When I was about ten years old, I stumbled onto an old homesite in a hollow near my home in Bryson City — just a small stack of stones where a chimney once stood, with daylilies and mock orange growing where the family once lived. Beneath a deep layer of leaves, I found a child’s shoe, preserved by time.
The lost object sparked something in me. How far had that child walked to school or church in that shoe, I wondered? How much corn had they hoed in the nearby fields? How many times had the shoe been worn to a burial in a nearby cemetery? I so badly wanted to know.
It would be more than 20 years before I pursued my simmering curiosity, finding that cemeteries are the most direct and meaningful link we have to the people who once called these mountains home. Some graves are marked with carved stones that tell us names, dates, and relationships, and others only by simple fieldstones, leaving us to wonder.
Through careful research — combining cemetery records, photographs, old documents, oral histories, and onsite visits — it is possible to bring many of these intrepid individuals and their stories back to life.
The Indian Creek cemeteries
Today, Indian Creek is a peaceful tributary of Deep Creek, north of Bryson City on the North Carolina side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Cherokee families were living along the creek before European American settlers arrived, though for how long is unknown. The first European Americans to live there are believed to have been Civil War veteran Jim Beard and his wife, Elizabeth (née Parris).
Shortly after the war concluded, they settled about 1.7 miles northeast from what is now the Indian Creek trailhead, and Elizabeth’s brother Alfred Washington Parris — also a Civil War veteran — and his wife, Eliza (née Conner), soon settled their family a bit farther down the watershed. By the 1870s, a small community of more than 30 families had been established that would last for more than 60 years.
Indian Creek Baptist Church of Christ, as it referred to itself in church records, was founded in January 1874, serving as the center of community life. It originally operated from a log building that was also a school, but in time, separate frame structures were built on land donated by the Parrises. The church stood just below what is now the lower cemetery, near present-day Indian Creek Trail.
During the life of this community, three cemeteries were established along Indian Creek, and more than 70 people are buried in them — many in graves that are now unmarked.
The upper cemetery
This uppermost cemetery — known variously as the Laney, Queen, or Styles cemetery — contains some of the oldest marked graves on Indian Creek. The earliest belongs to the Reverend James Henry Queen, who died in April 1902. A longtime minister at the Indian Creek church, he also traveled widely, preaching at other mountain churches such as Smokemont Baptist.
Nearby is his daughter, Elizabeth Queen, who died in 1900, and likely her daughter, Hettie, who passed a short 10 years later. His son, John B. Queen, who died in August 1917, is buried there too. Like his father, John was a minister at the Indian Creek church. Interestingly, church records note that John was once excluded from membership for profanity but subsequently restored — an example of both the strictness and tolerance of many churches during that period. It’s likely that his first wife Kiney (née Hunnicutt), who died around 1912, is buried in this cemetery as well.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Eugene Queen
Another son, Joe Thad Queen, experienced tragedy in October 1916 when his wife, Rutha, died from a postpartum hemorrhage. She too is buried here. Their daughter, Gladys, survived the traumatic circumstances of her birth and was interviewed many years later by Joseph Sargent Hall, a well-known linguist of the Smokies.
“I was borned [sic] and raised on Indian Creek,” Gladys told Hall, “and my mother died when I was 12 hours old, and my father, he raised me and my two sisters, and we had a hard time, and we had to hoe corn and work out in the field and had to walk two mile to school.”
Henry Queen’s daughter Theodosia “Docia” married William “Bill” Styles and had at least nine children. One of them, Mary Etta Wiggins (née Styles), died of complications of typhoid fever in July 1918 and is buried in upper Indian Creek along with her father, who died in November 1928. Mary Etta’s widower, Bowman Wiggins, married her sister Bessie in 1921. Docia and some of her descendants were among the last residents of Indian Creek, remaining into the 1940s on a lease. The park’s many restrictions on using the area’s natural resources meant “that was some hard livin’ down there” in those later years, as her grandson Theodore recalled in a 2012 interview.
Other members of the extended Queen family are also buried here. In 1888, 40-year-old widower Sherrill Wiggins married Henry Queen’s daughter, Laura, who was more than 20 years younger and instantly became a stepmother to his large family. From his two marriages, Wiggins would father at least 24 children, an estimate because infants who were stillborn or died soon after birth may have gone nameless. Their first child together was buried on a ridge at the home of Laura’s parents, along with another Queen cousin’s child.
Sherrill and Laura’s oldest surviving son together, Henry, served in World War I, spending 1918-19 on the Western Front in Belgium and France. Tragically, he was exposed to mustard gas, which permanently damaged his lungs, and spent most of his remaining life in the Veterans’ Hospital in Oteen. He died of tuberculosis in December 1921 and is buried in the upper cemetery beneath a stone inscribed “A Soldier Boy.” Perhaps the most poignant grave here is that of Oscar Shuler, who died in 1917 at the age of 11, likely from meningitis. He was the son of Jim and Nora (née Laney) Shuler. After his death, Nora crafted his headstone herself — building a wooden mold, burning the inscription into it with a hot poker, and pouring in concrete. The result was a stone with backwards lettering, a deeply personal expression of grief. Today, the stone lies broken in half, worn down by time.
The lower cemetery
Farther down the creek is the lower cemetery, called Laney Cemetery (after Baxter Laney), or Parris Cemetery for the husband-and-wife settlers who donated the land. It sits on the slope above the church site.
The Parris family played a central role in the life of Indian Creek. Alfred Washington Parris worked at a Deep Creek sawmill owned by Thaddeus Dillard Bryson and operated a grist mill on his own property. He served as a school committeeman and, along with Louisa, donated land for both the church and a community school. Their daughter Lucretia “Creasy” married John Davis, who built the cabin that now stands at the Mountain Farm Museum at Oconaluftee Visitor Center near Cherokee.
Louisa died in August 1918 and was buried in the cemetery she had helped establish. Alfred died in 1935 and was buried outside the park. Their daughter, Salinda, and her husband, Columbus Kitchen, purchased her parents’ property in 1919 and owned it at the time the park was created. They lived there for a time, and Columbus ran his father-in-law’s grist mill along with his blind son, Andy.
The Kitchen family later moved to Gaston County, North Carolina, where they worked for the A.M. Smyre Manufacturing Company. Andy developed a brain tumor and died there, but his body was returned to Indian Creek for burial — no small effort at the time — suggesting a deep bond with his extended family and the place he considered home.
Only two other graves at this cemetery are marked: those of Rosetta Davis and an unnamed Kitchens infant (with an additional “s” on the end of the name), both likely descendants of Alfred and Louisa and both marked with modern stones. More than 30 other graves are believed to be unmarked.
Walking through these cemeteries today, it’s easy to see only stones, dates, and fading inscriptions. But piecing together the lives of the individuals buried here builds a complex picture. Theirs were lives woven into a close-knit community shaped by faith, hardship, and deep ties to the land.
Wendy Meyers is a Bryson City native who runs a blog dedicated to historical research on Swain County, Reflections of Olde Swain, and gives talks on her research about county lore and Smokies people.
This story was originally published in the fall 2026 issue of Smokies Life Journal, a twice-yearly magazine that is the primary benefit of joining the 29,000-member Smokies Life, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the scientific, historical, and interpretive activities of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by providing educational products and services such as this column. To read more stories like this while supporting Great Smoky Mountains National Park, visit smokieslife.org/membership and become a Park Keeper.