April 2002Volume 3 • Number 1

T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F T E N N E S S E E L I B R A R I E S

Great Smoky Mountains Colloquyis a newsletter published byThe University of TennesseeLibraries.

Co-editors:Anne BridgesRuss ClementKenneth Wise

Correspondence andchange of address:GSM Colloquy152 John C. Hodges LibraryThe University of TennesseeKnoxville, TN 37996-1000865/974-0017865/974-9242 (fax)Email: smokies@aztec.lib.utk.eduWeb: www.lib.utk.edu/refs/smokies/

G R E AT S M O K Y M O U N TA I N S

(continued on page 2)

All photographs are from thescrapbook compiled by RosemaryMoorehead

Roosevelt in Gatlinburg

A Smoky Mountain Scrapbookby Merikay Waldvogel

Who knows how long the tattered leather scrapbook lay unopened in a California antique store? The book dealer explained, “I don’t usually

handle scrapbooks, but I knew it would have some historical significance tosomeone interested in the Great Smoky Mountains area.” Indeed, it does.

UT Libraries’ Smokies bibliographer Anne Bridges located the 1936scrapbook, compiled by Rosemary Moorehead, via an Internet search. It waspurchased for the Great Smoky Mountains Regional Collection with funds fromthe local Aslan foundation. Bridges describes the scrapbook as “exactly the kindof material we would like to add to the Collection. It adds a personal perspectivethat you cannot find in published sources.”

As someone interested in Appalachian crafts, I was eager to turn the pagesof the album, entitled An Impression of the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School and ItsVicinity. After my first appointment to view the scrapbook, I volunteered toresearch the album and its contents further. What a treasure trove!

The album contains 73 b/w photos—neatly captioned snapshots ofGatlinburg and its residents taken in the 1930s at about the time the NationalPark opened. Students, staff and teachers of Pi Beta Phi Settlement School pose

Pi Beta Phi Barn

The school bus

For more information, contact smokies@aztec.lib.utk.edu

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Eleanor Brabson, Miriam Swan, Mary Durkee, PaulineCampbell, and Rosemary Moorehead, elementary school teachers.

The Pi Beta PhiSettlement School

In response to their mission of educational outreach to children in communities withoutschools, the national Pi Beta Phi female fraternityin the early years of the twentieth century embarkedon an ambitious program of bringing settlementschools into the fastness of the Great SmokyMountains. Gatlinburg was chosen as the locationfor the first settlement school because of the town’slack of educational facilities. After months of localnegotiations, the school was opened in 1912 andquickly expanded to include health services and acraft shop. The craft shop, originally christened“Arrowcraft” after the fraternity’s symbol of thearrow, remains a thriving business today. Thename Arrowcraft was later changed to Arrowmont,reflecting a wider mission of instructional programsin the arts. Although Gatlinburg looks verydifferent today from the photographs taken byRosemary Moorehead, many of the original PiBeta Phi buildings still exist, hidden away fromthe Parkway in the center of Gatlinburg.

and grin for the camera. Mountainwomen head to the Arrowcraft Shop,their horses laden with hand wovenbaskets.

In photos of Myrtle Point andCliff Top at Mount Le Conte,teachers gaze at sunsets andsunrises—just as hikers do today.President Roosevelt waved toher camera in October 1936.This scrapbook encapsulates amemorable time of fun, adventure,and even romance. “Who wasRosemary Moorehead? Why didshe make this scrapbook and howdid it get from Tennessee to California?”

Let the search begin! I found Rosemary in one photowith four other elementary school teachers. I knew theschool recruited its teachers from Pi Beta Phi chaptersaround the country. The Pi Beta Phi Fraternity foundedthe settlement school in 1912 and is still involved in thesupport of the elementary school, the Arrowcraft Shop,and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, althougheach is funded through a variety of sources.

Through the Pi Beta Phi Internet website, I reachedFran Becque, Pi Beta Phi’s archivist. She wrote, “Yes,Rosemary Moorehead was a Pi Phi. She graduated fromMillikin College in Decatur, Illinois in 1935 and so didPauline Requarth,” whose photo I also found in thescrapbook!

Later, I located both women who have remainedclose friends. Rosemary Moorehead Barnwell lives inOakland, California and Pauline Requarth Smith inDecatur. Due to Rosemary’s fragile health, Paulinevolunteered to answer my questions. I sent her copiesof pages of her friend’s photo album. We talked andcorresponded. She kept Rosemary apprised of thedevelopments.

Rosemary Moorehead grew up in Decatur, not farfrom the Millikin campus. She was musical as a younggirl and majored in English in college. After graduation,a Pi Phi alum suggested she and Pauline apply to work atthe Pi Beta Phi Settlement School. Rosemary taught inthe elementary school. Pauline took a bookkeeping job.

The two young women lived in the Teacher’sCottage from the Fall of 1935 through the Spring of1937. Pauline kept the records for the school and theArrowcraft Shop. Her monthly pay was $60 the firstyear, rising to $80 the next year. A room and board feeof twenty dollars was deducted from her salary.

Gatlinburg in the snow

Aunt Lizzieat a loom in theschool weaving room

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Notable New BookStephen Wallace Taylor. The New South’s NewFrontier: A Social History of Economic Developmentin Southwestern North Carolina. Gainesville:University of Florida Press, 2001. 187 pages.

The most enduring image of the social and cultural heritage of the mountainous region

of southwestern North Carolina is that popular-ized by Horace Kephart in Our SouthernHighlanders in which the native mountaineers arecharacterized as isolated, romantic, backward, andinhabiting a static and solitary place Kephartchristened “The Back of Beyond.” Kephart fostersthis image of the isolated highlander perhapsbecause that is what he wanted to find when heabandoned his wife, family, career, and civilized lifeto enter this “back of beyond” in search of himself;nevertheless, his caricature of the Smoky Mountainhighlander spawned a generation of popular writersseeking to confirm Kephart’s expectations.

Stephen Wallace Taylor, in the recentlyreleased The New South’s New Frontier: A SocialHistory of Economic Development in SouthwesternNorth Carolina, challenges the anachronisticsentimentalism of Kephart and his literarysuccessors by examining the pattern of economicand social diversity of the region and thus demon-strating the greater similarities than differencesbetween the Smoky Mountain region and the restof the South. Taylor shows that the region was notisolated from the larger currents of Americansociety as Kephart implies, but was actuallyreceptive to the influences of land speculation,industrialization, transient labor, company towns,market economy, and the spirit of commercialenterprise that characterized other communitiesacross the South. Taylor focuses his story on thecommunities along upper reaches of the LittleTennessee valley and the effects on these commu-nities by the arrival of the Aluminum Companyof America (Alcoa) and the Tennessee ValleyAuthority (TVA). Yet, while challenging the mythof Kephart’s fictive “back of beyond,” Taylor isalso careful to remind the reader of the power ofmyth in the shaping of southern history.

In the scrapbook, Rosemary included graphs of herfifth and sixth graders’ intelligence test scores, aprogram for a Christmas pageant, a copy of the schoolnewsletter, and her students’ crayon drawings. Tuckedinto the back were two weavings by school children. Iconcluded her scrapbook might have served as somekind of an official report.

Rosemary met her future husband, Joe Barnwell, inGatlinburg where he was an engineer with the U.S.Bureau of Public Roads. They married in the spring of1937 and moved to North Carolina. After his career inthe Navy, they settled in Berkeley, California, where Joeworked as a city planner. When her husband died in1997, Rosemary sold her house and moved to anassisted living facility in Oakland. I imagine in themove, the scrapbook disappeared—only to find a “new”and appropriate home 2500 miles away.

Why is this scrapbook such an important find? Itadds a fresh, new and different perspective to thehistory of Gatlinburg, the Pi Beta Phi School, and itsvicinity. This is the view of a young woman obviouslyenthralled by and dedicated to her students, the localpeople, and the Smoky Mountains. Long-time residentsof Gatlinburg will recognize familiar places and faces.

The University of Tennessee Library has placed acolor photocopy of the entire scrapbook at the AnnaPorter Public Library in Gatlinburg. After necessarypreservation treatment, the original scrapbook will beheld at The University of Tennessee’s Special CollectionsLibrary.

Merikay Waldvogel is a quilt historian and author living inKnoxville. See Appalachian Life Magazine, February-March2002 for her cover story about the Pi Beta Phi Scrapbookand her regular column “On Quilts” with a story based ona photo found in this album. For information, phone:423-639-4031 and web: www.appalachianlife.com .

Murrell Reagon, winner of the high school popularity contest, isgiven a ride by Hoover, the town tramp.

GSM Colloquy152 John C. Hodges LibraryThe University of TennesseeKnoxville, TN 37996-1000

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PA S T I S S U E S O F T H E G R E AT S M O K Y M O U N TA I N S C O L L O Q U Y A R E A VA I L A B L E AT O U R W E B S I T E :

w w w . l i b . u t k . e d u / r e f s / s m o k i e s /

GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS

REGIONAL PROJECT

More photos fromRosemary Moorehead’s scrapbook…

Fireplace in the Arrowmont Shop

Bringing baskets to the shopBasket room