"To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die."
- Thomas Campbell
Simply put, it is our intention to visit every documented grave within Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
We pay our respects, photograph the site and post photos with a written narrative on the GoSmokies website. The Remembrance Project exists to perhaps keep a memory alive, if only by acknowledging its presence. The act of visiting the Smoky Mountain backcountry cemeteries, of paying ones respects, is an act of remembrance.
These graves represent actual people, actual lives, and all the complexity that a human life represents, even if we know nothing about the individual. It is not that these people died and were buried here. It is that they LIVED and were buried here.
We are documentarians more than we are researchers. Others long before us did the difficult work of researching these places. We have not discovered anything that someone before us has not already done. Nearly every cemetery we visit has already been GPS cataloged and most have already been written about. On the "Acknowledgements" page of this website we list a few of the historians without whom we could not have undertaken this project.
The dictionary gives a variety of definitions for "Remembrance," and the project is perhaps a sprinkling of them all:
remembrance
[ri-mem-bruh ns]
noun
1.
a retained mental impression; memory.
2.
the act or fact of remembering.
3.
the power or faculty of remembering.
4.
the length of time over which recollection or memory extends.
5.
the state of being remembered; commemoration:
"to hold someone's name in remembrance."
6.
something that serves to bring to mind or keep in mind some place, person, event, etc.; memento.
7.
a gift given as a token of love or friendship:
"I sent her a small remembrance on Mother's Day."
It is both simple and not simple to describe what we do. We go see the old cemeteries. Our visits reflect an interest in history and those who once lived - rather than those who once died. The families wanted these people to be remembered, and we try to connect with that. (Not to misinterpret "connect," we don't communicate with the spirits of dead people - we are much too boring. We just go hiking.)
We make every effort to avoid disseminating or repeating inaccurate information. If we didn't see it ourselves, we need to clearly say so. We post when we have something to say.
Some time ago we reviewed our first introductory post to GoSmokies, intending to update it to reflect what the project had become. In the end we left it alone, as it already said what we wanted. What amounted to a mission statement included four points:
To that we might add a fifth: Just go there, be present. Just show up. We will eventually visit all of the known cemeteries in the National Park. That may not be realistic for most readers to do themselves, but we take you along. And if you can visit just one cemetery yourself, then a remembrance has been paid to those who were left behind when the residents had to move away.
We have found that physical directions to locate specific cemeteries are often vague or incorrect, so each of our GoSmokies posts attempts to clarify directions. We want a reader without access to guidebooks or other references to be able to print out our post and have enough information to find a given cemetery.
But beyond facts and figures, we mainly hope to convey the spirit and sense of place. Our vision for the Remembrance Project is to honor and preserve the memory of those at rest in Great Smoky Mountains cemeteries. Each of these places was considered holy to someone. We will endeavor to connect with that holiness.
As we visit these places, even as we uncover pieces of the past, we invariably walk away with more questions than when we arrived. One could spend hours online and in county archives researching any of these people. There are so many cemeteries and not enough hours in the day. Quite frankly, we would rather spend our time in the backcountry than the courthouse records room. It is our hope that readers with knowledge of these places will post comments to contribute additional background and detail that can help flesh out the stories of these long ago lives.
The clock is ticking.
Headstones that once had legible inscriptions are now unreadable. Some stones have vanished entirely. In the foreseeable future, the wilderness will reclaim anything not deliberately preserved. Headstones will weather and crumble, and those that don't will be swallowed into the earth in the unending cycle of freeze and thaw.
This adds extra meaning to the work of the researchers who produced the table of GPS coordinates, and it is disconcerting to think that someday those coordinates may be the only remaining evidence of some of these cemeteries, the only remembrance. It is important to document these places now, while there is still something there to document. Preservation must happen now, while there is yet something to preserve.
We never enter the National Park without acknowledging at some point how blessed we are to live in this astounding and holy place, to be able to do on our days off from work what others might only dream of doing. It is a privilege we do not take lightly. We get to go knock on the door of God's living room.
We have visited areas of the National Park we would never have seen, never have thought to see, were it not for this project. We know that we will never return to most of these cemeteries. We take our photos, take our notes, pack up our gear, and when we turn our backs to walk away, it is forever. There are too many new places, not just cemeteries, that remain to be witnessed. It is our hope that others will return in our place to pay their personal respects.
One of our resources, a Park ranger, emphasized early on that respecting the gravesites is key to any cemetery work. He said that when he enters a cemetery he removes his hat and avoids treading on the graves. In practice, we do neither. We often spend hours in the sun, and the brimmed hats serve a practical purpose. Preserving the headstone inscriptions before they deteriorate beyond legibility requires photographing them head-on.
We trust that the dead and their descendants will understand.
For additional information about the Remembrance Project see:
History of the Project - Click Here
List of Cemeteries Visited - Click Here
For an index of our GoSmokies posts
Click Here