Lost Creek Diaries

Lost Creek Diaries

Alex Hutchins

Copyright 2021, Alex Hutchins

All Rights Reserved

 

Introduction

Great Smokey Mountain College was founded in 1835 by an Educator named Calvin McClung, as a non-denominational, private, liberal arts college focusing on nursing in Lost Creek, Tennessee on the shores of the Lost Creek river, not too far from Morristown, Tennessee in the north, Jefferson City, Tennessee in the east, and Knoxville, Tennessee in the south. Funding for the College came from private investors who had made their money in tobacco, cotton, iron, liquor, lumber, manufacturing, hardware, and munitions.

Currently, the college offers over 90 courses of study, enrolls 3,000 students annually, and employs over 250 faculty, administrative support staff, and maintenance workers. Most of the increase in students derived from foreign students from the following countries: Japan, Mexico, Ukraine, Russia, England, France, Italy, Sicily, India, and Iran The school has seen over 40 Presidents come and go with the currently having been there over twice as long as his predecessors – Dr. Lionel, “Li” Mudgar Crowninshield (PRONOUNCED: Crow – nin – sheld) who received his Bachelor’s in Philosophy and Religion from Harvard, his Master’s in Comparative Religions and Philosophy from Yale, and his Doctorates from Cambridge in Philosophy, Ethics, and Comparative Religion. Before accepting the position at Great Smokey Mountain College, he was Provost at American University in Beirut, Lebanon.

Dr. Crowningshield’s wife Vivian Kennedy is directly related to the Kennedy family of Massachusetts and speaks with a slight accent even though most of her life she has lived in the Northern Virginia area of the United States. She received a Journalism degree from Harvard which is where she and Lionel and got married after they both graduated. While both Lionel and Vivian are from large families with multiple brothers and sisters, neither one ever expressed a desire to the other one for children either conceived or adopted.

Dr. Crowninshield’s predecessor was very talented in hiring some of the best faculty members on the east coast, but was not that concerned with the financial aspects of running a college and when he took the helm a decade ago, he had inherited a debt of $50 million that he has managed to cut in half without eliminating too many programs or too many faculty in the process. There will continue to be cuts in expenses with revenue increases each year until the debt has been reduced to less than $10 million according to the wishes of the current Board of Trustees.

Dr. Crowninshield turned down a substantial gift offered by the Cherokee Gambling Casino in North Carolina that would have immediately helped them reach their goals; but, decided to accept a purchase offer for Glencoe Plantation from a former student, July Galilahi, that reduced the debt to all but a few hundreds of thousands of dollars.

However, there were other rumors that had been floating around for decades but no one paid any attention to them, as they were just rumors, but if the new owners of the Glencoe Plantation start digging around too deep, those rumors may no longer be rumors, and while these rumors occurred before Dr. Crowninshield was hired, many of the locals believe that some of those activities are still taking place right under everyone’s noses.

Just whatever those activities are, no one wants to talk about claiming the shock of it all, would simply destroy this community and the college and that what is unknown should remain unknown; although and in the spirit of true gossip, the locals still want to whisper about it in private or in the shadows of dark streets after every has been asleep in their beds for hours.

Glencoe Plantation was constructed 1503 and managed all the farmlands on either side of the.   Mossy Creek, approximately 500 acres on either side. The plantation was destroyed during the Civil War and rebuilt in 1835, the same year that Great Smokey Mountain College was founded and chartered.

Most of its 1,000 acres were sold to pay for the restoration, with the remaining monies being given to the college and the pledge that when both the current owners died that the college would receive the title to the plantation and do with it whatever they wanted to. When the college finally inherited Glencoe Plantation, it was transformed into a faculty retreat for the most senior of faculty members but was forced to sell in 2015 to help pay down the college’s debt.

The new owner of Glencoe Plantation, July Galilahi, is a former graduate of the Great Smokey[ Mountain College who acquired her wealth by purchasing Walmart, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon stock during their IPO’s and later sold some of the stock to invest in marijuana farms and retail stores in Colorado in 2012 and in other states that had legalized marijuana after Colorado.

At the time of July Galilahi’s purchase of Glencoe Plantation, the Black Lives Matter movement was moving throughout the country at an alarmingly fast pace and while Tennessee, especially East Tennessee was not a liberal stronghold, the WOKE movement was also gaining a foothold in some communities, but especially among the black students in all colleges and universities in the area, forcing the white population to be a little more discreet in their activities and in their communications with each other.