The Walker Sisters and the Last Family That Said No

When the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in the 1930s, the government bought — and sometimes condemned — the land of every family living within the park boundaries. Every family left except one. The Walker Sisters — five unmarried sisters living in the cabin their father built on Little Greenbrier — refused to sell and were granted a lifetime lease that let them stay on their land, farming and living in the manner of the 19th century, while the 20th century built parking lots around them.

The sisters — Margaret, Polly, Martha, Nancy, and Louisa — lived without electricity, running water, or motorized equipment. They grew their food, wove their cloth, made their soap, and received visitors who hiked the trail to their cabin with the curiosity of people visiting a museum that happened to be alive. Louisa, the youngest and last surviving sister, died in 1964, and the cabin stands today exactly as they left it — low, dark, chinked with clay, and surrounded by the forest that the park planted after the last farm fields were abandoned.

The Walker Sisters Cabin is accessible via a moderate 2-mile hike from the Little Greenbrier trailhead near Metcalf Bottoms. The trail follows an old road through forest that was once farmland — you can see the stone walls and clearings of vanished homesteads along the way — and the cabin at the end sits in a small clearing with the matter-of-fact presence of a building that was never designed to be visited but has outlived everything around it.

The Walker Sisters' story is the story of the Smokies in miniature: a landscape that was home before it was a park, occupied by people whose way of life the park both preserved and ended. The cabin is a monument to stubbornness, self-sufficiency, and the particular courage of five women who decided that their home was worth more than any government's plan for it.