Sacred Ground: The cemetery at John Hawk Smith Place
There are many cemeteries scattered throughout the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area. There are larger, privately-owned graveyards — some of them still active — that are frequently visited and well-maintained, like Katie Blevins Cemetery, Hattie Blevins Cemetery, Chimney Rocks Cemetery, and Terry Cemetery. There are also smaller cemeteries now owned by the federal government, no longer maintained and only rarely visited — if at all. Among those are the Nancy Smith Cemetery at No Business, the Owens Cemeterysac on Station Camp Creek, and the Blevins Cemetery on Station Camp Creek. Many of these cemeteries consist of only a handful of graves, and they’re often located deep in the backcountry — hard to find, if you can find them at all.
This is the story of one of those small, largely forgotten cemeteries. And it’s the story of a mother’s lifelong determination to keep her infant son’s memory alive.
The cemetery at Hawk’s place
Along the banks of Bill Branch, near where it empties into the Big South Fork River, about a mile downstream from Angel Falls, is a cemetery that has now completely faded into the undergrowth.
In fact, it’s only a few steps off the trail, yet if not for some faded flagging ribbon tied to tree branches, you’d walk right by the cemetery without knowing it was there if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
This is the John Hawk Smith Place, once the home of one of the Big South Fork’s most notable characters. And it was here, at the old home place, where some of Hawk Smith’s people were buried.
The cemetery doesn’t really have a name. In the National Park Service’s cemetery inventory, it’s referred to simply as “Baby.” That’s because the only identifiable grave there is that of a newborn baby, Walter Smith. It’s sometimes called the Ovie Smith Cemetery, after Walter’s mother. And, so, this is the story of Walter and Ovie Smith.
The Hawk Smith family
He was born John J. Smith on Dec. 9, 1866, but most folks knew him as “Hawk.” He made his home on the Big South Fork River near where Bill Branch empties in between Angel Falls and Rough Shoals, and folks eventually started calling this the John Hawk Smith Place.
John Hawk Smith’s people were a part of the Big South Fork since the first white settlers built homes along the river and its major tributaries. His great-grandfather was Richard Harve Slaven, who is believed to be the first permanent white settler in the Big South Fork region after building a home on No Business Creek. Slaven’s daughter, Sarah (Sallie) married Anderson Smith, and they built a farm where Laurel Fork Creek and Station Camp Creek merge a little less than a mile west of the river. Anderson Smith at one point owned the farm that is now Charit Creek Lodge. And in 1863, when Confederate guerrillas raided the river settlements, the farm of Anderson and Sallie Smith was among those raided before the Confederates were massacred at Duck Shoals.
According to the 1860 census, Anderson and Sallie had seven children, ranging from 29-year-old Mary to 15-year-old David. One of those children was 19-year-old Samuel Smith.
Sam Smith and his wife, Sally, had at least six children. The second-born was John J. Smith — who would come to be known as John Hawk Smith — born in 1866.
John Hawk Smith married Polly Ann Blevins. While he was a great-granddaughter of Richard Harve Slaven, one of the first white men to settle the Big South Fork, she was a great-granddaughter of Jonathan Blevins, another of the first white men to settle along the river, and the ancestor of all the Blevins family in Scott County today. Her grandfather was Armstead Blevins; her father was Diansis “Dide” Blevins, who married Sarah Jane Koger out of Kentucky.
John and Polly had a large family of at least nine kids. One of their children was Anderson Smith — named after Hawk Smith’s grandfather who was the first of the Smith clan to settle on the Big South Fork River. Folks called him “Anse.” (His tombstone, at Hazel Valley Memorial Cemetery, is spelled “Ance.” That’s also how his name was usually spelled in census records.)
HOW DID JOHN HAWK SMITH GET HIS NAME?
John J. Smith was popularly known as John Hawk Smith. It was a common practice in the river settlements to assign nicknames to people and families. Dave Smith, Hawk Smith’s great-grandson, recalls that historian H. Clay Smith said there was an old woman at Station Camp in the 1800s — Betty Smith — who gave nicknames to everyone who lived in the valley. She named John and his brothers after birds: John Hawk, Jim Raven, Bill Crow, and Anse Buzzard.
“People called Dad (Claude Smith, John J. Smith’s grandson) and his brothers ‘Hawks’ when they were in school, but they just laughed about it,” Dave Smith said.
Smith remembers a lot of other nicknames used for various families along the river: the Millers were called Milligans, for example, and his grandfather O’Neal was called Tarheel. The nicknames weren’t always endearing. “Dad said some of them would get mad enough to kill you if you called them that back then,” he said.
The Anse Smith family
Born on Jan. 20, 1899, Anse Smith was one of the youngest Smith children. He married Ova Ina Delk, born in 1904, who was from Pall Mall in Fentress County and grew up close to World War I hero Alvin C. York.
Anse and Ovie were married on Feb. 15, 1919 — the day after Valentines Day. He had just turned 20, and she was 15.
Nine and a half months later, on Nov. 27, 1919, Anse and Ovie’s first child was born. They named him Walter. Sadly, he died that same day.
According to Dave Smith, a descendant of John J. Smith who knows as much about the history of the Big South Fork river settlements as anyone, and more than most, Anse and Ovie lived nearby the John Hawk Smith Place.
“(Ovie) told me once that when Walter was born in 1919, they were living right on the banks of the Big South Fork, about a mile downriver from John,” he said.
Walter was buried on a small flat spot just outside the flood plain near his grandfather’s home, on the north side of Bill Branch.
Anse and Ovie would have other children. There was Marie, born about 1921, followed by Edward and Kirby.
On Oct. 26, 1934, tragedy struck. Anse was working in the coal mines at Zenith, located on North White Oak Creek several miles from his home, when he was killed by falling rock amid a cave-in at the Jackson Laxton Mine. A second man, 33-year-old Horace Davidson, was seriously injured in the cave-in.
Anse was buried at Hazel Valley — which is where his parents would later be buried, and where many other members of the Smith family have been buried, as well. Ovie later remarried.
These are the other stones that can be found at the Ovie Smith Cemetery, in addition to Walter Smith’s grave.
The cemetery grows
When Robert Bailey transcribed the cemetery at John Hawk Smith Place in 1994 as part of his Cemeteries of Scott County, Tennessee book, he recorded three unmarked graves. Likewise, the National Park Service said in a Facebook post a few years ago that there are three gravestones at the cemetery, though the other two cannot be identified.
However, Dave Smith — one of John J. Smith’s great-grandchildren — said that his father (Claude Smith, who was a brother to baby Archie Smith buried along the Grand Gap Loop Trail on the opposite side of the river) told him there were once seven stones at the cemetery — all of them river rocks.
Today, a close survey of the cemetery reveals five stones: the heart-shaped stone marking baby Walter’s grave, and four others that cannot be identified. There’s also an indention in the ground that likely indicates the location of a sixth grave. The seventh grave cannot be located.
Dave Smith said that his father knew the identities of two of those other graves: Jessie Smith and Sally Smith. They were the twin daughters of John and Polly Ann.
Gone, but not forgotten
Ovie Smith outlived two husbands, and resided in Oneida until 1991, when she died at age 86. As long as she lived, she never forgot about the grave of her firstborn, down on the river.
“As long as Ovie lived, she made frequent trips to the river to clean her son’s marker and leave flowers,” Dave Smith said.
Eventually, the property was purchased by the federal government and the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area was established. John J. Smith Road was gated at the top of the hill, 500 vertical feet above the river. Ovie still made the walk down the mountain to care for her son’s grave.
“When her health started failing, Ovie asked the park rangers to take her down the steep mountain road every year to put flowers on Walter’s grave,” Dave Smith said. “They were glad to do so.”
Sadly, Ovie’s passing in 1991, and the passage of 32 years since, has caused the little cemetery where her infant son and his twin aunts, and a few others, were buried to fade from memory and into the forest growth. Today, thick briars and shrubs obscure the graves from view; you will walk right by them if you don’t know they’re there, and it’s difficult to ascertain exactly where some of the graves are located.
But at the foot of Walter’s grave, near a fallen log that has dropped across the grave, a faded silk rose appears, nearly buried in decaying leaf matter. It’s part of a decaying flower arrangement, now faded from red to gray, perhaps left by one of Mrs. Ovie’s final trips to the river and the family’s old homeplace to honor the memory of her baby boy.
Cemetery Census
OVIE SMITH CEMETERY
GPS Coordinates: 36.50024, -84.63106
First Burial: N/A
Last Burial: N/A
Jessie Smith, N/A – N/A
Sally Smith, N/A – N/A
Walter Smith, 1919 – 1919
This story is part of the Scott County Cemetery Project.