Cumberland Gap National Historical Park ⓘ

The archives of Cumberland Gap National Historical Park cover hundreds of linear feet of documents pertaining to all aspects of the park and its history. Here's a brief synopsis of each collection. To schedule an appointment to view the archives, please contact the park .

The Resource Management Collection contains records created during the pre-park planning for a national park that preserves and interprets the historic migration corridor of the Cumberland Gap, and park management of the resources protected within and region affecting the Cumberland Gap NHP.

The Hensley Settlement Collection contains records created during the pre-park planning for acquiring the Hensley Settlement lands to be made part of the national park, family records and research, records created during park administration of Hensley Settlement, and historical research on the Settlement.

The Kincaid Collection includes the correspondence, manuscripts, newspaper articles, photographs, brochures, and hand-written notes of Robert Kincaid, author of the classic history The Wilderness Road.

The Tunnel Collection documents the entire administrative history of the construction of the Cumberland Gap Tunnel from the early planning stages in the late 1950s through the completion of the tunnel in 1996 and continues through the rehabilitation of the Gap after the tunnel opened to vehicular traffic.

William A. Barnhill Collection: Historical Photographs of Pioneer Life in Western N. C. 1914-1917

Although the historic photo collection of the park is currently under the process of being digitized, hundreds are currently available to be seen.

For more information about historical photo collections at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park please contact the park archivist.

Although Sherman Hensley recalled that he "never did see a wild deer in my life," today deer and even black bear are frequent visitors to the settlement, perhaps taking advantage of the abundant apples on the old apple trees found there. Numerous apple trees, of many different varieties, were planted by residents of the settlement. Today the park is actively restoring the apple orchard.

"Apple holes" were often used at Hensley and were a fine place to store apples during the winter –covered with hay and boards, the apples would stay fresh until needed.

The families at the settlement had a choice in how they earned a living and chose the land. Although the high, largely inaccessible mountain land may have been all they could acquire, many assets seemed to have attracted the Hensleys to the mountain. The tract was sufficiently large for making a living primarily by farming, and it was affordable. Because it had been leased, much of the land was already cleared and fenced for farming and pasture, and there were cabins to live in until other dwellings could be built. At an elevation of more than 3300 feet, with adequate coolness and moisture, the land had a climate conducive to living and farming.

Fences make good neighbors, to paraphrase Robert Frost, but at the settlement they were used more for keeping livestock out of gardens than for delineating property boundaries.There was an art to building fences, as described by Herbert Hensley:

"We would start our rail fence and we'd let it be on the light of the moon, when we laid our ground rail.Some old people called it the worm rail.That was the ground rail, that was the first rail.We'd put us some rocks, maybe a rock under that, each end, maybe one end would be a little bit low, and we'd have to put a thicker rock under it, bring it up level.Then, on the light of the moon, we'd put that on there, on account of the rail staying up off of the ground, lay it on the light of the moon, or your ground rail wouldn't even bury down underground, wouldn't even go down, it'd stay on top of the ground.And if you put it on the old of the moon, about two years, it would sink down in to the second rail. . .so we wouldn't fence that way, we'd put out, we'd build our fence by the light of the moon.And they still on top of the ground, last longer, several years longer, anyhow, the bottom rails."

Because hogs and sheep were so essential to the diet and household economy of the settlement, much traditional knowledge about keeping animals held sway. As Herbert Hensley explains: ". . .we had a rule, which was a law I guess, back then, that we marked all of our hogs, we had them marked. . .and if a hog was over six months old and wasn't marked, it might have been one of my hogs, but if it wasn't marked, you had the same right to it that I did."

In addition to raising livestock, men of the settlement hunted and trapped wild game for food and for hides. They also kept bees for honey which served to supplement their diet. There was lore and traditional knowledge to hunting and trapping that the Hensley folk understood. Herbert Hensley recalls that his father and Willie Gibbons "had secret ways of trapping without bait. He would follow the trail for a fox 'til he found where it stepped over something. There's a little stick laying across the path or somethin' like that, he would find where it stepped over there. Then he'd set his trap there and the first time he'd come along, to the second time, he'd get 'em."

The dogs and cats on the mountain were not pets, but domesticated animals who had jobs to do and roles to play in the life of the mountain farm. Dorothy Muncey says at her grandparents' home, "their dogs, and their cats, were never used as pets. . . I mean, they took care of 'em. . .but they were there for a reason. . .and they did their job. . .we had a dog that went for cows, a dog to help with the sheep. They had a dog for hunting. And their dogs served a purpose. So did their cats. They were at the barn. . . especially there for the mouse situation."

Death in the Community The small graveyard at Hensley Settlement serves as a poignant reminder of the realities of life and death in an isolated part of Appalachia. Nine of Sherman and Nicey Ann's children are buried there, six of whom died before their 5 th birthdays. In fact, out of the 35 marked graves, 25 are children of the residents. The earliest burial date is 1907, although many have no dates on them.

Death came in different forms. According to Lige Gibbons, Sherman Hensley's wife and two children died of TB. Lige himself lost a child to measles : "I lost one of ours. He had the measles, and I thought he was getting well. He was struck one night, speechless, and died just . . . the next night, by dark."

Decoration Day at the cemetery was a homecoming and is still celebrated annually by Hensley and Gibbons descendants and friends. Traditional activities included whitewashing the gravestones, placing flowers at the graves, singing, eating, and listening to various visiting preachers. As Herbert Hensley describes: "Decoration Day. . .'bout the third Sunday in June of every year. . .people would come up—good crowds. . .come up and have all day's preachin', 'til way up in the evening, and decorate all the graves. We decorated them out of wild laurel that grows in these creeks; ivy that grows in these creeks, which is a different flower, and the honeysuckle that grows in the mountains, in the woods."

There were two schools constructed in the Hensley Settlement proper. The first school, according to Sherman Hensley, was "a log school house," "logs and daub, clay-mud," with a puncheon floor and about "18 x 22 or maybe a little more than that" in size. The old school was ultimately torn down and re-sited about fifty yards from the first school and built with improved materials supplied by the county. Two outhouses, one for girls and one for boys, were constructed some distance apart from each other near the woods. The school term ran from July until January but stayed closed through the winter, when travel was more difficult for teachers and students, and through the spring and early summer when fields had to be prepared and planting done.

Students usually went home for dinner [lunch], but sometimes brought food. Jess Gibbons recalls "the farthest ones off'd bring their lunch with 'em, and us kids'd always go back home for our lunch, or sometimes we'd bring it. If my mother was going to be busy at work with something or other, we took our lunch with us."

Because the school house was the only space in the community where neighbors and visitors could gather outside of homes, for school functions, church, funerals, and Decoration Day activities, it figured prominently in the minds and memories of residents of the settlement.

Building Traditions When the Hensleys and Gibbons families began moving to the mountain in 1903, there were a few log structures that had been built by the tenants on the land before them. They used these to begin their homesteads but quickly set about the task of building their own homes, outbuildings, and fencing. The residents of Hensley Settlement used the folk knowledge of siting and building mountain farms that was widespread through many parts of central and southern Appalachia.

Lige Gibbons, for example, remembers "everywhere we were going to build a cabin to live, we'd get as close to a spring in summers as we could get." And Jess Gibbons remembers his father picked the site for his barn based on water concerns: "Another reason he built it here, see it's rolling, and the water will drain both ways. Down this way and back the other way, too. And it keeps it drier around your barn. And it was close to the water. It's down toward the hill there." Herbert Thompson, who taught school on the mountain, observed that "they built all their buildings on the south side of the ravine, or hill." He describes the site selection process of Willie Gibbons and others:

"He went over here on a little spur and you go down in the valley, down that hill. And you go down into a branch or valley, and he built up here pretty close to top. He built his house over on the south side of this spur. Then it goes right up across the road and he has a little road, built a little road up to that. And he build a hen house and he builds it on the south side, all the buildings. And he builds a large smokehouse right down below his house. All these buildings are on the south side and they're very near his home, his dwelling, farmhouse. And then he builds a cow barn on, pretty close to the top. Find a little level place. If he couldn't find a level place, they'd build a. . .building to go with the ground, sort of. And. . .they built those solid out of logs and they stuck those cracks up with planks just like they did their homes cause it got cold and the cows had a warm place to sleep. And Bert Hensley's house was on around here on another south exposure and where Sherman's is a way around about a mile. It was on a southern exposure. They always built 'em on southern exposures."

Restoration and Preservation Bert Hensley and his family lived in one of the many buildings which were later restored as the settlement became part of Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. The buildings at Hensley Settlement fell into disrepair after the park acquired the land in the 1950s, and it wasn't until the 1960s that work began on restoring the old cabins. Great attention was paid to historic details in order to adequately restore the buildings. Utilizing many of the original techniques and appropriate materials, work crews painstakingly restored the buildings and preserved their stories.

Today, National Park Service staff work to keep the buildings preserved. This restoration and preservation keeps the stories of the settlement and its families alive.

In 1964, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park was chosen as one of the sites for a Job Corps Conservation Center as outlined in President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. The center operated here from 1965 until 1969 and one of their primary goals was the rehabilitation of Hensley Settlement. The youth worked closely with former Hensley resident Jess Gibbons for four years, but by the time the center was disbanded only two structures were completely restored, so the job fell to park staff to restore the rest over the next few years.

Life is calmer at Hensley Settlement today, with daily guided tours during the warmer months and occasional events. K eeping the structures in good repair is one of the missions of the park facility management team, who are always brushing up on their skills to do the work in as authentic a manner as possible.

As the twentieth century progressed, life on the mountain changed, and some of the younger generation began to move away from the settlement. Better money could be made in the coal mines or in the auto industry. Park Hensley says his brother, Jack, for example, "worked at Pontiac, Michigan. No, Detroit, Detroit, Michigan. He worked there till he died up there." Park himself went to work for the Chadwell Gap Coal Company, a small family-owned mining operation that had opened in the 1920s just down the Virginia side of the mountain. "I got to working off in the mines and I just liked it better, you know. Made more money. . . that's what caused me to move off. Once some started, they all just went off pretty fast," according to Park.

The chestnut blight also had a profound impact on the community. Sherman Hensley says "I remember when the chestnuts left. I missed them. . . . I missed my hogs a getting' fat" and he laments that "the chestnuts whenever they died, why that ruined all the game up there."

Others moved off for more personal reasons. Herbert Hensley says he left Hensley Settlement because "I married a girl off in Virginia and when I married her, I went back to Kentucky on the mountain . . . but after a while, she didn't want to agree to stay up there, so I just agreed with her."

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Kentucky Park Commission began acquiring the land on the mountain for the newly created Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. Many of the residents seemed glad to be able to sell their land for this purpose. Sherman Hensley, the last resident to live on the mountain, said he left the mountain because "I sold my land to the Park and everybody else was moving off. . . it was buying up by the Park that started them to leave. Of course, they was people that moved off, but the majority of them was just people that didn't own any land. . .some of them really wanted to sell, maybe some of them really didn't want to sell so much or rather not sell, anyway they sold.Some of them wanted to sell because, I know I heard them talk, they wanted to get off the mountain." He concludes that "my honest opinion is that it is good they sold their land to the Park because it was owned by a few individuals and they'd kindly cleared up the best of the land. . .and it was getting worn a right smart and probably they could do better to buy somewhere else. It was unhandy up there anyway."

A Ghost Sleeps here . . . Mountain people called chestnut "the best wood God ever growed." Time was when the mountain people looked up to the chestnut as their best friend in the trackless forests. They ate its fruit, raw, boiled, and baked.Sale of the brown nuts brought many things hillside land that wouldn't produce. As furniture chestnut could be rubbed to shine like a coon's eye in a full moon. Their straight grained trunks became sturdy cabins and long lived rail fences. Shingles rived of chestnut promised three generations of wear. But when in 1908, mountain people noticed chestnut trees dying in their forests. A blight was destroying the inner bark of the trees. Nothing could be found to stop the disease from spreading.The blight ate on, insatiably, up one green mountainside and down the other. At the time the entire plain atop Cumberland Mountain where the Hensleys had a way of life, was covered with chestnut trees from which their homes were built, but by 1935, the mountaintop plain had only the dead trunks and cabin homes to tell the story of the passing of the once mighty, spreading American chestnut tree. - Earl Palmer

Moonshining Making and selling moonshine liquor was another source of cash and the residents made it clear that, while some of it was made for their own consumption, they also sold it as one of their more lucrative products. Lige Gibbons recounts being able "to make corn liquor up there, and Martin Green down here, why he was the high sheriff. . .he'd get a big lot of it. . .I knowed of him getting as much as twenty-five dollars at once." Gibbons got "ten dollars a gallon for it."

Park Hensley seemed to have had a vigorous trade in moonshine. He says, "when I made whiskey, I sold it to just anybody that would come along about that want it. But I bootlegged here at Page. I'd bring a load off on my mule bout once every week. I sold to Sherman Lawson. I'd bring him about six gallons every week and sell him down there. He'd buy about six gallons every week from me." Park Hensley only got "two dollars a gallon" for his liquor. He would "contract with him [Lawson], you know. . .and he'd buy mine. Now I done that for I'd say a year or so." The other man would resell the liquor , "no doubt he sold it in pints. . .got maybe five or six dollars a gallon and maybe more than that out of it by pinting it out. . . but he sold it in littles."

While the contractor made most of the money, the residents of the settlement did the hard work. Park Hensley found that, while moonshine might be lucrative, "it's hard work. You had to pack and tote, get your wood and everything you know. It was hard work."

Earl Palmer, known as the "Roaming Cameraman of the Blue Ridge" was a prolific photographer of the southern Appalachians in the 1920s-1940s and took many iconic photographs of the residents of Hensley.

One of his favorite subjects was Thomas Jefferson Cupp, a moonshiner who lived about one mile from the settlement near Martin's Fork. These three photos are Palmer's work, along with his original captions and descriptions.

Family Life Family to the residents of Hensley Settlement was important. Family brought joy and obligations; they shared meals, as well as work. Herbert Hensley recalls that "when my daddy built a fire, when one of us boys built a fire, and our mother got up to get us breakfast; we didn't do like lots of people does today, one get out at a time and eat, we all went to the table at the same time, when breakfast or dinner was called. . . we knowed nothing else excepting all go to the table at the same time." Obligations of family meant caring for the elderly no matter how burdensome or inconvenient it might be, as Jess Gibbons remembers: "We kept three beds in there [back bedroom] all the time, until my grandfather broke up housekeeping and come here to stay with us and live. Well, he wanted his bed hisself. He put it over in behind the door in there. . . that's the only time I can remember four beds being in there, when he come in and stayed with us about, oh, I guess ten or twelve years before he died."

Herbert Hensley says emphatically, "we had one thing that you don't see going today, we was a neighborhood." To Jess Gibbons that meant an equality of friendships: "They was just all friends together. Didn't have no special friends amongst them." The value placed on getting along led to expansive hospitality, especially at times such as Decoration Day. Jess Gibbons recalls, "when they got through with their church up at the schoolhouse, the graveyard, why, the people'd just gather up and tell 'em all, just 'all that wants to go home with me, let's go.' Just gather up and take off. I've seed as high as thirty or forty here for dinner."

Sherman Hensley says that, at the height of the settlement's population, when "between fifty and sixty" people lived on the mountain, "most of them was [related]. . .two other people lived up there that wasn't related to any of us." Although he says there is no relation between the Gibbons and Hensleys initially, when Willie Gibbons married "old man Jack Hensley's daughter," the two families became intertwined on the mountain.

This rocking chair in the park collection was made by Willie Gibbons, the community blacksmith and carpenter. Grand-daughter Dorothy Muncey remembered that "grandfather and my grandma always liked to sit in a rocking chair" in front of the fire.

Two of the more popular social activities on the mountain were listening to the Victrola and the radio. Park Hensley and Jess Gibbons both remember the community getting together on Saturday nights and listening to the Grand Old Opry. "It was a big night," Gibbons recalled.

Carved by wind and water, Cumberland Gap forms a major break in the Appalachian Mountain chain. Stretching for 26 miles along Cumberland Mountain and ranging from 1 to 4 miles in width, the park contains 24,000 acres, of which 14,000 acres is recommended wilderness.

The natural beauty of Appalachian Mountain country, lush with vegetation, supports diverse animal life, including white-tailed deer, black bear, rabbit, raccoon, opossum, gray squirrel, fox, and wild turkey. Park resources provide habitat for two federally endangered species, the Indiana bat ( Myotis sodalis ) and the northern long-eared bat ( Myotis septentrionalis ), and two federally threatened species, the blackside dace ( Phoxinus cumberlandensis ) and the white fringeless orchid ( Platanthera integrilabia ). Natural resource inventories of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, reptiles, and plants completed in the early 2000s documented 1,212 types of organisms in the park. More than 130 of these are considered rare.

The majority of the park's forest is a second- and third-growth Eastern hardwood and conifer mix, the result of timbering and farming over a 175-year period.

The park protects more than 30 known entries to limestone caves, the best known of which is Gap Cave. Other significant natural features include the Pinnacle, Sand Cave, and White Rocks.

Scientific research is key to protecting the natural and cultural wonders of our national parks. To make sound decisions, park managers need accurate information about the resources in their care. They also need to know how park ecosystems change over time, and what amount of change is normal. But park staff can’t do it alone.

Like a physician monitoring a patient's heartbeat and blood pressure, scientists with the Cumberland Piedmont Network collect long-term data on Cumberland Gap’s “vital signs.” They monitor key resources, like cave animals and meteorological conditions, forest vegetation, and water quality. Then they analyze the results and report them to park managers. Knowing how key resources are changing can provide managers with early warning of potential problems. It can also help them to make better decisions and plan more effectively.

But studying park vital signs is only part of the picture. Scientific research is also conducted by park staff, other state and federal scientists, university professors and students, and independent researchers. Because many parks prohibit activities that occur elsewhere, scientists can use the parks as areas for determining the effects of these activities where they do occur. National park lands often serve as the best model for what a relatively undisturbed landscape looks like.

Source: NPS DataStore Saved Search 5539 (results presented are a subset). To search for additional information, visit the NPS DataStore .

Extending from 1100 to 3500 feet above sea level and across various habitat types, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park supports a rather diverse animal assemblage. The current recorded number of animals is 371 but many more could be added with additional study, which we expect the Inventory and Monitoring Program to provide.

The less obvious or easily observed animals such as insects probably exist in far greater numbers than we have identified at this time. We do have documentation for: 33 mammals, 89 birds, 29 amphibians, 15 reptiles, 27 fish, and 178 insects.

Animals that a visitor could expect to see include cottontail rabbit, gray squirrel, opossum, striped skunk, bobcat, white-tailed deer, raccoon, gray fox, black bear, various bats, song birds, wild turkey, hawks and vultures, snakes, turtles, and, perhaps, an elk.

The autumn hawk migration is usually spectacular and can be observed from numerous vantage points along the Ridge Trail and especially from the Pinnacle overlook.

The most dangerous animal in the Park is probably the tick because of the diseases it can transmit. Proper deference should be shown to venomous snakes and bears as well.

Cumberland Gap National Historical Park was authorized in part to commemorate the significance of the Gap in the early history of our country. This critically important transportation link was made possible by a combination of uplift of Cumberland Mountain and the erosive action of Yellow Creek, cutting a notch in the mountain at the same time it was rising. The mountain began to rise faster than the creek could erode, causing the creek to change course. Thus, the Gap that the early Americans found was dry.

The Gap was so important to Indians and early settlers because Cumberland Mountain presented a nearly continuous, essentially impregnable barrier for hundreds of miles from the northeast.

The sheer bluffs of the east side of Cumberland Mountain are important to Park natural resources for the special habitats they provide and for the relative isolation of the interior of the mountain that they have secured. All but one of the creeks passing through the Park originate within the Park. In an area that has seen much development of surface mining and its unfortunate influence on water bodies, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park’s waters are generally very healthy and any adverse impacts are associated with air quality factors.

Residential and commercial development was ongoing in the vicinity long before the Park was established. With this human activity came the inevitable introduction, purposeful and accidental, of exotic vegetation. Today we have numerous species of non-native plants in the more developed portions of the park. Efforts are ongoing to control and reduce these populations. Non-native animals are a concern, also, particularly forest pests such as the gypsy moth and hemlock wooly adelgid. These animals are not yet in the Park but are hovering close by.

A native species has made its presence known within the Park in a dramatic way, however. The southern pine beetle has killed pines, mostly Virginia pine, over several hundred acres within the Park. We anticipate a measurable shift in forest community structure as a result. The 24 limestone caves found in the Virginia portion of the Park contribute a special set of environmental features. The caves are home to numerous animal species including the threatened Indiana bat.