CHURCH NEAR CADES COVE - Methodist Church, TN
Posted by: 
vhasler
N 35° 36.460 W 083° 49.044
17S E 244789 N 3944089
In October 1948, Ansel Adams made a photograph of the Methodist Church located in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. However, the image was reversed!
Waymark Code: WME57F
Location: Tennessee, United States
Date Posted: 04/05/2012
Views: 11
In October 1948, Ansel Adams traveled to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to take photographs of US national parks for a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Knoxville Museum of Art currently has an exhibit (
link) displaying on-line the 47 photographs created on that trip for educational purposes.
The Cades Cove area reportedly had five small churches, of which three still exist. Waymarking provided information on two of the three: the Methodist Church (Waymark WM2G62) and the Primative Baptist Church (Waymark WM60MB). At first glance, both of these white country churches look nearly identical -- check out the bell towers on both. If the 1948 photographs had shown the front of the church, then it would be easy to distinguish between one door and two. Or if the waymarks had the back of the church, then windows or none would have helped. The relative location of their respective cemeteries was an indication, but something was not quite right.
The Methodist church is located right on the Cades Cove driving loop road, while the Primative Baptist is down a side gravel road. Upon visiting both locations, we figured out the problem. The 1948 image has been horizontally reversed! Viewing the church from the cemetery reveals the building faces left and not right.
The two headstones in the foreground were verified as being for H.W. Myers and his wife Susan C. (see photograph in gallery). The location at the given coordinates is fairly close as these headstones line up between the church windows. A large boxwood has grown up in the church cemetery, as well as the background woods have risen high enough to block the view of the mountain in the background.