As easily as one season becomes another, the decades rushed by. But in this cabin in the Smokies, time once seemed to stand still.
When the federal government began condemning property to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park back in the 1920s, most landowners accepted the cash offers and left their farms. But five spinster sisters, who lived together in the log house where all of them were born refused to leave.
After months of bargaining, the government gave in. The sisters were given money for their land as well as the right to stay in their mountain home for as long as they lived.
So the women—the Walker sisters—remained on their rocky farm as the national park developed around them.
Word of the sisters spread among park visitors. These old-fashioned women grew their own food, visitors heard, and the sisters lived without electricity and running water. They fought off bears, and they made their own clothes from wool they carded and spun and weaved into broadcloth.
Summer vacationers wanted to see the women who lived together in the wilderness without men. The Walker sisters, like the park 's black bears, became an attraction.
The story of the fiesty women who bucked the federal government was told to the whole country in a 1946 Saturday Evening Post article: · 'Deep in the mountains of East Tennessee, the Walker sisters are still living in the early 19th century ... and finding it not so bad, either."
Leery of strangers coming around, the sisters made a sign and nailed it to a tree near the house. "Keep Out," it warned. But in time they learned to capitalize on their fame, selling apples to those who dropped by, along with little wooden brooms whittled from tree branches and poems written in longhand on sheets of lined paper.
Appreciating the extra money, they took down their sign, and replaced it with another: “Visitors Welcome.''
'The tourists started beating a path to their door on account of the magazine write-up,'' remembers Effie Phipps, daughter of Carolina Walker, the one sister who did marry and leave home. ''They wanted to see these old sisters ... and their coverlets."
"Some folks thought my aunts were peculiar, and I guess they were, but I loved them," says 83-year-old Effie, who enjoyed spending weekends at the Walker place when she was a child. "I slept on a feather mattress on the floor,†she clearly recalls.
“Aunt Margaret was the boss. All the sisters listened to her,'' says Effie.
"Martha Jane was good with a gun. She killed most of the wild animals used for meat.â€
Louisa, like her father, treasured the beauty of rhyming words. Her handÂwritten poems were popular with visitors, Effie says.
Margaret was the practical. noÂnonsense sister who frowned on all frivolities.
'' She preferred to work in the vegetable garden and let the others tend to the flowers and such," says Effie. "She was backwards about talking to strangers so she let the others do that.''
And what did the visitors discover when they wandered up to the Walker cabin? One of the sisters was often found working at the loom on the front porch. Wearing a bonnet, Margaret likely would be in the garden hoeing weeds while another sister milked the cow, cut fodder, carded wool. picked apples or shelled corn.
On rainy days, the sisters made sausage, pitted cherries, pieced quilts, spun wool on the spinning wheel. peeled apples or read the Bible.
If people came by on wash day, they found the women boiling their clothes in an iron pot in the yard.
"That's the only time I ever saw Aunt Margaret with her sleeves rolled up ... when she was boiling her whites," says Effie. "But when she heard a car coming, she would roll them down.â€
In the spring the sisters “scalded the walls" of the house. All the furniture was moved out in the yard and the log walls were scrubbed with hot water. The walls were then covered with a fresh layer of newspapers, to cover the chinking and keep out drafts.
''Aunt Louisa liked tourists,'' says Effie. ''She got up when she heard a car coming. She was happy to see them. She would go out and stand on the porch and welcome them.
“Aunt Margaret rathered they wouldn't come so often.''
But they did come, more each year.
"One bunch would come after another,'' Effie remembers. ''There were times when I would go visit my aunts that I never had a chance to talk with them. Some tourists would come even before the sisters got out of bed in the morning. They'd sit on the porch and wait for them to come out.''
Not only were visitors fascinated by the women, but by their old house as well. The Walker home was actually two log cabins attached to each other. The main part. built in 1859 by the sisters' grandfather, served as a living room/bedroom. The second room was the kitchen.
Every piece of furniture in the house—the chairs, beds, tables, even the spinning wheels and loom—were handÂmade by the Walker sisters' father.
Hanging on nails and pegs in the ceiling beams were walking sticks, bags of saved garden seeds, stringed peppers, lanterns, bundles of herbs and baskets filled with treasured letters and family photographs.
And under every bed were several boxes. Each sister had a personal "card box" for personal items, according to Effie, filled with things like letters and postcards people would send, coverlet patterns and poems.
Between the house and the fruit orchards were a barn, hog pen, smoke house, corn crib and spring house, all made of logs. One thing not found at the Walker place was an outhouse. The sisters, and their parents before them, used the woods, according to Effie. In later years, men of the family offered to build the sisters an outhouse, but Margaret refused. She said that people would see it and know what it was for, and ''this would be an embarrassment.''
"I've been asked that a thousand times," says Effie, a bit annoyed. "My answer is I do not know. I can't speak for them on that.''
Other than an occasional church social, the sisters had few opportunities to meet men. And their stern father went to bed as soon as it got dark and expected his daughters to do the same.
Sunday night was an exception. Led by Margaret carrying a kerosene lantern, the sisters walked single-file to the church for evening services.
The Walker sisters remained at the old homeplace, refusing electricity and other wonders of the modern age, until they all died, one by one: Polly at age 70 in 1945; Hettie at 58 in 1947; Martha at 74 in 1950; Margaret at 92 in 1962; and Louisa at 81 in 1964.
Soon after Louisa was buried, the Walker family heirs sold the contents of the house to the Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association. The homemade spinning wheels, loom, brooms, pea shellers, cotton gin, baskets, beds, chairs, walking sticks and coverlets were put into storage.
"We have everything from the house, carefully documented and boxed up," says Bob Miller, spokesman for the national park. "It's like a time capsule.â€
According to Miller, the Park Service hopes to display the Walker items someÂday in a new museum at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center.
Untilled for 30 years, the Walker sisters' vegetable garden has been overcome by weeds and grasses. The fruit orchards have been pushed aside by the forest. But the log house and corn crib are in good repair.