Saving Elkmont: 100 Years of Personal Stories and Photos

Welcome to our Elkmont.For over a century, six generations of one family return each summer to cabin #6 in Elkmont, Tennessee. The first among them purchased the land and built the family cabin with their own hands. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park didn't exist for another 30 years. The federal government asserted eminent domain, and the family was evicted in 1926. "Lifetime" leases of 20 years - and 20 years and 20 years and so on - were negotiated, pushing the deadline back until 1992.The Park Service came with No Trespassing signs and dumpsters. Antique dealers flat out stole.This is the story of what was lost—and what was saved.Saving Elkmont weaves together voices from across the generations: Evelyn Van Gilder Creekmore's 1935 essay capturing Depression-era summers; her daughter Eleanor's account of filing a 56-page preservation petition that placed Elkmont on the National Register of Historic Places; twin sisters remembering childhood rites of passage at the swimming hole; and an outsider who married into the grief and can only imagine what it meant to lose people and a place so completely loved.Through family photographs spanning 1911 to the present, handwritten letters, newspaper clippings, and stories passed down over a hundred years, this polyphonic memoir documents an American summer community displaced by the federal government—the revivals and bear encounters, the diving cliff and hop-rocking, the midnight raccoons and seven-day soup.Some losses cannot be undone. This book is a witness and an invitation to keep the stories alive.To everyone who loves Elkmont, Elkmont Will Shine."Elkmont will shine tonight, Elkmont will shine,Elkmont will shine tonight, all down the line;We're all dressed up tonight, don't we look fine!When the sun goes down and the moon comes up,Elkmont will shine!"10% of net proceeds benefit Tennessee Baptist Children's Homes in honor of Uncle Lem Ownby, the last mountaineer in the park. Read more