The Untold Appalachian Story of the Walker Sisters

PART 2 :

Every fall, they canned enough food to survive a long mountain winter with no help from outside. There was no icebox. Food that needed to stay cold went straight into a spring house built directly over running water, where the cold spring did the refrigerating for free. Years later, the sisters like to say that there were only four things their land couldn’t give them: sugar, salt, coffee, and soda.

Everything else, they made with their own hands. This was the rhythm of their lives straight through the 1910s and into the 1920s. By the 1920s, timber and coal companies had already stripped the Smoky Mountains down to almost nothing. Decades of logging and mining had wrecked the old forests and fouled the mountain streams.

Once those companies had pulled every dollar of value out of the ground, they then turned around and sold the ruined land straight to the government, one last profit on their way out the door. That sale became the foundation for something new, a push to protect what was left by turning the whole region into a national park.

In 1926, Congress authorized the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That sounded like good news for the mountains, but it was a direct threat to everyone still living inside the boundary lines being drawn on the map. And thousands of families were. The Walker sisters were one of them. But plenty of families took the buyout without much of a fight.

Mountain life was hard, and the money on offer, even if it wasn’t much, could buy a foothold in a valley town with factory work and running water. But other families refused outright. To them, this wasn’t property to be appraised and sold. It was home. And for the families who wouldn’t sell willingly, Tennessee had a legal weapon ready to use.

Eminent domain. Nobody resisted longer or harder than the Walker sisters. In 1933, a park service official made the trip out to Little Greenbrier in person, trying to talk the sisters into a deal directly. The government wanted this handled quietly. Dragging five unmarried women through the courts to force them off their family farm would have been a public relations disaster, and officials knew it.

 So, instead of taking legal action, they kept coming back to negotiate. The land had been appraised at just over $5,000. Working with a lawyer, the sisters countered and asked for $7,000 instead. For years, neither side gave an inch. Nancy, one of the six sisters, died in 1931 before the park was even officially dedicated. But the remaining five sisters didn’t slow down. They kept fighting.

President Roosevelt formally dedicated Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1940. And the Walker cabin was still standing right where it had always stood, occupied, unsold, sitting dead center inside land that the federal government had already claimed on paper. Finally, later that same year, the sisters agreed to terms.

They sold their 120-acre farm for $4,750, but buried in that deal was something that the government almost never handed out. A lifetime lease. The sisters could keep living in their cabin on their own land for as long as any of them drew breath. Now, that sounds on paper like a happy ending. It wasn’t. Not really.

The sisters weren’t land owners anymore. They were tenants now. And the National Park Service was their landlord. The new lease came with hard rules attached to it. No hunting, no fishing, no cutting timber, no grazing livestock the way they always had. Now, for most of the 1940s, almost nobody outside of the mountains had any idea that the Walker sisters existed.

Then, in 1946, the Saturday Evening Post ran a feature story on them, and everything changed almost overnight. Strangers started hiking out from every direction just to catch a glimpse of them. Now, at first, the sisters were guarded. These were women who had spent their entire lives with almost no contact from the outside world, and now cameras were showing up on their porch uninvited.

But, they adapted fast. They started inviting visitors in for meals. They sold homemade dolls, fresh apple pies, and hand-stitched quilts. Louisa sold her poems, too, priced anywhere from a quarter to a dollar, depending on the piece. In its own small way, it became a business. A way for women who had just had hunting and grazing taken away from them to make their land support them again on their own terms.

Now, the visitors who came out didn’t just find hardship, either. They found sisters with real wit. During World War II, while their nephews were serving overseas, Martha was known for joking that not every soldier in Germany could say his old maid aunts had knit his socks off of a rocky mountain side. Margaret had her own running bit about the family mule, insisting it needed special handling because none of the sisters were allowed to properly cuss at it.

But, time kept moving forward, the way it always does. Polly died in 1946, not long after the magazine story ran. Hetty died the following year in 1947. By 1951, only two sisters were left standing. Margaret, now well into her 80s, and Louisa. That year, Martha had passed, too, leaving the two eldest survivors alone in the cabin that their family had called home for generations.

Margaret and Louisa made one last decision together. They were simply too old now to farm the land and host a steady stream of visitors at the same time. So, they wrote to the National Park Service and asked for the visitors welcome sign to come down. The same sisters who had once fought the government just to stay on their land were now quietly asking to be left alone in it.

 Margaret died in 1962 at 91 years old, having outlived nearly every one of her siblings. Louisa held on for two more years, living alone in the cabin until 1964. The National Park Service took full and final control of the land that the Walker family had fought for, worked, and lived on for almost a century. The cabin never disappeared, though.

It was restored in 1976 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. And it’s still standing today in an area now called Five Sisters Cove, reachable by trail for anyone willing to make the hike.