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Dorothy Copus Brush More on the Gentry Tourist Camp Back-to-back phone calls several Sundays ago
were almost as exciting to me as it must be to win the Powerball! Readers of this column know there has been
a search for answers to two questions. The first caller was Harold
Broughton, who lives in Cumberland Cove but knows Monterey well.
He did not know the Gentry Tourist Camp but wondered if it might
have been the Mountainview Tourist Camp on U.S. 70 North. A Bob
and Hessy Cooper owned that place for many years. Mr. Broughton
gave me the name and location of their daughter, Joyce Moore. The next day, I drove to Monterey and found
Mrs. Moore. As we talked, she was sure she remembered there had
been a Gentry Tourist Camp, but she wanted to check her husband's
memory. He was not home, so I gave her my card, and that evening
she called to tell me her husband verified that there had been
a Gentry camp. When work began on I-40, the tourist stops
on U.S. 70 were doomed and eventually closed. The Moores knew
the Gentry place had been gone for a long time and doubted if
they could even drive by the spot where it had been on 70N between
Crossville and Monterey. At their suggestion, I called another
life-long resident of the town, Jim Pugh. He also remembered
there had been a Gentry camp, but not its exact location. So
that closed one case. The second phone call came from Judith Steepleton
of Fairfield Glade, and she reopened the Coal Creek question
with a fascinating slice of Tennessee history. She is a librarian,
and in the Fairfield Glade United Methodist library she found
a novel, Coal Creek Wars, written by Chris Cawood and published
in 1995. Cawood wrote, "Although this is a fiction-enhanced
story of real events, I have tried to be as accurate with the
actual happenings of the Coal Creek War as possible." The
author is an attorney and served in the Tennessee General Assembly
for two years. He lives in Kingston and his family roots were
established here before Tennessee was a state. A later column will cover the Coal Creek story.
Of interest is the heroine, Betsy Boyd Drummond Brimer, a real
person who believed in education and women's equality. She was
in the first class of women to be accepted at UT in September
1893. Before that, only men had been admitted. She continued
in her chosen profession of education for the rest of her life
and was the first woman in her neighborhood to register to vote
after Women's Suffrage was passed in 1920. Another call came from Gladys Hill about the Nakanawa camp columns. She shared some of her memories of the girls who attended the summer camp. Ms. Hill worked at Hill's Department Store, although she was not a relative of those Hills. She said all the clerks looked forward to the girls coming in to shop because they were so well-mannered. "They were wonderful girls," she said. |