[female voice] This place has a heartbeat of its own.

[male voice] You just get a vibe that you're here at home.

[female voice] It's given me opportunities that I never thought I'd have.

That atmosphere is infectious.

[female voice] It's a magic little place in the mountains.

[announcer] Made with the state fruit of North Carolina, Mighty Muscadine offers a line of superfruit supplements and juices made from the Muscadine grape, including the Cellular Health Antioxidant Beverage, Vinetastic.

More at mightymuscadine.com.

[♪♪♪♪♪] [Joshua Deel] Ever since I was a child, I've had fond memories of this place.

[♪♪♪♪♪] Perhaps it's the connection I feel since I once called it home in my youngest years.

[♪♪♪♪♪] Tennessee has always felt like my home away from home, specifically the Smoky Mountains.

But to an outside observer, you may think, come on, Josh.

[♪♪♪♪♪] This could be just another bustling tourist town that draws people, young and young at heart, from all around the country.

[♪♪♪♪♪] And perhaps that's what it is, at first glance.

[♪♪♪♪♪] Maybe these memories, calcified in time and burned into my mind's eye, truly were born in the innocence and wonder of youth.

[♪♪♪♪♪] Or, is there an intrinsic, less subjective quality about a place like this?

The Great Smoky Mountains.

To quote a famous American naturalist, author, and advocate for the preservation of wilderness, and considered to be the "Father" of our national parks in the United States, John Muir once wrote, "The mountains are calling, and I must go."

[♪♪♪♪♪] I've heard it said, "Where we are affects who we are."

Makes sense, right?

I've always believed you can't really understand yourself until you understand where you come from.

Hi, I'm Josh, and I'm hosting this series with PBS Appalachia to explore the places people still call home, their hometowns, and to uncover the stories that make them unique.

Hometowns is about exploring the communities that give America its character.

This season, we're going off the beaten path on a journey from Virginia to Wyoming.

Now don't get me wrong, many of these places have their flaws, warts and all.

But if that's all you focus on, you're missing the bigger picture, the raw, untamed beauty of the land and the depth and complexity of its culture.

These are the things that speak to the heart of understanding what it really means to be an American.

It's a journey worth taking.

Trust me.

For this trip, I decided to make my way to the peaceful side of the Smokies, to the little community of Townsend.

[Neal Stone] This area is known as Tuckaleechee Valley, Tuckaleechee Cove area.

And archaeological digs suggest that there have been people here since 2,000 years Before Christ.

Cherokee Indians settled here around 1600 and then whitemen settled in probably in the 1700s.

Don't have exact dates on that.

But throughout this area, there were three communities that were named after their post offices.

There was Sweet, Tang, and Tuckaleechee Cove.

And they were basically farming communities, people raised enough for themselves.

There was no large-scale logging for commercial reasons.

They logged for building a house, clearing land, needing wood for fences or whatever, but not for commercial purposes.

In the late 1800s, they began to have some commercial logging up here.

The biggest problem was, how do you get the logs out of the park or out of the mountains, downriver?

[Joshua] Neal explained the early challenges and inefficiencies of moving these cut logs downriver by utilizing homemade splash dams that would essentially flash-flood the rivers in hopes that most of these logs would make it to their destination.

But often, this wasn't the case, as many were either lost or badly damaged.

In time, men from Pennsylvania found this area to be desirable for its timber, and that changed everything.

-They had connections with Colonel Townsend and several other gentlemen who formed a little group.

They were already lumbering in the West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky areas.

And they came down and looked at this area, found all this timber, and already had somebody wanting to buy their waste product.

And they ended up coming down and establishing the Little River Lumber Company here in this valley.

About that same time they consolidated, the people named the area Townsend after Colonel Wilson Bailey Townsend.

He was the primary member of the group.

[Joshua] The Little River Railroad and Lumber Company laid over 150 miles of track in what would become the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

These rail beds not only make up the roadways through the park that you drive on today, but as a direct result of their method of logging by strip or clear-cutting, it made the formation of the national park all but inevitable.

-This was witnessed by folks from Knoxville, influential individuals, who said, "We need to protect this.

We need to stop this from happening."

And they were spurred by the formation of the national parks of Yellowstone back in 1872, and subsequent parks since then.

So, what the railroad and lumber company did was actually promote the park by letting people say, if you don't protect it, this is what you're going to get.

In 1925, the Colonel sold to the State of Tennessee his land holdings that form now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

[Joshua] Although logging gave way to the formation of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in 1934, Neal indicated, as one might already know, logging wasn't the only thing they did in the mountains around here.

-We got rocks.

-Exactly.

-Our corn comes in a jar.

-Right.

You got a rocking town.

-Absolutely.

[Joshua] And on that note, I was off to find some... well, said corn in a jar, but not the kind you might think.

I wanted to meet with the former master distiller of Jack Daniels himself, to learn why he decided to start his own distillery right here in Townsend.

[Jeff Arnett] I was a fan of Jack Daniels.

You know, I think being a native Tennessean and living out-of-state, anytime I told somebody I was from Tennessee, it was like, Jack Daniels.

-[Joshua] It's almost like-- -[Jeff] You know, it was like, yeah, Elvis, Dolly, Jack, you know.

So even, you know, I would get invited to parties when I was in Texas or Louisiana, you know, wine and cheese parties.

I'd bring a bottle of Jack, you know, because that's like, here's our postcard from here.

This is what we do.

We don't do wine.

[Joshua] Digging a little, I asked Jeff, how does one become the master distiller for Jack Daniels?

He told me he got a call after the former master retired.

-They contacted me and asked if I would serve.

So, at that time, there had only been six.

The company was over 140 years old.

There had only been six master distillers.

So they named me the seventh in 2008, and I served until 2020 with them.

It was really a fun time to be there and innovate.

But, you know, I think there's, you kind of get to a point in your life where it's like, you know, being, you know, an employee, I was a corporate employee.

Even I had a great title.

I went to 41 countries in 11 years, you know.

I was the man, you know, to so many people who were Jack Daniels fans, but, you know, but you didn't own it.

And so, you kind of get to that point where it's like, is just serving as master distiller here enough, or would you want to take the risk?

Would you want to have the ability to build your own distillery, build your own brand, have something that maybe your kids and grandkids tell their children?

-[Joshua] Sure.

[Jeff Arnett] I think one of the first questions we get is, why'd you name it Company?

-Now that's a good one.

-You know, we actually, we had quite a few names that we were thinking about naming the company, but we were being formed during the pandemic.

-Okay.

-And so, a lot of people's, I think, social norms had been broken.

There were no bars or restaurants that were allowing people to come in and walk into the bar and order whatever they wanted.

-Right.

-So it put pressure on home entertaining.

So, you know, when I was a kid, my parents would say, you know, clean up your room and take a shower.

We've got company coming over.

So that really became the inspiration behind what we wanted to do is that we wanted to make spirits for the best of company.

We wanted something that you would be proud to have in your cabinet at home, that you would serve to people who matter to you.

[Joshua] Most people associate moonshine with whiskey, but in reality, moonshine is any type of distilled spirit that isn't taxed.

Or in other words, anything that's illegally distilled.

So, that's technically not moonshine you're sipping in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, but it's still a lot of fun.

Jeff isn't alone in his passion and vision for taking this reputation of great whiskey-making in Middle Tennessee and bringing it to East Tennessee, as other brands here are now pushing the envelope a little beyond moonshine to do whiskey as well.

-When you come to East Tennessee, it also had some spirits making history, but it was much more in the moonshine space.

It was more the backwoods, unrefined, you know, where people still, you know, would apply some crap to it.

You probably had people that were pretty good at it and some that, you know, would blind you, you know.

So you need to be careful about whose you're buying.

But, you know, but in Blount County, where we're sitting, we became the first legal distillery here when we opened this.

But we're, we are by no means the first distillery to ever be here.

We're just the first one that got taxed and was legal.

But yeah, if you look up sort of the Appalachian moonshine history, Blount County, Cocke County in Tennessee are probably the two most-mentioned counties.

There's a lot of reasons to love Tennessee, I feel like, and people are discovering Tennessee after the pandemic.

We've had a lot of people moving here just of late.

Townsend is definitely the peaceful side of the Smokies.

You know, that's what they've branded themselves to be.

And it is hard to argue that this is the most peaceful spot you're going to find in Tennessee that allows you access into the Smoky Mountains.

[Joshua] If you didn't already know, being a son of these mountains myself, I love storytelling.

And that's one thing I noticed I have in common with Jeff as many of his labels tell a story.

From Ace Gap, where loggers would meet to distill spirits, drink, and play cards here in the Smokies.

There's even GPS coordinates to the trailhead on the bottle.

To his Seismic Rye Single Barrel Whiskey that tells the story of Monitoring Station AS107... try saying that five times fast... that was established in the Tuckaleechee Caverns of Townsend in 1978 to measure and report seismic activity for the eastern half of the United States.

Which clued me in to my next stop... Tuckaleechee Caverns.

[guide giving instructions] There's a reason the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited national park by far.

Its remarkable beauty is not lost on me, but that's just above the ground.

[♪♪♪♪♪] Descending beneath the cool, dark earth, a whole new world comes into view that is equally captivating, if not eerily haunting, of that beauty I leave behind, bathed in sunlight above me.

[♪♪♪♪♪] Originally open to the public for a year in 1931, the caverns were closed because of the Great Depression.

It wasn't reopened until 1953 as a tourist attraction after four years of lonely toil by two men, Bill Vananda and Harry Myers, who once played in the main passage as kids and later wanted to reopen it to the public.

They carried in hundreds of tons of sand, cement, and gravel on their backs to build steps and passageways in order to achieve their dream.

Their commitment to reopening the caverns led to numerous discoveries over the subsequent years by various cavers... including the Big Room, which is large enough to house a football stadium, and Silver Falls, a double waterfall cascading over 200 feet.

These discoveries put the Tuckaleechee Caverns on the map, ranking it as the highest rated cave of the Eastern United States.

[♪♪♪♪♪] Snaking its way through part of the mile-long guided tour, cable bundles can be seen that go to the seismic monitoring station I mentioned earlier.

The station here is said to have picked up seismic activity from the UT victory over Alabama in 2022, breaking a losing streak that extended back to 2007.

[woman ] I think we counted nine families total that we know.

[Joshua] Working up an appetite, I made my way over to the Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro, ranked one of America's top 25 dining restaurants, and it's right here in Townsend.

[Houston Oldham] We're here to create Appalachian cuisine in a setting that feels rustic yet refined.

And so, our focus on modern Appalachian cuisine is all about bringing the recipes and the techniques from our forefathers and our ancestors that have maybe been here in Tuckaleechee Cove, or the larger Appalachian region, and pairing that with the sorts of ingredients that you can really get across the world.

And so, really, the purpose of us is to update what it means to be Appalachian food by providing this modern Appalachian experience that includes, you know, bringing in fish or shrimp from around the world that you can probably get at Kroger these days, but, you know, pairing them with traditions and techniques that have been around for centuries.

If there's one thing we're trying to do all the time, it's that we want to be the best destination dining spot in all of Appalachia.

And we want your experience, while you're here, to be as authentic to the place that we're in as possible.

[Jeff Carter] Well, and that's like the cornerstone of this modern Appalachian is that it's community and technique.

We're using all the techniques that our forefathers used in the pickling and the drying and the, you know, the jamming and, you know, all those techniques to preserve food and flavor.

But we're also, on the other side, supporting those, the community, and making sure they have a way of life.

And, you know, their farms are not going out of business because nobody's buying their product.

[Joshua] Speaking with Houston and Chef Carter, I discovered their commitment to provide world-class culinary experiences by ensuring the local agricultural supply chain, like small mom-and-pops growers, remain supported and intact with access to sell their products right here at Dancing Bear.

[Jeff Carter] It's very rare that we'll get a truck delivery from a national purveyor.

I mean, we will get our basic stuff, flour and sugar and salt, but most of it comes from local farmers that drive up here in their pickup truck.

We believe that the food grown in this dirt just tastes better.

[Joshua] I'm no celebrity chef or food critic with a column to write, but I can certainly appreciate quality food with a story.

That's what you find here.

And the lengths that Houston's team goes busting their chops to ensure they not only acknowledge, but preserve the Appalachian food tradition and local way of life, is worth acknowledging.

And the food is damn good, too.

-Appalachia, in general, is a place that has been forgotten about.

It's a place that you've flown over in an airplane .

It's a place that you've driven through as fast as you can.

It's not a place associated with modern culture.

And so, what we are trying to do here in Appalachia is bring some of that modern culture back to a community that may have been forgotten about.

And what we are working with is the idea that you can rehabilitate and renovate existing structures and you can make them modern, and that's okay, you know.

Offering modern services, it's not a dereliction of the past or a condemnation of the past.

Making things modern is simply ensuring that we as a community will survive over the next 50 years.

[Joshua] Houston's thoughts about the survival of the community were also echoed by my host at the Little Arrow campground.

[Carmen Simpher] We intend for Little Arrow to be part of the peaceful side of the Smokies.

We value the peaceful side.

It's fun to go over the other side of the mountain and do all the fun, loud lights and things.

That's great fun.

But to be peaceful on this side is very important to us.

It's also important that we are peaceful with the pulse.

If you don't have thriving businesses, it's a ghost town.

And there's a difference between a ghost town and peaceful.

[Joshua] And working hand in hand with those thriving businesses in the peaceful side of the Smokies is Appalachian Bear Rescue.

The rescue has been in operation since the mid-1990s, and this year, is rehabilitating its 400th American black bear.

Houston helped arrange for me to speak with the operations director to learn more about the importance of their work.

-These bears are super tough, very resilient creatures.

You know, that's what I love about them.

I tell people bears are my spirit animal because I like to think I'm really tough.

You know, maybe I tell myself I'm really tough.

And then, you know, I see a bear who's walking around with, you know, a bullet wound and missing an eyeball, and he's still getting it out there and no one's helping him.

And I'm like, man, okay, that's a tough critter.

So, you know, you get some of these, these little cubs, man.

They're knocking on death's door, and they got a broken arm, and they're starving.

And you just give them a little bit of food and some shelter and, you know, time, and they recover.

And that's what's so impressive about doing this work and knowing that it does work is that, hey, these bears can, they really can survive a lot.

You just got to give some of these guys, you know, a little bit of a chance, and they're going to take care of themselves.

For the last nine years, I've been working in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as a park ranger, as a wildlife technician.

I've been catching bears, hunting wild hogs, doing search and rescues, fighting wildfires, doing all kinds of stuff with, you know, bats, elk, turkeys, you name it.

And mostly bears, though.

And I've just recently been hired into this Director of Operations role here at Appalachian Bear Rescue.

I was very fortunate to have an opportunity to be a park ranger for so long, and those skills I learned about mitigating human-bear conflict are carrying over to this role as Director of Operations here, where we take care of orphaned cubs that mostly come from human-bear conflict.

Unfortunately, a lot of the orphaned cubs that do show up here are orphaned because their mothers are killed either accidentally or on purpose because of problems working with humans.

In the rehab world, it's hard to rehab a bear to where you can release it to the wild, because if you don't have it set up the way we have it set up, where these bears are in all these separate pens to where we can move them without them seeing us, and they don't see us bring food.

Then they get really used to you bringing food, especially a young one, and you can't put them back out in the wild.

And that's why some states don't allow rehabilitated bears to be released, because they don't have think it's safe, or they don't think it's worth it, because they're like, you know, it's gonna be like a zoo bear or a circus bear.

The black bear population across the Eastern US is booming.

All the states up the east coast are seeing huge booms in their black bear populations.

You know, black bears are doing well.

Right now, like the climate kind of changing and warming, it's good for bears.

They don't have to sleep as long, they're getting more food, right, they're staying out longer.

But the other thing that's good for bears that's maybe not so good for everyone is they're finding more anthropogenic food sources, right, food from humans.

And a garbage bear does very well compared to a wild bear.

Garbage bears mature faster, they grow bigger, and they have more litters more often, and the cubs survive more, but until they get in trouble, right?

So it's this kind of Catch-22.

A garbage bear might be healthier at two years old and reproduce sooner and raise more cubs, but it might be dead by 5 because of conflict.

Whereas a wild bear may not reproduce till 3 or 4, may not be as reproductively successful over the course, but it might live to be 15-20, you know.

So it's a dichotomy.

We see that the garbage bear populations are very dense.

An acre of cabins can hold ten bears if the trash is good.

And that's something, you know, we're fighting every day.

It's not something you're going to solve.

There is no magic bullet, but you know, you gotta just keep fighting that fight.

[Joshua] There are signs posted everywhere urging people not to feed the bears.

But like Greg said, it takes more than a sign for some people.

It's also not just the tourists who are repeat offenders.

That's why Greg and his team have developed the BearWise Program to help people from homeowners to businesses and even communities, learn to coexist with bears in a responsible and safe way.

-People love seeing bears, man, and that's the dichotomy.

Everyone wants to see one, and it's like, well, how close do you want to get to them?

And people are like, just a little closer, just a little closer, and then until it's like really, really close.

Then they're like, hey, someone needs to come get this bear, you know?

And that's the problem we have here.

Everybody wants to see them until then, they have a problem.

They want you to come get it and get rid of it.

[Joshua] To my surprise, Greg did more than just talk bears with me.

He took me on an unofficial tour of the park, where I witnessed just how close some people are willing to get to see a bear.

[♪♪♪♪♪] To quote John Muir again on hiking, "I don't like either the word or the thing.

People ought to saunter in the mountains, not hike.

These mountains are our holy land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently."

[♪♪♪♪♪] [gushing water] So in that spirit, we did our best to saunter, making our way to places like the trailhead for Ace Gap... and finding the deepest cave in Tennessee.

Everyone knows about Tuckaleechee Caverns, or at least those of you viewing this, but few know about Bull Cave, which is somewhere around 900 feet deep.

And the water from here flows down into the Tuckaleechee Caverns below us.

[♪♪♪♪♪] [guitar chords] -♪ There's a dark And a troubled side of life ♪ ♪ There's a bright And a sunny side too ♪ ♪ Though you meet with The darkness and strife ♪ ♪ The sunny side You also may view ♪ ♪ Keep on the sunny side Always on the sunny side ♪ ♪ Keep on the sunny side Of life ♪ ♪ It will help us every day It will brighten all the way ♪ ♪ If you keep on The sunny side of life ♪ I was born and raised in the mountains and have a love for it, and continue my career in the mountains.

Just look around, look at the scenery we have.

The people are generally kind and warming and welcoming.

You know, good neighbors.

You know, in a lot of other places, you know, you don't even know who lives next door.

Here, you know, most of the community is, you know, descendants of people that grew up in these mountains.

Not so, there're more people moving in and things like that.

But, you know, typically, the family names.

You recognize a family name that lives in this particular area here in Townsend.

Now, the Tipton side, I'm not too familiar with, but the McCauley side, which would be on my mother's side, was they lived in what is now the national park.

The Tipton side also did, and the Myers and the Cables and people that I'm related to, all lived in a community called Cades Cove at the time.

And they were subsistence farmers.

You know, they farmed, they worked the land, they worked hard, but they lived well, you know, in that particular type of environment.

[Joshua] Jay explained to me how the early settlers of Cades Cove, many of whom were his ancestors predating the civil war, but long after the Woodland Indians lived in the area many centuries or more ago, they lived a way of life few can understand today , in a time before television, radio, and electricity.

They grew their own food, and depended on one another in a very tight-knit community.

-You know, there were some reporters, you know, went to my great-great-grandpa and interviewed him one time.

And, you know, they were asking sort of the same questions you're asking.

What drew them to that particular place?

And what was the life like?

Because, you know, in today's time, you know, I can't imagine, you know, life without my cell phone or, you know, stuff like that.

But they, his response was, "We lived like kings."

He said, "It was almost paradise."

They had everything they needed.

Townsend is home.

Townsend is peaceful.

Townsend is a place to come and relax, prop your feet up, get away from the struggles and trials of life.

It's a place to come and bring your family, to enjoy God's creation that He's given us here.

It's unlike any other place that you'll visit.

I enjoy it tremendously.

It's a small town.

Townsend is a small town.

But we're growing, and we need healthy growth, you know.

And we need people to come and enjoy what we have, and we're glad to share it.

♪ Oh the storm And its fury broke today ♪ ♪ Crushing hopes That we cherish so dear ♪ [Joshua] So perhaps my draw to this place has always been something deeper.

It certainly isn't the amusement parks that keep me coming back here.

There's something about these mountains, these people, the soul of this place.

It has a way of getting on the inside of a person and taking up residence.

Something that isn't transient.

Its permanence is on display like a gem set amongst shadows that are here today and gone tomorrow.

-♪ It will help us every day It will brighten all the way ♪ ♪ If you keep on The sunny side of life ♪ How's that?

That suits you?

Help me do something else.

[rain pattering] [female voice] This place has a heartbeat of its own.

[male voice] You just get a vibe that you're here at home.

[female voice] It's given me opportunities that I never thought I'd have.

That atmosphere is infectious.

[female voice] It's a magic little place in the mountains.

[announcer] Made with the state fruit of North Carolina, Mighty Muscadine offers a line of superfruit supplements and juices made from the Muscadine grape, including the Cellular Health Antioxidant Beverage, Vinetastic.

More at mightymuscadine.com.