Little River Railroad and Lumber Company Museum Update

We’re happy to see that new life has been injected into the Little River Railroad and Lumber Company Museum in Townsend. New construction of a wooden water tank and tower are planned for 2005 and continued improvements will be made to other outdoor displays and a new foundation has been laid for the new shop building.

“The main thing this year is putting up the shop building, which is really a big deal,” said museum President, Jim Thurston. The track is almost finished and Sandy Headrick, museum secretary said, “We’ve seen a marked increase in visitation last season. When people see men pounding spikes and laying new rail the old fashioned way, they just have to stop and take a look.”

The museum features equipment used in the logging industry in what is now the Park land. Recently, a vintage log loader was received as a gift from the Texas Forestry Museum in Lufkin, Texas. “This is the most significant piece of equipment we have obtained for the museum since the Shay locomotive was brought here in 1962,” Thurston said. The log loader is a “huge, steam powered machine that rode atop flatcars in the logging industry,” Thurston continued. “This is one of only five such machines still in existence and may have been used in building the Panama Canal.”

A Frick steam engine, a caboose, two vintage flatcars and a set-off house are included in the outdoor exhibits. “Set off” houses were pre-constructed off site and delivered via flatbed to Townsend for use by the loggers and their families. Barely large enough to hold a pot-bellied stove, bed and kitchen table, the houses were Spartan at best. Large families had to take two of the storage-sized buildings in order to gain any space and the choice of location never varied. These homes were dropped off the flat cars barely four feet from the tracks.

The set off house on exhibit at the museum was relocated from another part of Townsend and was probably built in the 1920s. “We plan to interpret this as it was used in a lumber camp,” said Headrick. “Your front yard might have been three feet deep and your kids played right there on the railroad tracks,” She said renovations on the house would be consistent with how the house would have looked in a lumber camp.

Company History

The Little River Railroad and Lumber Company began in the Blount and Sevier countries’ sections that are now part of the National Park. The Walton and England Tannery in Walland needed tree bark for its operation, and invited Col . W.B. Townsend of Pennsylvania to form the lumber operation.

Townsend bought 100,000 acres of timberland along the Little River and its tributaries, in Cades Cove and along the Pigeon River, and construction began on the railroad in 1902 in Walland. The first 11 miles up to Townsend were completed in 1903, and a 15 mile extension to Elkmont was completed in 1908. Short spurs were run to patches of virgin timber…one being to Clingman’s Dome.

In 1926, Townsend sold 80,000 acres to the state of Tennessee to become part of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and in 1934, the Park was officially opened. The lumber operation formally closed down its sawmill in 1939.