Tyson McCarter Place: A Smokies Homestead Frozen in Time

Jacob Tyson McCarter was born in eighteen seventy-eight and spent his entire life farming in the Greenbrier section of what is now Great Smoky Mountains National Park. His family had been in this valley for generations, they were descendants of some of the earliest Euro-American settlers in the Smokies, and when you walk through the old homestead today, you are walking through the arrangement of a life that had deep roots in this particular soil.

McCarter's house is gone now, but a cluster of outbuildings survived park establishment and have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places. What remains is a barn, a springhouse, a corn crib, and a smokehouse, all dating to around eighteen seventy-six. What makes the McCarter homestead architecturally distinctive is the way these structures are laid out: rather than the more common linear arrangement found on most Appalachian farms, McCarter's buildings were organized in a near-circular formation around an open barnyard. The unusual configuration was probably intentional, a circular barnyard makes it harder for predators to get at livestock from any direction, and the mountains in this era still held wild predators.

Another unusual feature is that the barn and the corn crib are joined, typically two separate structures on a farm. Combining them likely reflected practical efficiency: ears of corn could move directly from storage to feed with minimal handling.

Jacob McCarter lived on this land until the park was established in the nineteen thirties. He was in his fifties by then, and the farm he left behind was still organized the way his grandparents had laid it out. The National Park Service documented the surviving structures through the Historic American Buildings Survey, preserving measured drawings and photographs of buildings that represent the full texture of Appalachian mountain agriculture before it was absorbed into the national park system.