You think you have troubles?

The past couple of days Margaret and I have been touring through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina. The park consists of over a half million acres of mountains, valleys, rivers and creeks comprising some of the most beautiful scenery in the east. Human settlement in the area started in the early 1800’s and continued until the area became a national park in 1934. With that, no more new settlement was allowed while those already living there could do so for the rest of their lives. Thus, settlement of the area officially ended with the death of the last full time resident in 1999.

One of the more interesting things about the park is the ability to visit some of the old farms that have been preserved, some dating back to the beginnings of human settlement in the area. They contain the houses, barns, storage sheds, mills for grinding grains, and other facilities necessary to live literally beyond the edge of civilization.

Margaret and I were continually amazed by the stories of the people that lived on the various farms that we visited. A consistent theme was the number of people that lived in the houses. Big families were common back in those days because farms needed lots of hands to run them and often a couple with 8, 10 or more kids wound up living in a one room log cabin. The concept of personal privacy had to have been a rather foreign concept to them.

When walking through the log cabins, log barns, log storage sheds, log…. fill in the blank…. it became real obvious real fast that life for them was extremely hard. No popping down to the local Wal-mart for them. Anything they needed they either grew, raised, made themselves or bartered with their neighbors to get. And the nearest neighbor could be miles away.

We soon began to realize that people today who complain (ourselves occasionally included) about how hard we either have it or had it in the past just don’t have a clue what hard times are. Try building your house yourself from logs. Try farming in land that you had to clear tons and tons of rocks and hundreds of trees from before your plow ever broke ground. Try carrying water from a creek or river up to your house to do simple household chores like cooking and cleaning. As a woman, try giving birth to numerous children in the middle of nowhere and hope sometimes against hope that there were no complications. All too often there were complications and in the graveyards we saw headstones that spoke of the birth and death of a baby on the same day… as well as the death of women “during childbirth”.

So, next time your microwave goes on the fritz and you have to use a regular stove to heat your store bought food that you brought in your air conditioned SUV to your 5 bedroom three bath home, just thank your luck stars that you weren’t born 200 years ago. I suspect the ghosts of those settlers of yesterday would just shake their heads in disbelief at what you think are troubles.

Pictures in the Current Pictures Gallery.