David West Barber Sr.: One of the Quiet Doers Behind the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

History tends to remember the people who wrote about great things. But behind nearly every great undertaking are others who simply went to work.

My great-grandfather, David West Barber Sr., was one of those men.

Long before the Great Smoky Mountains became America's most visited national park, a relatively small group of hikers, conservationists, businessmen, photographers, architects, and community leaders recognized that these mountains were worth protecting. Some of their names became closely associated with the Smokies, including Harvey Broome, Carlos Campbell, Jim Thompson, and others.

West Barber belonged to that circle from the very beginning. But while friends such as Harvey Broome would become known for eloquently writing about wilderness and the Smokies, West seems to have been more comfortable helping make things happen.

His efforts can be traced to 1924, when this small network of friends became some of the early voices pushing for a national park here in East Tennessee.

A Hike That Helped Start Something Much Bigger

In October of that year, West, his cousin Charles Barber, his brother Guy, and a group of roughly a dozen or so others made a trip up Mount LeConte. The purpose went beyond recreation. They hoped to generate greater interest in hiking the Smokies and ultimately in preserving these mountains as a national park.

That weekend helped give birth to the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club.

The club would become an important early voice for the mountains, bringing together people who knew the Smokies personally and increasingly understood what could be lost if they weren't protected. West remained part of that effort for decades and served as president of the Hiking Club in 1940—the same year Great Smoky Mountains National Park was formally dedicated. His architectural firm, BarberMcMurry, also designed the park headquarters completed that year.

There is something fitting about that convergence. A man who had spent years working to help preserve these mountains also had a hand, through his profession, in creating one of the buildings from which the new park would be administered.

But West's involvement wasn't confined to meetings, advocacy, or architecture.

He wanted people to actually experience the mountains.

A Cabin in Greenbrier

One tangible example still stands in Greenbrier.

The Smoky Mountains Hiking Club had envisioned a clubhouse in the mountains almost from its beginning. In the 1930s, that vision became the Hiking Club Cabin along Porters Creek. The club built it largely by hand, using traditional Appalachian construction and salvaged materials. BarberMcMurry designed the structure, and members of the Barber family were personally involved in its construction.

West was part of the effort to see the cabin completed and enjoyed by the people for whom it was intended.

It wasn't a monument. It was a place to use.

Club members could hike into Greenbrier, gather around a fire, eat together, rest after a day on the trail, tell stories, and spend a cool night in the mountains with others who shared their love of nature. Over the decades, the cabin and the trail leading past it became part of the experience of countless ordinary people exploring Greenbrier.

That distinction matters.

West didn't seem to believe that preserving the mountains meant simply protecting nature from people. There was another side to conservation: protecting these places for people—so ordinary families could walk through them, hear the water rushing over stone, sleep beneath the trees, and develop their own affection for the land.

Because people tend to protect what they have first learned to love.

Harvey Broome, West Barber and a Lifetime in the Mountains

Harvey Broome's writings give us another window into this world.

Broome became one of America's significant wilderness advocates and later a founder of The Wilderness Society. But he was also West's friend and hiking companion. His book, Out Under the Sky of the Great Smokies: A Personal Journey, preserves memories of the people, places, hikes, conversations, and friendships that surrounded the Smokies during much of West's lifetime.

Among those memories is Broome's account of hiking with West after he had become blind.

There is something deeply moving about that image.

West could no longer see the mountains he had spent so much of his life exploring and working to preserve. Yet blindness didn't end his desire to be among them. With trusted friends beside him, he could still follow the trail. He could hear a stream before reaching it, feel the grade changing beneath his feet, recognize the coolness of a hollow, smell the forest, and experience through memory a landscape he had known for decades.

The mountains had become more than something West needed to see.

They were part of him.

Broome's book also records another wonderful scene from 1965, when members of the Hiking Club gathered in Emerts Cove for a fall "spook night." They moved from cottage to cottage, with wood fires burning and friends gathering together. At West Barber's cabin, Broome remembered the pleasure of everyone singing together.

Beyond the nostalgia, Broome captured what Emerts Cove represented to these people: a place of calm, friendship, and harmony in contrast to the turmoil of the larger world.

That description could have been written about why many of us still retreat to these mountains today.

A Small Piece of Heaven in Emerts Cove

While West was helping preserve an enormous piece of the Smokies for millions of people he would never meet, he was also quietly securing a tiny piece of these mountains for his own family.

West and his wife, Carol, began bringing their three children from Knoxville into the mountains. They began by camping on the tiny island just downstream from what is now the Park. They eventually discovered Emerts Cove, just outside the future national park, where the family camped, hiked, fished, swam, and even enjoyed watching local baseball games on the larger island next door. In time, they became seasonal members of this little mountain community.

In 1937, West and Will Cain purchased 1.25 acres there. West later acquired another 19 acres, and the Barber family completed its cabin in 1939.

Building it wasn't particularly convenient.

There wasn't even a bridge across the Middle Prong of the Little Pigeon River. Reaching the property required fording the river. West and the family built most of the cabin themselves.

And West didn't keep his discovery entirely to himself.

He helped friends and fellow members of the hiking community establish their own footholds nearby so that they, too, could have a little piece of these mountains and share the experience with their families.

Over time, Emerts Cove became something of an extension of the friendships forged on the trails.

Broome's recollections decades later show that it worked.

These weren't simply second houses. They became places where families gathered, friendships deepened, children grew up, fires were built, songs were sung, and the mountains became woven into people's lives.

The Gift Passed Down

For me, this story is deeply personal.

West Barber was my great-grandfather, and his son—my grandfather—was a great influence in my life.

The little place West established in Emerts Cove became part of my childhood. The river, forests, trails, old cabins, mountain people, and the ridge behind the cabin weren't scenery viewed through a windshield.

They became part of who I was and what I've become.

And many decades later, I can see a fairly straight line between his vision and my own love for this corner of Appalachia.

That connection has caused me to think differently about what matters most: God, family, the outdoors, and conservation.

West and his friends didn't preserve the Smokies because they believed mankind should never touch them. Quite the opposite. They fought to preserve these mountains because they had touched them, walked them, slept in them, built friendships in them, raised children around them, and experienced something here they believed was worth passing on.

They understood something simple: experience creates affection, and affection creates stewardship.

That idea has become deeply important to the vision behind Running Rock.

Running Rock is certainly different from the old Barber cabin in Emerts Cove or the Hiking Club cabin in Greenbrier. But the underlying philosophy feels remarkably familiar.

Protect something beautiful.

Allow people to experience it rather than merely observe it.

Develop only what is necessary to make that experience possible.

And leave enough untouched that a child walking these woods generations from now can discover something that still feels wild, quiet, and remarkably unchanged.

West Barber and his friends helped preserve more than 500,000 acres of the Great Smoky Mountains for generations they would never know.

Then, in a quiet cove just outside its boundary, he gave his own family a small piece of heaven beside it.

Nearly a century after that first Mount LeConte hike, I find myself trying, in my own much smaller way, to do something remarkably similar.

Preserve the land. Share the experience. And give the next generation the opportunity to fall in love with these mountains for themselves.

For both the love of these mountains and the vision they inspired, I have my great-grandfather to thank. And so, I hope to share it with others from a place of respect, gratitude, and appreciation.

Kindly,Jake