The Walker Sisters Refused to Leave

When the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in the 1930s, every family was bought out or condemned. Every family left except one. Five unmarried sisters on Little Greenbrier — Margaret, Polly, Martha, Nancy, and Louisa — refused to sell. They got a lifetime lease. They farmed, wove, made soap, lived without electricity or running water while the 20th century built parking lots around them.

Visitors hiked to their cabin and the sisters received them with the curiosity of people watching a museum that happened to be alive. Louisa, the last surviving, died in 1964. The cabin stands as they left it — low, dark, chinked with clay, surrounded by forest the park planted after the last fields were abandoned.

The Walker Sisters Cabin is a moderate 2-mile hike from the Little Greenbrier trailhead near Metcalf Bottoms. Old road through forest that was farmland — stone walls and clearings of vanished homesteads along the way. The cabin sits in a clearing with the matter-of-fact presence of a building never designed to be visited that outlived everything around it. Five women who decided their home was worth more than any government's plan.