the Cemeteries of Great Smoky Mountains: 1

Scattered across the valleys, coves, ridges, and forests of Great Smoky Mountains National Park are more than 150 cemeteries; quiet reminders of the communities that existed long before the park was created. Some stand beside familiar churches in Cades Cove and Cataloochee. Others lie deep in the backcountry, reached by old roads and mountain trails. Along Fontana Lake's North Shore, burial grounds remain where communities such as Hazel Creek, Forney Creek, Eagle Creek, and Noland Creek once flourished. Some contain rows of carefully carved monuments, while others are marked by little more than weathered fieldstones beneath the trees. The Cemeteries of the Great Smoky Mountains explores these remarkable burial grounds and the history preserved within them. From early family plots and church cemeteries to children's graves, military markers, Decoration Day traditions, and cemeteries still visited by descendants today, the book reveals how generations of mountain residents remembered their dead. It also tells the story of what happened when the national park was created, families left their homes, forests reclaimed former farms, and Fontana Lake changed access to communities along the North Shore. Houses vanished. Roads disappeared. Fields became forests. The cemeteries remained. More than collections of names and dates, these burial grounds form a lasting map of the people who once called the Great Smoky Mountains home. Their stones preserve the presence of communities that might otherwise have disappeared almost completely from the landscape. The Cemeteries of the Great Smoky Mountains is a journey through the quiet places where the human history of America's most visited national park still rests beneath the trees.