Before It Was Pittman Center: The Story of Emerts Cove

...history with Jake

A few miles outside Gatlinburg, where the mountains separate as we approach the Middle Prong of the Little Pigeon River, lies a community whose story reaches back farther than the state itself. And it helped to shape my life, and then the lives of our entire family.

Today we call the larger community Pittman Center, but our little neck of the woods has been and will always be Emerts Cove. Long before Pittman Center took shape, Emerts Cove was one of several distinct communities tucked among these mountains. Every cove and hollow seemed to have its own name and identity. What we now know as Pittman Center was largely the Webb Creek Community, while Running Rock sits in the area historically known as Laurel or Laurel Creek.

Understanding this place means understanding something about the people who lived between these ridges long before visitors began coming to the Smokies.

A Cove Gets a Name

The story is generally traced to Revolutionary War veteran Frederick Emert, one of the area's earliest European-American settlers. Of the 2,000 acres he was granted, Emert and his family chose and settled in the fertile valley along the river in the late eighteenth century, and the surrounding valley eventually took his name: Emerts Cove.

The mountains provided timber. The river provided water. Small farms occupied the usable bottomland. Families grew food, hunted, raised livestock, worshiped together and depended heavily upon one another.

It was not an easy life, but it produced a remarkably self-reliant community.

Perhaps no one spent more time preserving that story than Glenn Cardwell.

A Man Who Remembered

Glenn Cardwell was born in Greenbrier in 1930, in what would become the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He remembered a landscape of small farms, cornfields, pastures, smokehouses and gristmills—a place he described not simply as scattered farms, but as a village.

When creation of the National Park displaced families from Greenbrier and other mountain communities, many did not travel very far. They moved just outside the new park boundary into places such as Emerts Cove.

The Cardwells were among them.

During World War II, when new building materials and even nails were difficult to obtain, Glenn recalled his family dismantling old buildings, straightening the used nails and reusing the lumber to construct their new home and outbuildings.

That small story says a great deal about the people who lived here.

Use what you have. Waste little. Work together. Take care of the place that takes care of you.

Those ideas feel surprisingly current. Around here, they are not new at all.

A Doctor's Vision Becomes Pittman Center

Just downriver from Emerts Cove, the Webb Creek Community would eventually become the center of an extraordinary effort led by Dr. Robert F. Thomas.

Thomas saw needs that went well beyond medicine. These isolated mountain families needed better access not only to healthcare, but to education and the practical resources that could strengthen an entire community. What developed at Webb Creek was largely Thomas's vision and effort.

To make that vision possible, Thomas needed help raising money. That help came through Methodist minister Eli Pittman, who became an important fundraiser and supporter of the effort. Pittman's success in securing financial support ultimately attached his name to the institution: the Pittman Community Center.

The name endured, but the vision behind the work belonged substantially to Dr. Thomas.

What grew there became far more than a school. Education, healthcare, agriculture, craftsmanship and community life gathered around it. The campus eventually included a school, medical clinic, general store, post office, farm and orchards. Over time, the name Pittman Center came to identify not merely the institution but the surrounding community itself.

Dr. Thomas's life and what he did for these mountain families deserve a story of their own, and we'll return to it another time.

The school eventually closed, but the community remained. Pittman Center incorporated as a town in 1974, encompassing much of historic Emerts Cove.

Its history was not discarded.

It became part of its identity.

Glenn and Faye Cardwell

Glenn Cardwell eventually became one of the community's great keepers of memory.

He taught at Pittman Center before beginning a 34-year career with Great Smoky Mountains National Park as a naturalist and educator. After retiring from the Park, he served for nearly eighteen years as mayor of Pittman Center.

He collected photographs. He recorded family histories. He wrote about churches, families and communities. He led hikes and told stories. His books The Greenbrier Cove Story and A Dream Fulfilled: A Story About Pittman Center preserved memories that might otherwise have disappeared.

Today, the Glenn Cardwell Heritage Museum at Pittman Center Elementary preserves photographs, artifacts, books and stories from this mountain community.

His wife, Faye, was an educator too.

That part of the story is personal for me.

Mrs. Cardwell was my 10th-grade English teacher.

At the time, I certainly wasn't thinking about the historical thread and connection we all shared. Really, I didn't make that connection until well after high school, even though she lived less than a mile away. I certainly wasn't thinking about an old mountain community and something I might someday build here. But decades later, Running Rock is taking shape in the same community Mr. Glenn spent so much of his life documenting and Mrs. Faye spent part of hers educating.

There is something meaningful about that connection.

The Community Beside the Park

The creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park preserved an extraordinary landscape. But it also changed the communities surrounding it.

Families left Greenbrier and other places that became part of the Park. Farms disappeared. Tourism gradually replaced agriculture as the dominant economic force.

Cardwell once lamented the disappearance of the small farms because he understood that when a landscape changes, a culture can disappear with it.

Pittman Center chose another path.

It grew, but it also made preservation part of its identity.

The quiet little town in the shadow of the National Park has chosen not to imitate Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge. The Middle Prong still runs through the valley. Forested ridges still surround it. Family names that appear in old photographs and histories can still be found here today.

And remarkably, you can drive only a few miles from one of America's busiest mountain destinations and find a place that still feels unmistakably like a community—and quite a special one at that.

Running Rock and the Story That Continues

Running Rock is new.

The ideas behind it are not.

We are so very pleased and honored to be neighbors to such a fine place, one of the most beautiful on earth.

Preserving forest. Building carefully. Allowing the land to determine where structures belong. Creating a village rather than simply filling acreage with buildings. Leaving something worthwhile for the generation that follows.

Those ideas belong naturally in Pittman Center.

Running Rock will never recreate the Emerts Cove of Frederick Emert or the Pittman Center Glenn Cardwell remembered. Nor should it try.

But we can learn something from them.

A place becomes valuable because people develop a relationship with it. They learn its streams and ridges. They know its stories. They care for it. And eventually, they leave some portion of it in the hands of someone else.

Our responsibility is to leave it better than we found it.

In that sense, Running Rock isn't simply being built in Pittman Center.

We hope, in our own small way, to become part of the continuing story of this remarkable mountain community.

Thanks for reading,Jake