Amos Reagan, Gatlinburg, Sevier County, Tennessee
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Amos Reagan was 45 years old when recorded in 1939 and was liging in Gatlinburg, in Sevier County, Tennessee. He had about eight yeats of formal eduation and worked as a CCC foreman and owner of a restaurant.
[transcripption copyrigh Michael Montgomery and Paul Reed, 2017]
My name is Amos Reagan, I was borned in Sevier County, Tennessee, at Gatlinburg up on the mountain where Uncle Tom Campbell lived when he died, I’ve been a logger all my life up till the last six, a little better than six year, about six years ago, June the second, nineteen and thirty-three, I joined the CCs, I worked as a leader up till the second day of November in nineteen and thirty-three and I was transferred into the Park Service, I went to cutting timber, had a great deal of trouble with the CCC boys cutting tim-, timber, as they didn’t know anything about cutting timber, and later on I went to Cove Mountain and built the Laurel Falls Trail, and we had several rock on that trail and nothing to, to drill those rock with, only just a steel and eight-pound striking hammers and I want you to know it was a very difficult job training those boys to drive steel with handles, switch handles, we used switch ham-, handles in this park here that, when you lay them across your shoulder the handle, the hammer falls down on your back, but we got along pretty well and went to shooting those rocks off and blew them off down in the hollows, had a great deal of trouble then a-picking up the broken rocks and hiding them and so on, we got the Laurel Falls Trail done, why, we built a tower, a lookout tower up on top of the mountain and got it complete and come back off the main camp, later on we went to the Newfound Gap and built a trail from Newfound Gap to Leconte, we didn’t have quite so much trouble with the rock on that trail for the reason that it was soft slate rock, but it was a very hard place to work, a-high up on the mountain, cold weather, and lots of rain up there, and the boys, they’d want to come in every weekend, and two or three of them would get sick during the week, and it’s a very hard job fooling with these CCC boys when you get some of, some of them that you can’t get much work out of, you have a right smart trouble training them up, one thing and another, the most difficult trail, trail I’ve ever built since I’ve been in the Park Service was the Trillium Gap Trail, we went up on this Trillium Gap Trail, the year nineteen and thirty-five and worked all summer on it, went back again in thirty-seven and worked another six months, and then in nineteen and thirty-nine I went back up there in June, complete the trail, got the trail done but they was rock bluffs up there that’s eighteen and twenty feet high, put those boys up on top of the rocks, have to tie them with ropes, make scaffolds and use those switch hammers, tell you it was pretty dangerous, but we had good luck with the trail and didn’t get anybody hurt, when we got the rock shot down, picked them all up, hid them, covered them up, mossed lots of them over, had lots of big walls to build, when we got the trail done then we come back over the trail and hid all the brush and logs and things that we had along in sight, and we’ve moved out of up there now, we’re back down in Greenbrier, to side camp, doing trail maintenance and other kind of work, I’ve been with the CCCs now a little better than six years, would like to stay on with them as long as I live, I’m not having much trouble with the boys now, I have very, a good bunch of boys, the boys is getting trained till they know how to do things, might tell you a little bear tale or two before I quit, while we was up at Trillium Gap last summer we had a bear that came to the camp several times while we was up there, the biggest bear I ever seen in my life, and one of the boys, one night he took a notion to run, jump down off a log and scared the bear to death and when he jumped why, his feet flew out from under him in some tin cans and one thing and another, and he got on those cans and rolled right in under the bear and he scared the bear nearly to death and he like to scared him to death too, we had lots of fun about the bear, well, I’ll see you all later, come back again, that’s all, is that enough?