Abstract
Cades Cove as a social community hosted complete and integrated expressions of all the major social institutions, including family, education, religion, economics, and politics, all self-contained but not isolated from the larger society. The community organized its own “public-works” program to maintain schools, roads, and other public infrastructure, demanding the cooperation of social interaction and relationships. The early subsistence economy fostered reliance and interdependence among residents, and the bonds of community were enhanced as surpluses promoted a barter economy. Cades Cove, like rural community anywhere, was inevitably influenced and impacted by the money economy of capitalism and by the Industrial Revolution, particularly industrialized agriculture, with its edict to “get big or get out.” Thus, Cades Cove was exhibiting decline even before the threat of a national park. Cemeteries and death culture were influenced and shaped by this context of community.
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Notes
- 1.
Community is not independent of geographical place, for resources and constraints of the immediate environment contributed to the nature and dimensions of the social relationships and interactions, just as did the values, norms, and ethnic influences brought into the cove with the settlers (see Bernard 1973, 4; Nisbet 1967, 47).
- 2.
- 3.
Visiting the cove today, as it is and not as it was, it is easy to imagine the isolation, perhaps a romantic gesture to the individualistic pioneer and his family confronting, surviving, and thriving in the face of adversities that nature had to offer, but it is more stereotype than reality (for more on Appalachian stereotypes, see Foster and Hummel 1997; Williamson 1995).
- 4.
Other historians and regional scholars have reconstructed and portrayed a different Appalachia, citing examples of an isolated and static place, a “retarded frontier” (Vincent 1898), a place “where time stood still” (Roberts and Roberts 1970), as “yesterday’s people” (Weller 1965), “our contemporary ancestors” (Frost 1899). One of the first to offer that perspective was a sociologist from the University of Chicago, who wrote,
“Let students of sociology leave their books and at first hand in the Cumberlands deal with … a social order arrested at a relatively early state of evolution” (Vincent 1898, 20). More than 100 years later, we, as sociologists , offer a different Appalachia in history, based on empirically quantitative data.
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Foster, G.S., Lovekamp, W.E. (2019). Cades Cove as Community. In: Cemeteries and the Life of a Smoky Mountain Community. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23295-5_2
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