Visiting with the Ancestors

Great Smoky Mountains National Park lake cemetery crew member Shawn Massey braces his tattooed left arm for James Calhoun,  who cautiously steps out of a utility terrain vehicle at the edge of Bone Valley Cemetery. 

Calhoun, from nearby Robbinsville, wears a navy blue ball cap with the words “North Shore” embroidered in yellow. He shuffles up an embankment onto the graveyard’s sloped pitch carpeted with a veneer of rain-slicked orange mud. In one hand, he holds a grocery bag stuffed with colorful artificial flowers. Clutched in the other is a hiking pole he plants in the clay to steady himself. 

“Decoration Day has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember,” the 91-year-old said of the tradition of placing flowers on the headstones of ancestors each summer. “It was a big day for us.”

In Swain County, this annual ritual takes place at Bone Valley and nearly three dozen other cemeteries that were disrupted in the years following the park’s dedication by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Days after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Congress authorized the Tennessee Valley Authority to erect the Fontana Dam by plugging a narrow slot in the Little Tennessee River gorge, which would be used to generate electricity to make aluminum and enrich uranium for the war effort. 

The dam submerged more than 10,000 acres, including N.C. 288, the area’s sole paved road. Another 46,000 acres north of the reservoir were added to the new park, uprooting hundreds of families and requiring the relocation or isolation of over 2,000 gravesites. 

The sense of loss fueled a cultural movement to maintain a connection to these displaced communities, a constellation of subsistence farms and logging towns known collectively as the North Shore. In 1978, the park pledged to maintain and provide access to these remote cemeteries, in cooperation with the North Shore Cemetery Association. 

Each weekend between Memorial Day and Labor Day, a three-person park crew grooms cemeteries on Saturdays and helps descendants like Calhoun visit the graves on Sundays, sustaining a cherished tradition. But due to cuts to federal programs, its future is no longer assured.

The Trump administration’s 2027 budget proposal includes a 25% reduction in park operation budgets and would likely eliminate thousands of park staff nationwide, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. They estimate the Great Smoky Mountains lost nearly 25% of its permanent workforce since 2010. Additional cuts mean fewer people and resources to support projects in the most visited national park in the country, where a growing backlog of deferred maintenance already exceeds $300 million. 

Clearing a Path

On a Saturday morning, Brad Swartz eases the throttle of a twin-diesel engine landing craft and gently guides the small barge to the mouth of Hazel Creek. The sturdy and cheerful Kentuckian joined the Park Service in 2019 and now leads the crew dedicated to maintaining the burial grounds and coordinating family visits. 

“This is the most remote and most challenging area of the North Shore,” he said over the growling engines. Reaching Bone Valley requires a ferry across Fontana Lake the lake followed by a six-mile shuttle utilizing two vans, a Chevy Suburban, and several rugged off-road vehicles with wide knobby tires on a rutted backcountry road winding along Hazel Creek, each vehicle ferried across the lake by the crew throughout the week. 

His crew’s job descriptions might be among the most varied in the park. They must operate boats; maintain a network of roads and trails; repair equipment; forecast weather; and be as adept at operating a chainsaw as they are at mingling with North Shore descendants, who have a long and painful history with the park. 

They also interpret history, a duty the crew embraces. En route to prepare the cemetery for descendants, Massey, who commutes an hour each way from Cherokee County, suddenly stops his UTV, leaps down the riverbank, and begins searching through the undergrowth. 

“I know it’s here somewhere,” he said, scanning the bank before revealing a half-buried, rusted crosscut-bucking saw, left nearly a century ago. 

In 1903, the Ritter Lumber Company of Ohio dispatched engineer Orson Paul Burlingame to survey Proctor, its company town on Hazel Creek, and design a mill, rail lines, and bridges to expedite the extraction of the area’s abundant timber. Among the most remote sections of forests in the Eastern U.S., it’s a stretch to imagine how they used saws like this to clear this backcountry of timber by 1928 and built a town that was home to more than 1,000 people and a whirling cog of American industry. Burlingame is among the 82 souls buried at Bone Valley.

Later that morning, in a field at the confluence of Bone Creek and Hazel Creek, the cloud cover thickened, and a steady rain fell as the crew draped an enormous plastic tarp between two hulking trees, arranging a dozen picnic tables for tomorrow’s gathering. The crew continued to haul equipment up a spur trail flanked by thickets of blooming rhododendron to the ridgetop cemetery, located there so those buried are closer to heaven or, more practically, to reserve bottomland for homes and crops. 

Roughly the dimensions of a tennis court, five columns of headstones face east, each a testament to the hard lives in these isolated mountain communities. Among them: an unnamed newborn beside their 17-year-old mother, Grace Laney Marr, both lost in 1918. Her concrete headstone, now broken in two, bears the inscription: “Darling, we miss thee.” 

The remoteness of the cemeteries requires careful coordination to safely bring work crews and descendants, explained Great Smoky Mountains National Park Chief of Staff Katie Liming, who is attending her first Decoration Day at Bone Valley. The risks include unpredictable weather, hazardous tree limbs, sneaky copperheads, and squads of yellow jackets enraged by string trimmers, such as the one crew member Paydon Womack revs to clear out clumps of grass sprouting among mounds. Nearby, Swartz kneels to plumb a headstone. It may have been dislodged by a rooting wild hog; the grounds are no longer enclosed to keep livestock and wildlife out. 

The trio removed last year’s flowers, cleared vegetation, trimmed several locust saplings, and blew away a year’s worth of organic duff, revealing the muddy ground beneath. “The leaves are obviously suppressing any growth,” Swartz explained, suggesting that adding topsoil could encourage vegetation and prevent erosion.

But any changes the crew considers must follow park protocol to avoid damaging archeological remains, historic features, or unknown burial sites. 

Liming said that the park is committed to fulfilling its requirements to maintain and provide access to the cemeteries, despite federal budget cuts. The park financially supports cemetery maintenance, manages vegetation and wildlife, and covers access and transportation to the cemetery sites. The Friends of the Smokies also plays a critical budgetary role, for example, funding wages for special projects and the purchase of utility vehicles to move people and gear, such as the orange Kubota driven by Massey. 

“We’re trying to tell the rich and complex history of the park,” Liming said. “The cemeteries are part of that story.”

A Fraught Past

Bryson City author Lance Holland was contracted to shuttle families across the lake when park maintenance began several decades ago. He learned from his passengers that many landowners willingly sold to the federal government, though it may have been a false choice given the TVA’s authority to condemn private property. “You either took the money, or they took the land,” he said. 

Many felt they were sacrificing their homes for the good of the war effort. “People were very patriotic here,” he explained. “They felt that they were just giving up land.” 

More stinging, however, was the federal government’s broken promise to build a road through the North Shore to replace the drowned asphalt. Between 1948 and 1962, the Park Service carved a portion of the proposed 30-mile byway, but unexpected costs and environmental concerns halted construction. In 2010, the U.S. Department of the Interior agreed to pay Swain County a $52 million cash settlement instead of completing the road. The county earns interest on the payment, which it uses to fund community projects and public services. But without automobile access, reaching Bone Valley requires either a 15-mile hike from Fontana Dam or a 21-passenger pontoon boat the Park Service contracts named “Miss Hazel.” 

Early the next morning, North Shore descendant Henry Chambers, 69, orchestrated boarding visitors—plus their camp chairs and coolers—to Bone Valley. Each week, the Georgia resident makes the roughly two-hour drive, rarely missing a decoration and often picking up elderly descendants so they can make the journey. Midweek, he writes lengthy Facebook posts on each cemetery’s history and logistics, such as traffic hazards, weather reports, and recent deaths. 

Keeping up this tradition is a challenge: Just 23 people born on the North Shore are still alive, leaving the onus on a younger generation to protect it from the losses of time, lean budgets, neglect, and vandalism.

Another obstacle, according to Chambers, is the perception the park is falling short of its obligations. That includes gaps in providing dependable access due to the limited number of ferry vessels. “Since the number of boats have been limited to Bone Valley, attendance has dropped,” he said. “People quit coming because of the delays and time waiting for shuttles.”

Liming said that based on five years of attendance data, two shuttle boats should accommodate the number of visitors to Bone Valley.

As far as Chambers is concerned, the 2010 settlement didn’t address the deeper moral obligation owed to families the park and dam displaced. He wishes the park would strive to maintain each cemetery in the best condition possible and provide safe access. But, he said bluntly, “Park management doesn’t have a clue. There’s a long history with the park telling us what we want to hear and failing to follow up.” 

Yet Chambers draws a clear distinction between park leadership, including the park superintendent’s office where Liming works, and the employees who care for the cemeteries. He also credits the nonprofit Friends of the Smokies for funding equipment and other expenses to accommodate visits, and he praises the cemetery crew. “The guys that help us with the decorations are the salt of the earth. These guys are caring, respectful, and work extremely hard,” he said. “You couldn’t ask for any better.” 

The park is trying to keep up with the demand, Liming said, and has been working with the North Shore Cemetery Association to match boat capacity with visitor interest, consider pilot fencing and revegetation projects, and continue feral hog management programs. 

With funding from the Friends, the park recently hired a cemetery coordinator to complement the work of the park’s cultural resources team and focus on assessing conditions of the most threatened cemeteries. In all, the park oversees 152 cemeteries, more than 4,000 graves, and dozens of historical structures in various stages of disrepair, and cares for thousands of cultural artifacts and documents.

Chambers said he understands the needs of the 522,000-acre national park are vast, but he also believes its leadership hopes that “no one will care or show up at decorations and their obligation will be fulfilled.” 

What is evident is that as older generations grow fewer, remaining descendants are drifting further from their roots: In 2010, three times as many attended Decoration Day at Bone Valley. Yet many descendants, including Chambers, aren’t yet ready to let their connection fade.

“On every decoration we learn something new,” Chambers said. “Many times, we hear the missing piece of a story we thought we knew but didn’t know at all.”

Keeping Tradition Alive

By noon, gray clouds thicken, thunder rumbles, and the rain intensifies. Massey’s UTV splashes through mud as he brings Calhoun to the tarp from the gravesite, where he joins dozens of others squeezed together at picnic tables.

Chambers and the park crew agree they’ll have to abandon plans to visit Hall Cemetery, a smaller gravesite two miles farther up Bone Valley Creek. Several stream crossings are too treacherous. Meanwhile, visitors queued up for a buffet of home-cooked dishes, among them chicken dumplings, deviled eggs, and deep-fried walleye, bass, and catfish fresh from the lake. 

After lunch, a chorus led a rendition of the hymn “Shall We Gather at the River?” followed by a homily. The day was deemed a success despite the rain. Chambers tallied nearly 100 visitors, among them 12 children, a hopeful sign for the future of the tradition. 

During a break in the rain, Massey carefully glances over his shoulder and reverses his vehicle to the tarp to begin the first of several shuttles transporting descendants back to Miss Hazel and across the lake. 

Massey, who moved to Western North Carolina as a boy, is proud to be part of an unbroken chain of caretakers tending these cemeteries. “The stories people tell of who were here mean something,” he said. “They want to preserve this, just like we do, so the next generation can enjoy it.”