aided struggling families in Tuckaleechee by going from house to house to cut firewood and do basic chores. While Walker was well liked and respected throughout the northwestern Smokies, he was always a source of controversy due to his practice of polygamy. Walker, who was very religious, believed that Biblical scripture allowed him to take more than one wife. In 1864, he married Mary Ann Moore and a few years later married a third wife, Mary Moll Stinnett. Walker eventually fathered a total of 26 children, although several died in infancy. He allowed tenant farmers to move into Walker Valley, and a small community developed. Walker constructed three gristmills to accommodate the growing community. Early logging As large-scale logging operations left much of the Eastern United States deforested by the late 19th century, logging companies turned to the remote virgin forests of Southern Appalachia to meet the nation's growing demand for timber. Taking advantage of recent band saw and logging railroad innovations, small logging firms began to spring up around the Great Smokies. The first logging venture to reach Walker Valley and the Middle Prong area was that of John English, a Knoxville businessman whose company began cutting timber in nearby Tuckaleechee Cove in the early 1880s. English used a series of splash dams to move the logs down Little River to a mill on the outskirts of Knoxville. One such splash dam was located at the mouth of Spruce Flats along Middle Prong, just above Walker Valley. While English's lumbering venture turned a small profit, a flood along Little River apparently wiped out his splash dams in the late 1890s, and his venture had folded by 1900. The Little River Lumber Company While Will Walker allowed English to build a splash dam and do minor logging in the Middle Prong watershed, he disliked the thought of large-scale logging operations mowing down his valley's virgin forests. In 1901, Colonel Wilson B. Townsend and several associates formed the Little River Lumber Company and bought up of land along Little River between Tuckaleechee and the river's source on the slopes of Clingman's Dome. Walker, however, refused to sell Middle Prong, forcing Townsend's operations eastward to what is now Elkmont. Townsend set up a band saw mill in Tuckaleechee, and the town that bears his name grew up in the vicinity. He formed the Little River Railroad to connect the mill with the