Little Greenbrier School and the Walker Sisters

Tucked in the woods west of Gatlinburg stands a hand built log schoolhouse that tells one of the Smokies' most beloved stories. The Little Greenbrier School was raised in eighteen eighty-two, after the county promised to pay a teacher's salary if the community would build the schoolhouse itself. Dozens of neighbors gathered that January to do exactly that, among them a man named John Walker.

For more than fifty years the little building served as both school and Sunday church, which is why a cemetery still sits nearby. But the school is most famous for John Walker's daughters. The Walker family homestead sat just up the trail, and when John died, his farm passed to six of his unmarried daughters.

When the national park came buying up land in the nineteen thirties, the Walker sisters refused to sell their way of life. They kept farming, spinning, and living as their parents had, and they finally signed a lifetime lease in nineteen forty-one, agreeing to sell only on the condition that they could stay until they died. They sold homemade jams and pickles to hikers, and in nineteen forty-six the Saturday Evening Post made them famous as living relics of a vanishing frontier.

Louisa, the last sister, died in nineteen sixty-four. Their cabin and their schoolhouse still stand, quiet monuments to people who simply would not let go of the mountains.