In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it's easy to get lost in the past. The nation's most-visited national park has nearly 80 historic buildings scattered throughout its 800 square miles, evidence that until the 1930s, children attended school there while their parents coaxed corn from the hardscrabble soil of the southern Appalachian Mountains.

Then the federal government decided to step in and create a park to protect the area, untouched by the last ice age and straddling the Tennessee-North Carolina border.

Today, as the park prepares to celebrate its 75th anniversary June 13-15, wildlife outnumbers people. And visitors, about 9 million to 10 million a year, can hike and enjoy nature. They can also walk into mountain cabins and churches and family cemeteries left behind by those not-so-long-ago residents, many of whom didn't move willingly.

Raymond Caldwell, 85, of Waynesville, N.C., lived in the Cataloochee area, in the southeast section of the park, until age 15. He says the government paid his family $4,000 to leave the 160-acre farm they'd owned for a century. When they moved, he says, "I drove a team of horses with a wagon and farm implements hanging off it. My 8-year-old brother was with me."

Caldwell says he liked living in the mountains, but it wasn't easy. "It was pretty rough terrain. We were just getting by," he says in a phone interview. He remembers grinding corn at a water-powered gristmill. His family, with eight children, grew corn and raised cattle for beef.