National Affairs: Smoky Park

Five million dollars of the money extracted by John D. Rockefeller from Pennsylvania’s oil-bearing substrata were last week applied to perpetuate the surface grandeur of 600 square miles of the Appalachian chain far south of Pennsylvania. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial fund announced that it had underwritten half of the $10,000,000 fund sought for the Great Smoky Mountains National park. Public subscription and the legislatures of North Carolina and Tennessee had provided most of the other $5,000,000 required to buy what will be the outstanding national park in the eastern U. S.

Who first called them “The Great Smokies,” from the smoldering haze that hangs upon them, no one knows. They stretch for 200 miles northeast and southwest paralleling the Blue Ridge (40 miles southeast). Master chain of the Appalachians, they wall off Tennessee from North Carolina. Near a place called Indian Gap, the snag-toothed divide is so sharp that a mountaineer’s misstep would plunge him dizzily into one State or the other.

Accessible to three-fourths of the country’s population, containing a dozen peaks higher than anything north of Virginia’s southern boundary, except Mt. Washington in New Hampshire (6293 ft.), still frequented by Cherokee Indians, the new park will be advertised as a rival of Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite. In place of naked peaks it raises up lofty, rolling domes fringed with balsam. Its bears are black instead of grizzled and the deer frisk white tails in place of the western black. For lodgepole pines and wind-torn spruce, are substituted every variety of tree and shrub that one would find in a trip from Georgia to the St. Lawrence—including flourishing chestnuts (now moribund from Pennsylvania north), holly, magnolia, the rare yellowwood, giant hemlocks, 30-ft. huckleberry bushes, acres of mountain laurel, rhododendrons with 18-inch trunks. Only lately have the Great Smokies been accurately mapped, and then a plane had to fly back and forth over them for days. There are no roads yet through the heart of the region, but soon one will be built, presumably with a filling station on majestic Mt. Guyot and a hot-dog stand on massive Clingman’s Dome.

Hard by, the Great Smoky Mountains park, a 327,000-acre swath of Blue Ridge territory, six to ten miles wide, between Front Royal and Waynesboro in Virginia, is to be secured as the Shenandoah National park. Last week, the $4,000,000 fund necessary for this project was reported within $100,000 of completion.