This study of the vernacular landscape is also a study of the people, their work, and the social and economic systems in which they operated. Hensley Settlement represents a regional kinship model, inextricably linked with subsistence farming, in which community members were bound by cooperation and friendship. The Hensley Settlement CLR is organized into four chapters that record the site history and existing conditions, analyze and evaluate the cultural landscape, and recommend ongoing treatment and management guidelines for the property. The CLR is the primary document that the NPS will use to make both short- and long-range management and treatment decisions for this historical property. The site history section covers from the pre-contact period through the present. Three overarching elements still exist at Hensley Settlement—the log-cabin architecture, the remote location, and the settlement pattern on the top of Brush Mountain. The report describes landscape features and characteristics that illustrate life in the settlement, such as the building arrangement, springs, a cemetery, and fields and orchards. Residents of Hensley Settlement did not widely adopt the many changes and advances made throughout the country and world between 1900 and 1950. Instead, they chose to live remotely, in a location that was inaccessible to automobiles, without public water or sewer connections, and without electricity. Despite the distance to and difficulty in reaching the surrounding towns, the Hensley residents frequently visited them to trade, pay taxes, sell products, and buy supplies for their farmsteads. They worked within a system that remained cohesive for several decades, until the lure of steadier work, higher pay, and an increasingly urban lifestyle caused younger people to leave the isolated subsistence farm community where they grew up. Eventually, founding members also left the farmsteads they had established as homes. From 1951 to 1965, through the NPS Mission 66 program, the park began documenting the people and way of life that had existed at Hensley Settlement through an ambitious oral history project and the beginning of the CUGA Job Corps. During the period from 1965 to 1979, starting during the Johnson administration, the CUGA Job Corps program completed work on the Hensley Settlement buildings to develop and implement interpretive farmer demonstrations on the site, which helped preserve this distinctly Appalachian community. The purpose of Hensley Settlement is to preserve, interpret, and educate the visiting public on the homesteads and material culture of the extended family that occupied the site for almost fifty years between 1903 and 1951. The site is located in Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, near the state lines of Kentucky and Virginia. It was established in 1903 as a group of communal family subsistence farms that evolved as the number of residents increased. In later decades, the population of the settlement declined, until the last resident moved away in 1951.

Hensley Settlement Cultural Landscape Report, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

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