The Stubborn Walker Sisters

In 1933, the Great Smoky Mountains Park Commission was busy buying up land in East Tennessee and western North Carolina for a national park. Most residents were desperate during the Great Depression and took the offer. But the commission met its match when they tried to buy up 120 acres owned and operated by the Walker Sisters. The five sisters (originally six) had lived there since they were born in the 1870s and 1880s, and they weren't suffering for cash because they'd always been self-sufficient. They raised sheep and plowed their own fields to grow corn and cotton. They preserved their own food, spun their own cotton, and hunted game, as they always had. Their parents had eleven children and left the land and cabin to the ones who were unmarried. The Walker Sisters fought the government for years, and although they didn't "win," they managed to stay in their home for the rest of their lives, the last sister dying in 1964. And the cabin itself survives today.