Nestled deep within the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains, in the Elkmont Historic District, rests one of the last abandoned settlements leftover from the logging era of the 1910s and 20s: Daisy Town. Two rows of humble vacation cabins and cottages flank a central road, a stone’s throw away from a babbling brook known as the Little River.
There are 19 homes in total, and not one looks the same. They each have an undeniably rustic charm to them, but weren’t built from any standard design or code. The exterior walls are painted with bright, extravagant colors.
They’re from a different era – one before the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But they also don’t resemble the many centuries-old pioneer’s cabins which are scattered throughout Cades Cove. Some aren’t even 100 years old.
“This was a place where the Cherokee people once came,” said Katie Liming, a management assistant for the park. “It’s a place where early mountain settlers came, and later it was one of the largest logging companies in the area. And that’s what led to the railroad, which later led to this becoming a tourism area. These homes tell the stories of those families, and many of those families helped advocate for the start of the National Park.”
It is here, in the first area to be trafficked by tourists in the mountains, that a concentrated effort by the National Park Service has restored these structures and their surrounding infrastructure. With the restoration of Chapman-Byers cabin in the Society Hill district of Daisy Town, the park says it has fulfilled its 15-year-old promise to restore the Elkmont Historic District.
Robert Sanders was one of the first carpenters to be hired on for the initiative, back in 2017. He had just exited the medical field, and had previously served in the military. He had no previous carpentry experience.
“I came here not knowing what I was getting into, and fell in love with this stuff,” Sanders said. “I wasn’t a carpenter until nine years ago. So to come here and to learn how to restore and preserve these things from that crew that I was with, has just been a dream job.”
Sanders said that he and the other craftsmen painstakingly matched the paints, which had dulled and browned with age, to their original shades, and used original materials wherever they could. Chapman-Byers Cabin took three years alone.
Sanders referred to it as his crew’s ‘rainy day project.’ As he puts it, “there’s nothing square, plumb or level in these structures.”
“There is no rhyme or reason, there is no code,” Sanders said. “Every aspect has gone back to the most original that we can make it.”
But that kind of work gets expensive. In 2019, the non-profit Friends of the Smokies were approached by the park to get involved in the project. They established a $9 million endowment in 2020 to help fund the restoration of Elkmont and other historic structures in the region. Sanders and his fellow craftsmen became partially funded by the Friends through this endowment, and were labeled the Forever Places Crew.
Friends of the Smokies President and CEO Dana Soehn says that it’s been an ongoing passion project for her.
“I have a personal tie to the Elkmont community, because my husband’s grandparents are laid to rest here … at the Elkmont cemetery,” Soehn said. “My husband and I got married at the Wonderland Hotel, and we were one of the last weddings before the leases expired in 1992. So this has always been a really special place for me … It’s a continuing story that I’m really proud to be a part of.”
The restoration process began in 2009, when a memorandum of understanding was approved by the park service outlining restoration efforts in the Elkmont region. Along with the restoration of 19 structures, roughly 60 buildings were considered unsavable and slated for demolition. Sanders is grateful that even those survived.
“If the National Park Service had their way, none of these structures would be here,” Sanders said. “They would have all went back to nature. But because of the families that owned these properties, they felt that it needed to be part of Tennessee's history.”
The structures were built throughout the early twentieth century by Knoxville vacationers who hitched a ride on the Little River Railway. They came to visit two clubs – the Appalachian Club and the Wonderland Club – which had established a clubhouse and a hotel in the logging town of Elkmont. It wasn’t long before the visitors began building private vacation homes, such as the ones restored by Sanders and his crew at Daisy Town.
Al Bedinger is president of the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association, the organization which originally pushed for the park’s creation in the 1920s. His grandparents, Otto and Ella Roehl, owned a two-story vacation home on Society Hill near the Chapman-Byers cabin.
“I started going up there in a wicker basket in the back of a car with no seatbelts when I was an infant,” Bedinger said. “My grandparents would take me up there and I’d stay with them for weeks at a time. Never put shoes on, I would run around the creeks and trails barefooted … what could be a better place for a kid than in the mountains?”
After the creation of the national park during the 1930s, the park service granted lifetime leases to the owners of the cabins and structures at Elkmont. In 1992, the last of the homes became owned by the park. The roughly eighty structures in Daisy Town, along with several others in Elkmont, were left abandoned. The Wonderland Hotel ceased operation in 1992 and burned to the ground in 2016. Cabins deteriorated and were declared unsavable. The original plan was to simply let the cabins collapse, and return the land to its natural state.
“It was painful to watch them melt away into the earth, just falling apart,” Bedinger said.
But the memorandum in 2009 changed everything. It designated the most well-preserved structures in Daisy Town, including one in Millionaire’s Row and another on Society Hill, for preservation and restoration. This was a major step forward, as previously, most of the historic buildings in the park were centuries-old cabins built by early American settlers.
“Every other structure in the park is a square log cabin, for the most part, that’s been here for a couple hundred years,” Sanders said. “This is more of a modern history. And each one of these structures is unique … it’s not like any other home that you’ve ever been in.”
Sanders says that for him, it’s just about preserving history. He takes the time to look up the history behind each structure he works on, and considers the job to be his passion. Up next for the Forever Places Crew will be the restoration of structures in the Cataloochee region, about 80 miles east of Elkmont.
“This is American history,” Sanders said. “That’s what the National Park is all about, is preserving the history and the resources of this country. To come and see these things and to witness this should be on everyone’s bucket list.”
Although Bedinger still misses his family’s vacation home, which was one of the nearly 80 structures demolished as part of the project, he’s glad that at least some part of the town is left to tell the story.
“It's good that that piece of history is not lost, because it's a historical place, and Elkmont played a role … in the park being established,” Bedinger said. “They did a good job restoring them – hard work – but they did a good job, and I'm glad they did it.”