| Sources |
- [S101] 1880 Census, Ocona Lufty, Swain County, North Carolina, 200C.
Name Relation Marital Status Gender Race Age Birthplace Occupation Father's Birthplace Mother's Birthplace
I. F. CONNER Self M Male W 24 NC Farmer NC NC
Margaret CONNER Wife M Female W 23 NC Keeping House NC NC
Julius J. CONNER Son S Male W 3 NC --- ---
James F. CONNER Son S Male W 11M NC --- ---
- [S142] Newspaper Article, Knoxville Journal, 16 Aug 1976.
The Saga of the Dock Conner Family
Transcribed by Don Conner, Yakima, Washington, Dec. 27, 1976
Story by Vic Beale, Knoxville Journal, Aug. 16, 1976
The upper end of Pigeon Forge [Tennessee] was one unbroken farm of 115 acres when Dock F. Conner was finally able to buy it for $17,000 in 1926. Dock had been coming through the farm for years, driving cattle on the hoof from the higher ranges of the Smokies, down the Indian Gap wagon road through the unpaved mountain hamlet of Gatlinburg, on down the twisting curve of the west prong of the little Pigeon river. Where the river flattens and the valley suddenly widens for the first time was where the farm lay, on the west bank of the river. Dock camped there with his cattle many a night, resting for the two-day push on to the livestock market in Knoxville.
Sometimes to get a better price Dock would take his cattle by rail to the ultimate market, Chicago. He rode in the cattle car with them, to see that they were properly fed and watered, so they'd bring top price for condition. So Conner had the cash to buy the Pigeon Forge farm he had wanted so much for such a long time. And he made the money raising cattle on the free range of the Smokies, in the wake of the big logging operations, early in this century.
The Conner homeplace was on the North Carolina side of the Smokies, a 300-acre farm that stretched up and down the banks of the Oconaluftee river [often referred to as the Lufty or the Luftee, and sometimes the Ocona Lufta], across from where Collins creek empties into it, and about two miles north of the present-day Smokemont Campground [North Carolina]. Dock's father, Rev. William Henry Conner (known locally as Henry), bought the Luftee farm from the Collins family before the Civil war. Henry moved to the farm during the war, when Dock was eight years old.
His busiest years as a trader appear to have been when he was middle-aged and past. The farm on the Luftee was a collecting point for the yearlings he bought each spring, most on the North Carolina side in the counties of Haywood, Swain, Jackson and Macon. Each springtime, Dock and the late Good F. Ownby made the rounds of the families they'd been buying from down through the years. These mountain farmers would raise steers to yearlings, one of several head, in anticipation of the Conner-Ownby visit. [Journal Ed. note: Dock married Margret Emeline York at Smokemont on April 9, 1876.]
Weighing was by guess, but it was said of them that they seldom missed an animal's weight by more than a very few pounds. They paid the farmer the most recent market price of which they were aware. They bought several head from a farmer on Deep creek in one instance, and when they got home they learned that the market was significantly higher than the price they had paid him. So they returned to Deep creek and paid the man the difference. It was a mountain way of doing business that enabled Dock to stay in business.
When they had gathered enough cattle to make it worthwhile, they, meaning members of the Conner family usually would start a drive back into the mountains, looking for good grazing in the river valleys, on the heads of creeks and on the ridge tops. The pounds that the put on that summer, assuming that the market didn't go down drastically, represented a profit. Dock almost always sold off all his cattle in the fall. Sometimes he sent them east through Asheville to the market in Richmond, Virginia.
Where the cattle had been grazing when it was time to take them out of the mountains often determined whether they would be driven north and west into Tennessee, or south and east through Carolina. The mountain land was still owned by the lumber companies until it was purchased for the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Logging on most tracts was completed in the 1920s or earlier, and from then until the [National] Park Service began patrolling was when the free range was most plentiful. Anybody who owned cattle was welcome.
The Conner family started moving to Tennessee in 1937, first to Gatlinburg and then to the Pigeon Forge farm Dock had bought 11 years earlier. He lived his last years here with the family of his son Charles W "Charlie.". And less than a handful of years after Dock died in 1948, Pigeon Forge lots with 100 feet of road frontage and 150 feet deep were selling for more than he had paid for 115 acres.
The Saga of the Dock Conner Family
- [S142] Newspaper Article, Knoxville Journal, 30 Aug 1976.
All nine children of Dock F. Conner were born in the big log house built on the Oconaluftee river well before the Civil War. Their mother died there in 1895 when the youngest, Cretta, Charles and John, were two, four and six. "A faint memory of her" is all that the surviving son Jehu has after 81 years. Only the two oldest daughters, Jennie Paul, 95, of Brevard, North Carolina, and Ruth Whaley, 93, of Pigeon Forge, can remember their mother in a personal way. Cretta, also of Brevard, was too young to have any recollection of her, as was Charlie, now deceased. But photographers were far away, during Margaret York Conner's young womanhood in the remoteness of the Oconaluftee. And there was no known picture of her. A frequent lament, even among the older children, was "If only we had a picture of her."
Jehu remembers it was sometime after 1910 that they built the new frame home. They later were to regret tearing down the fine old log house, which was built by the original settlers of that tract of mountain land, the Collins family. Closest in age of the boys in the family, and with much in common after the death of their mother, Jehu and Charlie learned to work together as soon as they were old enough or chores around the home and barn. The log home had two, vast, hungry fireplaces, one seven feet wide and one five.
Then the new frame house had three fireplaces, one in every major downstairs room. Wood was the only fuel, and because they liked to get their job done and over with, both boys became skilled axemen. Charlie was born left-handed but was partly talked out of it when he was very young. He perfected his skill at right-handed throwing by mailing rocks across rivers. But he swung an axe, with awesome efficiency, from his left.
The main road across the Smokies now runs along the west bank of the Luftee, across the river from the Conner homesite. On a busy day in peak tourist season it is traveled by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cars. The transmountain road of Jehu's youth ran directly past the home and at its best was impossible for automobiles and scarcely passable for horse-drawn wagons. Most of the small amount of traffic was people walking or on horseback, except for livestock drovers there was little commerce between North Carolina and Tennessee by way of the Smokies.
Jehu and his wife, Nellie Bradley Conner, had been married about ten years when they made their first trip across the mountains to Tennessee in 1926. Son Edwin was almost nine years old and Willard was five. The four of them rode horseback the 18 miles from Smokemont to Indian Gap, with Jehu's father, Dock, riding along so he could return the horses. Jehu and Nellie and sons then walked the 14 miles or so down the Tennessee side into the Sugarlands, where a nephew, Everett Whaley, met them in his automobile. Everett then transported the Conners to the farm Dock had bought at the end of Pigeon Forge earlier in the year. It was their first holiday outside of North Carolina. They rode the railroad from Sevierville to Knoxville, and then rode the K&A railroad to Maryville.
Sometime before the modern highway was completed by way of Newfound Gap in the 1930s, Wiley Oakley was guiding hikers across the Smokies via the old trail through Indian Gap. The Conners remember that Wiley's groups would walk from Gatlinburg to Dock Conner's home the first hard day. They'd be fed an ample country supper and if there weren't beds enough in the home proper the rest would sleep euphorically on the fragrant hay in the barn. After breakfast they'd walk to Cherokee six miles down the river. They'd return to the Conner home that evening for supper and sleep again. Next morning, after breakfast and lunch packed for the over-mountain trek, they'd head back to Gatlinburg. It was work, especially for Nellie Conner, the only woman at home then, to do the cooking for such a group, and to wash the dishes and the bed linens. "We didn't think of it as hard work at that time," says Nellie. She did all the washing by hand on a scrub-board and all her ironing with an oil-fired hand iron.
The Oconaluftee valley had its first big invasion of outsiders when construction of the logging railroad was begun sometime after 1916, as recalled by Jehu. The first actual cutting of timber was two or three years later. Jehu and Charlie never did work directly for any of the three lumber companies that operated in succession up all the forks of the river. But their brother-in-law John Freeman ran the company commissary at Smokemont.
Charlie had his own meat market at Smokemont, supplying beef to he lumber company and loading it on the logging trains upbound to the camps where the lumberjacks stayed. Jehu and wife ran a general store at Smokemont from 1922 until they left the North Carolina side of the Smokies early in 1949. The store building and their home beside it were at the end of the bridge where campers today turn from the main highway to enter Smokemont Campground. Their business in the first years was with the old families who had stayed in the valley and with those employed in the logging operation. They said their land at Smokemont about 1928 for inclusion in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In quick succession then the lumber company yielded its lead and took up its rails and ceased operating, and its employees who had moved in there, from wherever, departed.
The Conners continued to operate the store, under lease renewed by the Park Service a year at a time. The Depression came, and although most of the families left in the valley were the old families who made it all right before logging days, but many of them were having it hard now. This of course was before food stamps and jobless pay, and the Conners felt called upon to help a few of those who needed temporary help. Finally the Hutomobile highway across the Smokies was completed in the 1930s, a campground was installed at Smokemont and there began to be some summer tourist business for the Conner general store. [Ed. note: we double-checked the Hutomobile spelling in the article and searched for such a highway anywhere in reference books and the web and we cannot find it anywhere. The modern Highway between Knoxville, Tennessee, and Sylva, North Carolina, through Pigeon Forge, the Cherokee Indian Reservation and the Great Smoky Mountains is U.S. Hwy. 441.] It was an interesting time for Jehu and Nellie, who now had three sons, from oldest to youngest, Edwin, Willard and Dan.
Charlie and his childhood sweetheart Ella Beck had married in 1911, when both were about 20. The Becks also were a pioneer family in the Luftee valley; a nearby mountain, Beck's Bald, was named for them. Six of their seven children were born during the Oconaluftee years, when Charlie was building fame as a Smoky Mountain guide. The youngest son, Doug, was born after Charlie and Ella moved to Tennessee in 1937. Dock Conner's two oldest sons, Julius J. [our Skagit County subject] and [James Franklin], had moved to the state of Washington soon after the turn of the turn of the century. They worked there in the lumber industry and came back to Tennessee only once, after 36 years.
Another of Dock's sons, John, next above Jehu in age, died in a logging camp in West Virginia. Charlie died in 1969, a month shy of being 78 years old. His wife, Ella, died in 1974. Of Dock Conner's four daughters, only Julia Freeman is dead. Jennie Paul, Ruth Whaley and Cretta Corpening survive, along with their brother Jehu, in a family remarkable for its longevity.
Charlie, born in 1891, was the youngest and of his principal assignment from an early age was to keep the herds out of sections where the bears were known to be bad. In spite of his frequent encounters with bears, Charlie did not become their out-and-out enemy. He shot at several that were menacing his livestock, but most of those got away. Of the two that he "killed dead" in his long life, one was a mean, stock-killer bear that weighted more than 500 pounds, a very large specimen for a black bear. Wild game, including the black bear, was abundant. But it is said of Dock that, never in his 93 years, did he kill a bear.
The Saga of the Dock Conner Family, part 2
- [S106] The Mountain Press, 3 Apr 2016.
Upland Chronicles: Conners’ Norma Dan Motel a Pigeon Forge landmark
- [S77] Rawlings Funeral Home Records 1911-1995, Larry D. Fox, (Smoky Mountain Historical Society), 19 Apr 1948.
Conner, D F -Doc 92 Apr 19, 1948 buried Pigeon Forge Baptist Church Cem son W C Conner Pigeon Forge
- [S73] Rawlings Funeral Home, Book 2, 19 Apr 1948.
Conner, D. F. Aug 4, 1855 N.C. April 19, 1948
Father: Conner, Henry N.C.
Mother: Gibson, Rachel N.C.
Sons: J.J., J.F., J.S., N.C., C.W.,
Daughters: Mrs. D.C. Whaley, Mrs. J.E. Freeman, Mrs. E.H. Corpening
Cemetery: Pigeon Forge Baptist
Brothers: Rev. W.E. Conner
- [S34] In the Shadow of the Smokies, Smoky Mountain Historical Society, (1993), 324.
- [S147] Find a Grave, (Memorial: 7296460).
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