| Sources |
- [S27] The Daily Times, http://www.thedailytimes.com/, (Blount County, Tennessee), 16 Dec 2007.
Last woman out: Lois Caughron talks about life in Cades Cove
Daryl Sullivan/The Daily Times
Lois Caughron (left) and her daughter, Ruth Caughron Davis, look over a book at the Cades Cove Preservation Association Museum. Lois Caughron was the last woman to reside in Cades Cove. She and her husband, the late Kermit Caughron, made their home in Cades Cove from 1942 until shortly before Kermit’s death in 1999.
By Linda Braden Albert
of The Daily Times Staff
Imagine living in a home without electricity, where you cooked three meals a day on a wood cook stove and carried drinking water from a spring. Also imagine living in a community with no neighbors, but where the world felt free to stop at your front door and visit.
This is the life lived by Lois Caughron and her husband, the late Kermit Caughron, in Cades Cove. The couple lived in Cades Cove from the time of their marriage in 1942 until shortly before Kermit’s death in 1999, raising a family of two sons and two daughters in the home built by Kermit in 1952 from wood and other materials salvaged from the old Cable School.
This last family to have lived in Cades Cove was well known to visitors to the once thriving mountain community after it was absorbed by Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Many of them became friends of the Caughrons, making time to stop and say hello — and buy a jar of Kermit’s honey — whenever they made a trip to the Cove.
Lois Caughron fondly recalled those times along with her daughter, Ruth Caughron Davis, during a recent visit to the Cades Cove Museum at the historic Thompson-Brown House on East Lamar Alexander Parkway in Maryville. Several artifacts in the museum depict the family’s history in Cades Cove, including Kermit’s beekeeping paraphernalia and some of the household items used by the Caughrons and the generations before them.
Davis shared the history of two of the artifacts.
“This is a kraut cutter,” Davis said as she and her mother looked at the device which had two blades set between large pieces of wood. “It belonged to my dad’s mother (Delia Myers Caughron). It was in a little bit of disrepair but Daddy put a nail in it to try to straighten it up a little bit.” A dish, complete with a lid that had the handle broken off, brought other pleasant memories of when her father gave it and an old dresser to her. “When Daddy gave me the dresser, I asked him, ‘what do you want me to do with the dish?’ He said, ‘just leave it on the dresser, that’s where it always sat.’ So it stayed on my dresser all these years. The dish belonged to Levi Patterson and Eliza Elliott Caughron, my dad’s grandparents. They lived in West Miller’s Cove.”
Hard work
As the two women reminisced, Lois Shuler Caughron shared some of her memories of Cades Cove and a way of life many people dream of living. For her, however, living without the benefits of modern civilization in the same manner as her ancestors wasn’t so idyllic — it was plain hard work.
She freely confided that, although she loved the solitude of the mountains, she would rather have lived someplace else.
“Knowing that other people lived the same way, I would have been fine, but everybody else had an easier time,” Caughron explained.
The home she shared with Kermit and their children was built near the Dan Lawson Cabin in Cades Cove, just past the Loop Road’s intersection with Hyatt Lane. There was no electricity. Water was pumped to the house by use of a water wheel and water tank Kermit built.
Davis explained, “The branch water turned the water wheel, the water wheel turned the pump, and the pump pumped water from the spring up to the tank.” Prior to moving into this house, the Caughrons lived in the Dan Lawson Cabin. Caughron’s main memory of this home was that it was cold.
“The only bedroom was upstairs and it was too cold so we put two beds in the back of the living room,” she said. The house was heated by a Home Comfort stove bought when the young family moved in.
Although Lois Caughron supported her husband’s decision to make his living farming in Cades Cove, she would not have made the choice to live there, she said.
“I never wanted to go back to Cades Cove,” Caughron said, but her husband wasn’t happy outside of his mountain home. Once, she said, “Kermit worked a day or two at ALCOA, then put in a 10-day notice. He’d stay with some of his cousins in Alcoa and then come home on weekends, but he’d rather farm as work out there.”
- [S106] The Mountain Press, 27 Jan 2013.
Cades Cove family recalls area's heritage
ROBBIE HARGETT
Robbie Hargett
Lois Shuler Caughron (left) and her daughters Ruth Caughron Davis and Kay Caughron McMahan, discuss life in Cades Cove during the recent Wilderness Wildlife Week in Pigeon Forge.
PIGEON FORGE —
Lois Caughron was working in the garden near her Cades Cove residence when she heard noises coming from her home. She walked inside to find a Boy Scout troop touring the house as though it were a museum.
That was years ago, way past the end of an era in Cades Cove history. Most Cove residents had either left or been forced to leave their homes by the '50s. Those who remained lived in an area of increasing tourist traffic.
During the recent Wilderness Wildlife Week, the panel discussion over Cades Cove given by longtime residents Ruth Caughron Davis, her sister Kay Caughron McMahan and mother Lois Shuler Caughron was as much a celebration of their life in the Cove as a reflection on the pains of leaving.
The Caughrons were one of the last families to leave the Cove. When Ruth and Kay's father died in 1999, the Cades Cove Preservation Association "couldn't wait to tear the house down and rebuild it," Ruth said.
"We have some items, little key tags, that were made out of some of the lumber that came from (the house), but it was very sad," Ruth said, tearing up.
They lived in a log cabin built of wood from the area. They never had electricity — no television or working phones — though they went to school with children who did. Their home offered shelter but was still subject to the elements. If the wind blew, soot from the fireplace scattered throughout the house. If Lois mopped the floor, the water froze.
"They say the good old days, but it wasn't," Lois said.
But anyone in the Harp Room at the Music Road Convention Center could tell that these women experienced deep joy alongside the hardships — the kind of joy children will always experience no matter their circumstances.
Ruth told of how her family sold jars of honey on the side of the road for $1 apiece. Payment was made "on the honor system," but apparently someone began stealing honey, so their father built a fake beehive on the hill near the real beehives. They sat on a board behind the beehive and peeped through a small hole to try to catch the honey-stealer. They never did.
"Kay and I spent many a hot hour in that fake beehive," Ruth said with a laugh.
Someone from the crowd asked of the honey jars, "Did they always pay for them?"
"At that time they did," Ruth answered.
Today Cades Cove, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Smokies. Visitors to the area see the John Oliver Cabin, the Myers Barn, the Becky Cable House, the churches and other historic structures. But, as Ruth will tell you, what's left is not totally representative of the mid-20th century community.
Many of the buildings were partially reconstructed, by wood that was not from the Cove, and no one lives in them. They are the hollow, honey-less beehives of their former bustling selves.
"When the tin roof came off, the whole front side of the (Becky Cable) barn rotted, and the end rotted as well," Ruth said. "They came in and tore all that off and hauled it off to the dump and put new lumber on. And you tell me that's 75 percent original? I don't think so."
Nor do these primitive log cabins reveal the very real modernity of the Cove by the time the Park Committee forced most of its residents off their property in the '30s, '40s and '50s. Ruth left in 1965, and Kay in '71.
In the end, the National Park Service demolished most of the more modern structures, leaving the early-Appalachia cabins and a distorted legacy of the area, including the Caughron house.
"They pushed everything out. The only thing that's left there is the apple tree in the front yard," Ruth said. "And I'm surprised they didn't push that down, too."
rhargett@themountainpress.com
- [S112] Census, 1940.
name: Lois Shuler
titles & terms:
event: Census
event year: 1940
event place: Civil District 14, Blount, Tennessee, United States
gender: Female
age: 15
marital status: Single
race (original):
race (standardized): White
relationship to head of household (original):
relationship to head of household (standardized): Daughter
birthplace: Tennessee
estimated birth year: 1925
residence in 1935: Rural, Blount, Tennessee
enumeration district number: 5-27
family number: 106
sheet number and letter: 7A
line number: 11
nara publication number: T627
nara roll number: 3874
digital folder number: 005461280
image number: 00916
Household Gender Age Birthplace
head Will Shuler M 51 Tennessee
wife Laura Shuler F 38 Tennessee
daughter Dorothy Shuler F 18 Tennessee
daughter Lois Shuler F 15 Tennessee
daughter Julie Shuler F 13 Tennessee
son Maxie Shuler M 12 Tennessee
son Bobbie Shuler M 6 Tennessee
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Abt 1925 - (~ 99 years)
