Henry Whitehead Place

Henry Whitehead Place is a small historic homestead in Cades Cove: a larger log house, an earlier one-room cabin joined by a covered passage, and a smokehouse. It makes a good short detour if you like old buildings; the payoff is seeing two kinds of log construction together. From the 11-mile, one-way Cades Cove Loop Road, turn onto Forge Creek Road just past the Cades Cove Visitor Center and Cable Mill Historic Area parking lot. The homestead is 0.75 miles down the road.

Matilda Shields was left with her young son when her first husband abandoned her during a visit to family in Cades Cove. Her brothers quickly built her the small cabin in 1881. Matilda married Henry Whitehead in 1887, and he built the larger house between 1895 and 1898.

The larger house can look like a frame building, but it is made of logs squared at a sawmill. It is the last surviving sawn-log house in the park. Compare its smooth, tight-fitting walls with the smaller cabin’s rough, hand-hewn logs; the older gaps were filled with mud or clay, while the sawn logs needed almost no chinking.

Beside the smaller cabin’s fireplace is a little opening called a “granny hole,” which let the person tending the fire look outside. The nearby smokehouse is one of five still standing in Cades Cove. Families usually smoked pork there, using oak or hickory and storing the meat on shelves; smokehouses stood close to the house for convenience and were built to keep bears out. For a photo, frame both cabins together so the contrast in their logs is clear, adding the smokehouse if it fits.