Cades Cove Loop Road: John Oliver Cabin to Carter Shields Cabin

Welcome to Cades Cove. Great Smoky Mountains is the most visited national park in the country, with more than eleven and a half million visits in 2025, and this valley is one of the places people come for. It's a flat valley ringed on all sides by mountains. Around here, that's what a cove is.

The road is an eleven-mile, one-way loop. In summer, in fall and on weekends, the traffic here is heavy, and that's fine. I'll tell you a story on the way to each historic place, and another when you get there: the first settlers' cabin, three churches, a mill and the farms of the families who lived here. When the traffic stops for a long while, I have a few more stories for the wait.

Before any of those families, this valley had another name. The Cherokee called it Tsiyahi, otter place. Otters lived in the cove's many creeks until they were hunted and trapped for their pelts and disappeared in the 1920s. The park brought them back in the 1980s, and they've made a remarkable comeback.

The Cherokee hunted in this valley for hundreds of years. They made trails through these mountains, and visitors still travel some of them today. Settlers later followed the same paths in. Even the name on the map is likely Cherokee: Cades Cove probably takes its name from a Cherokee leader called Cade.

By around 1900, the cove was home to more than seven hundred people. Then the national park came, and the community came to an end. What's left is the widest variety of historic buildings anywhere in the park.

We'll start where the settlers started, with the family who came first, in 1818.

This is the John Oliver place, the first historic site on the loop, and the oldest. John and Lucretia Oliver came here with their young daughter, Polly, in 1818. They were the first permanent European American settlers in the cove.

John had fought in the War of 1812, and he was a collier by trade, a maker of charcoal. The cove didn't look like this then. It was thick forest, and the west end was swamp, so the Olivers settled on the drier east end. The creek nearby often runs dry in summer, so they dug a well. They cleared fields for wheat and corn, kept cattle along Abrams Creek and built a barn to store their grain.

That first winter nearly beat them. By Lucretia's own account, the family survived only because the Cherokee brought them food.

The paved path from the parking area leads to the cabin. It isn't the family's first home; that one stood a few dozen yards away, and it's long gone. This cabin went up in the 1820s. A kitchen was added to it at some point, and the Park Service later took it off again.

Generations of Olivers lived on this land, for more than a hundred years, until the park was established. Several of their descendants settled elsewhere in the cove. Not bad for a family that almost didn't make it through its first winter.

This is the Primitive Baptist Church. The members built this white frame church by hand in 1887, to replace their old log meeting house. If you step inside, look up: the fingerprints of the people who built it can still be seen on the ceiling.

Behind the church is the oldest cemetery in Cades Cove. Among the graves is that of Russell Gregory, who was murdered by Confederate soldiers from North Carolina. Descendants of the early families, among them Olivers and Cables, are still being laid to rest here today.

The national park was officially established in 1934, but this congregation kept meeting here until the 1960s. Even after the church formally closed, its members looked after the building and the cemetery into the 1970s, under a special permit from the park. The church is still used now and then for religious events and ceremonies.

Of all the buildings in the cove, this one may say the most about the people who lived here. They built it themselves, they argued in it, they buried their families beside it, and they kept coming back to it long after the park came.

This is the Cades Cove Methodist Church, built in 1902 to replace the old log meeting house. The story goes that the Reverend J. D. McCampbell, a blacksmith and carpenter, built it for a hundred and fifteen dollars in a hundred and fifteen days. He later served as the church's minister for many years.

The building has two entrances. That follows a design meant for dividing men and women during services, but the Methodists in Cades Cove never followed that custom.

In the cemetery lie many of the cove's early settlers, among them Tiptons and Sparkses. It is most likely the second-oldest church burial ground in the cove, and descendants still use it today. Like the other churches here, this one still hosts a service now and then.

The cove's Methodists didn't always agree, either. In 1844 the national Methodist Episcopal Church began to split over slavery, and the split reached the cove. One group broke away and, in 1880, built its own church, called Hopewell, near the south end of Hyatt Lane. That building is gone now.

A hundred and fifteen dollars, a hundred and fifteen days, and more than a hundred and twenty years standing. That's a good return on a blacksmith's work.

This is the Missionary Baptist Church. After the war, the congregation went quiet again: from 1880 to 1889 there were no meetings at all, and nobody recorded why. In 1889 the small congregation began meeting again, and its turning point came in 1893, when an evangelist, the Reverend Thomas Sexton, led a revival that nearly doubled the congregation, from twenty-two members to forty. A new pastor was called, and in 1894 the members put up their first building of their own, on Hyatt Hill, near this spot.

The church you see was built in 1915 to replace it. It has a bell tower, and behind the pulpit there's a bay window, added to make more room on the floor. Inside, the pews are unfinished wood, set on either side of a center aisle. The Sunday school started in 1898 and kept meeting until 1944, ten years after the national park was established.

Across the road is Rich Mountain Road. It began as a Cherokee trail, and later the families who lived near the middle of the cove used it to go directly to the valley around today's Townsend.

From thirteen people who walked out in 1839 to a church with its own bell tower. That's patience.

This pullout is where the path to the Elijah Oliver place begins. The farm itself is half a mile along the trail, so it's about a mile there and back. It's a wide, gradual climb with dirt, gravel, rocks and roots, and one stream crossing. If you'd rather stay with the car, here's what's waiting at the end of the trail.

Elijah's family lived in a dogtrot cabin: two cabins joined by an open breezeway under one shared roof. Around it stand a corn crib, a smokehouse, a barn and a springhouse. The springhouse was built over a trickling spring. It gave the family clean water, and the spring's cool temperature kept eggs, milk and butter fresh longer. It is the only springhouse left in the cove.

Look too for the stranger room, off the front porch. It was built for overnight visitors, so the family could take in a traveler and still keep their own space. Stranger rooms were fairly common in the cove.

There's something fitting about that room. A family that had to flee its home in the war came back and built a room for strangers.

This is the Cable Mill area, beside the Cades Cove Visitor Center. The mill stands on its original site. Most of the other buildings around it were brought here from elsewhere in the park, and the blacksmith shop, though it looks like the old shops of the cove, was built in the 1950s.

Here's how the mill works. A dam on Mill Creek sends water through a canal to a wooden flume, and the flume pours it onto the top of the big wheel. That wheel turned the millstone that ground the corn, and it also worked a heavy saw blade back and forth to cut logs. The mill runs in the warmer months, and in the fall there are sorghum-making demonstrations.

Next to the mill is the Gregg-Cable house, built in 1879. It's the first and only remaining all-frame house in Cades Cove. There used to be others, but after the park was created they were removed, because they looked too modern. The Gregg family kept a store on the first floor, and later so did Becky Cable and her brother Dan. Dan and his wife Martha were both ill, and Becky supported them and their four children. After Dan and Martha died, she raised the children herself, which is why so many people knew her as Aunt Becky.

Around the grounds you'll also find a smokehouse, a corn crib, barns and a sorghum mill. Take your time here. On mill days, this was where the cove came together.

This is the Dan Lawson place. The house began as a log house, built in 1856. Later additions were framed, and later still the whole building was covered with siding. From the side, you can see those layers of change. The brick chimney was unusual for its time and place, and its bricks were made right here on site.

The small building closest to the house is a smokehouse; the other is a granary. On the front porch is a small room with a window to the inside. It may be where people picked up their mail, or it may have been Dan's office as justice of the peace. It most likely started as a stranger room for overnight guests.

The last residents of Cades Cove weren't pioneers at all. They were a farming family with an agricultural lease, who helped the park keep these fields open, and they didn't leave until 1999. Their home stood beside the Lawson house. None of their buildings remain except a barn, which they had moved here from the Cable Mill area when it was about to be torn down. Near that barn, an old apple tree and a few lilies from their garden still grow.

An apple tree and some lilies: the last things planted by the last people to live in Cades Cove.

This is the Tipton place, sometimes called the Tipton-Oliver homestead, after the two families who lived here.

Hamp Tipton's daughters, Lucy and Lizzie, lived in the cove into adulthood and became schoolteachers. In 1878 the house was rented to a man who was building his own homestead, with blacksmith and carpentry shops. When Hamp died in 1895, his estate was sold to the Reverend William H. Oliver, and the Oliver family lived here until the land was bought for the park in 1931.

The big barn is a cantilever barn, reconstructed in 1968. Its overhangs held hay where it was easy to reach, with room underneath for livestock pens, grain cribs and equipment, all kept dry from the rainy East Tennessee weather. Sevier and Blount Counties have more cantilever barns than anywhere else in the world.

Around the cabin are a blacksmith shop, a smokehouse, a corn crib, a woodshed and a bee apiary. Early beehives were sometimes called bee gums, because they were kept in hollowed-out blackgum trees.

In the cabin's back room, once the kitchen, are two small holes in the wall where a telephone was attached. It connected to the blacksmith shop and to a store across the road. Even out here, the line was in.

This is the Carter Shields cabin, one of the most photographed buildings in any national park. It's small and plain: one room with a fireplace, a staircase up to the loft and a porch outside, tucked behind a few trees in a clearing with a stream out back. Over the years, the people who lived here added living space, a barn and other outbuildings, a chicken coop, a garden and a cellar for food. Like most buildings in the cove, the park returned it to its pioneer-era look, the way you see it now.

That brings us to how Cades Cove ended as a community. When the movement for a national park began, people here were promised they would be left alone in their homes. Then the whole cove was drawn inside the new park, and many felt betrayed. The cove's leading citizen, John W. Oliver, grandson of the first settlers, fought the taking of his land in a long and lonely court battle. He appealed his case to the Tennessee Supreme Court three times, and in the end he lost. As the historian Durwood Dunn put it, the birth of what would become the most popular national park in the East marked the death of this historic community.

Today no one lives in Cades Cove. Millions of visitors come instead, for many of the same reasons the first families did: flat land, mountain views, water and abundant wildlife.

That's the end of our tour. Thank you for spending the loop with me. Take your time on the way out.