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5/12/04

History Lost
The Smokies’ battle with environmental challenges is well known, but as budget cuts now threaten cultural treasures, private donors struggle to fill the gap

By Becky Johnson
Raymond Caldwell was 15 years old when his family was forced to pack their belongings into a horse-drawn wagon and vacate their century-old farmstead in Cataloochee Valley, a remote community slated to become part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the 1930s.

“My daddy was bitter. That’s the only word for it,” said Caldwell, 81. Decades later, Caldwell boldly denounced the family bitterness he once subscribed to when giving a public talk on growing up in Cataloochee.

“I made the comment that the park was the best thing that ever happened to Cataloochee and Western North Carolina,” Caldwell said. If not for the park, the great timber stands would be gone, the church and one-room schoolhouse Caldwell attended as a boy might not be standing. “It preserved it for future generations,” Caldwell said.

The historic remains of the Cataloochee community are in a state of decline today, however. The U.S. Park Service’s ability to preserve the half-million acre cultural and natural enclave of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for future generations is compromised by federal budget shortfalls, leading to a systemic state of disrepair parkwide.

The National Parks Conservation Association released a State of the Parks® report for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in April. The park’s federal budget this fiscal year is about $15 million. By contrast, the study tallied an $11.5 million annual shortfall in operating costs and a cumulative maintenance backlog of $182 million.

“It’s a snowball problem,” said Greg Kidd, a Smokies advocate with the National Parks Conservation Association who lives in Waynesville. “If you’re operating on too little money every year, your maintenance problems only grow worse.”

Ecology is suffering as well. When park rangers discovered the feared hemlock woolly adelgid had infested hemlocks in the park, threatening to wipe out an anchor in the ecosystem, the park didn’t have the money to combat the problem. To make matters worse, the park’s lead natural resource specialist and resident expert on exotic pest and diseases retired this year, and he won’t be replaced. So the private park advocacy group Friends of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park raised $390,000 to pay for the release of predator beetles intended to eat the adelgids.

“Ultimately that effort is something the park is going to have address with their own funding. But we couldn’t just sit around and do nothing because we risk losing the vast majority of our hemlocks in five to 10 years. That’s something that had to be acted on immediately,” said George Ivey, North Carolina director of the Friends of the Smokies.

Friends of the Smokies is funding $1 million in park initiatives this year — including bear-proof food storage for backcountry campsites, batteries for the GPS collars worn by the experimental elk population, costumes for rangers doing cultural programs, and repairs to historic churches. But ass park budget cuts deepen, the group is plugging holes for basic park needs, even port-a-potties at visitor rest areas.

“Friends’ groups should provide the margin of excellence, not the margin of survival,” Ivey said. But donors love the park and want to see it taken care of, he said. “They step up and do what’s needed,” Ivey said.

Of 20 factors rated in the State of the Smokies® report, the only “good” rating was for external support, ranking a high 89 out of 100, and was the only factor projected to improve in the park’s 10-year outlook. Support groups fund nearly 15 percent of park operations — with the Friends of the Smokies contributing $1 million annually and the Great Smoky Mountains Association around $1.25 million, of which a large portion goes to park ranger salaries.

The park lost all its federal funding for summertime rangers — some 130 of them — who offered guided nature hikes, cultural demonstrations and campfire talks, as well as seasonal maintenance support. In addition, 19 full-time positions have been cut. The outlook for next fiscal year is worse, said Howard Clinton, finance director for the Great Smoky Mountains Association.

Limited park staffing means some donated funds go unused. Friends of the Smokies provided $40,000 to fix crumbling picnic tables at the Chimneys, a popular picnic area on U.S. 441. But the funds are sitting idle as the park lacks staff to do the work.

“This a national embarrassment. Here were are in the most visited national park with 9 million people from all over the world, and our Congress and current administration can’t find the funds to fulfill core needs,” Kidd said, citing the broken picnic table tops and exposed metal rebar protruding from benches.

In the outset of his term, President Bush pledged to eliminate the maintenance backlog in national parks. Kidd’s cautious optimism at the time has long since evaporated.

“How could the administration possibly be chipping away at the maintenance backlog if it is barely funding the day-to-day operations?” Kidd asked. Nationally, the park system suffers from a $600 million annual shortfall for basic operating costs — and a nearly $6 billion maintenance backlog.

Bob Miller, spokesman for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is required to steer clear of politics. However, he said it was no secret that the Smokies, like most national parks, is short-staffed.

“It comes down to capability. On any given day, you have to decide where to send your people. Do you send them to Cades Cove? To Cataloochee? It’s a constant balancing act that all depends on funding,” Miller said.


Endangered rangers

Last week, Judy Radeck took her fourth-grade students from Andrews Elementary School in Cherokee County on an annual pilgrimage to the reconstructed pioneer farmstead at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center. Months of studying North Carolina history culminated in the field trip. The boys wore overalls and straw hats, the girls wore petticoats and aprons. They brought their lunch in baskets and pails, and their drinks in mason jars.

“We’re trying to recreate 100 years ago. No plastic bags or lunch boxes,” Radeck said.

The students spent the day on the historic farmstead with costumed park rangers. They worked in the blacksmith shop, learned how to make wooden shingles and baked cookies in a Dutch oven over an open fire in the kitchen of the old farmhouse.

“Reading out of a book or watching a movie just doesn’t do it,” Radeck said.

The educational program has been offered to schools in the seven western counties for 18 years, but is now funded largely by the Friends of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Great Smoky Mountains Association.

On a typical May weekday, there would be no park rangers at the outdoor pioneer farmstead to interpret the history. But on this day, a puzzled couple approached one of the costumed rangers to ask why the kitchen was detached from the old farmhouse as a seperate building out back. Did it reflect on the woman’s role in society? No, it reduced the risk of fire to the main house and kept the heat generated by cooking on a woodstove away from the living quarters in the summer, the ranger explained.

“We do have the wayside exhibits and the pamphlets, but that question isn’t in it,” said Heather Grossnickle, the park interpretive ranger. “One thing we try to do is help people make a connection with this place so they can understand our shared history that makes America what it is today.”

Lack of funding has jeopardized this type of cultural interpretation in the park, however. For instance, No interpretive rangers will be on duty in Cataloochee this summer. Visitors will learn only a couple of paragraphs about each structure, if they are lucky enough to notice the small pamphlet box in the campground area.

Cades Cove — which has 2 million visitors annually and would qualify as one of the top 10 most visited national parks if it was its own little park — will only have one and a half rangers to offer cultural or historical interpretation on the preserved community.

“It’s really mind blowing,” Kidd said. “If I’m visiting Cades Cove this summer looking around for a ranger who is going to educate me about what I’m seeing, there’s a good chance I’m not going to find one because I’m one of 2 million people looking for one and a half persons.”

Tourism business owners are concerned about the deterioration of visitor services.

“If there’s not a quality experience for the heritage tourists, they’ll start bad-mouthing us and nothing is worse than negative word-of-mouth publicity,” said David Erikson, owner of Twigs and Leaves Gallery in Waynesville and tourism committee chair with the Haywood County Chamber of Commerce.


Saving a lost art

The National Park Conservation Association gave the Smokies a “poor” rating of 52 out of 100 on cultural resources. The park’s collection of artifacts, from old oxen yokes to antique broaches, are stored two hours outside the park in Oak Ridge, Tenn., due to lack of a museum storage facility in the park. A single staff member is slowly chipping away at cataloguing the collection.

The park completed a cultural resource survey of Cataloochee Valley two years ago, but the report has yet to be printed or incorporated into a management plan for the historic sites in the valley. The park cannot afford an oral historian or ethnographer to capture fading histories of the old Appalachian ways.

Take Caldwell for example. His great grandfather established the first permanent home in Cataloochee Valley. It was 1836 and the family was seeking cheap land after having bad luck on their farm in Buncombe County. Caldwell tells stories of his grandfather being kidnapped by Union soldiers during the Civil War, accounts of the early herders and hunters who roamed the Valley before the permanent settlers, and the particulars of his family’s long-lost tub mill, a style of grist mill that differed from the over-shot water wheel.

“That was a popular type of mill in Scotland and Ireland in those days. It was an older, more primitive type. I’m one of the only people living today that could reconstruct that tub mill,” said Caldwell.

But Caldwell will likely never see the park pay for reconstruction of his family’s tub mill. And his stories aren’t shared with visitors.

Lack of funding is not a new phenomenon. In the 1970s, the park, home to the largest collection of historic log cabins in North America, was unable to patch rotted holes in the historic Cook Cabin in Cataloochee Valley.

“It had gotten in bad shape. So they took it down and stored the logs until they got the money,” Caldwell said. Money came in the form of a private grant from Log Cabin Syrup Co. 20 years later.

“When they put it back up, they used what logs they could of the original, but it wasn’t much,” Caldwell said. “They would do a better job if they had the money. They just don’t have the money.”


Lesser of evils

While the National Park Service has received minimal budget increases — averaging 2.9 percent annually since 1998 — those increases don’t come close to covering mandated expenses, such as the 4 percent annual cost-of-living increase for federal employees.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the park service spends an extra $63,500 each day the nation is put on orange terror alert, which calls for increased security at dams, national monuments and landmarks, sapping up $8 million of the park system budget in 2003.

The unfunded security requirements “adversely affect already-strained park budgets, which have been absorbing unfunded increases in operational costs over the past several years,” states the park service’s annual report for 2003.

One solution to budget shortfalls being explored by the Bush Administration is privatizing national park operations. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been selected as one of a handful of parks for an outsourcing analysis that compares the cost of running the park with federal employees versus contracting a private company to run the park. The park is in the process of quantifying each duty performed by employees, from staffing the visitor centers to changing toilet paper in campground bathrooms.

Rather than outsourcing, Kidd has a different recommendation to fund the Smokies’ shortfalls — instead of building the North Shore Road along the shore of Lake Fontana along the Smokies’ southern border, use the money to repair historic structures and hire interpretive rangers. Kidd estimates it would cost a minimum of $500 million to build the 26-mile road, based on per-mile costs of new road construction through similar terrain.

U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor, R-Brevard, has pledged to see the road built, however. Taylor cites the need to fulfill the federal government’s promise to the families who were removed from their communities along the north shore of Fontana Lake in the early 1940s when the lake was created and the road into their homes were flooded. The inaccessible area was incorporated into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but the government promised to replace the road into the area “as soon after the present was as funds are made available.”

Taylor is chairman of the budget committee for the national park system and entire Department of Interior. He leveraged a $16 million appropriation for the North Shore Road in 2000.

The only other money Taylor has leveraged for the park in recent years is $500,000 to build chain link fences around historic cemeteries in the Swain County section of park and repair restrooms, according to Kidd and park finance records.

Advocates for the park claim Taylor has the clout to win more money for the Smokies, or push for larger appropriations for the entire park service. This month, Taylor spoke at a ceremony honoring the transfer of 127 acres of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians for a new K-12 school campus. At the ceremony, Taylor said during a speech that he got the land transfer approved by telling other Congressmen “that they would not get another dime in appropriations” if they voted against the land swap. Taylor’s press secretary failed to return phone calls requesting an interview.