On a quiet, tree-lined street, sits a small cemetery. The grave markers have started to erode and some even lay broken and chipped on the rocky ground, covered by leaves and moss.  Thousands of people have passed this cemetery over the years, never knowing that one of the founding members of Ridgetop, Tennessee now resides beneath the grass.

Dave Smiley, born in Ireland in 1780, came to America to make a better life for himself.  Sometime around 1805, the Irish immigrant landed on the eastern coast of North America.  There, he met his future bride, Temperance, and together they journeyed out to the rocky terrain of Tennessee. The couple settled on over 500 acres of land upon a large ridge that would later become a resort get-away for the rich and also a literal turning point for the Smiley family.

“My father built this cabin all by hand,” Katrina Smiley Mercer, a seventh-generation Smiley, says as she lovingly peers over the deck railing and down upon the family pond she grew up fishing out of. “When your family has lived somewhere [for] so long, you don’t have the option to leave. The ridge still holds our family’s heartbeat.” 

The cabin that Katrina, her husband, and their daughter, Krislyn Mercer, now reside in is Katrina’s childhood home, built from logs on the original acreage that Dave Smiley once farmed. They cleared the ridge together as a family back then and the ancestors of Dave and Temperance still help to maintain that land today.

Katrina’s father and Krislyn’s grandfather, Steve Smiley, often walks across the street from the cabin he built to maintain and preserve the gravestones in the Spring Hill Cemetery. There are some Smileys buried here, even dating back to the turn of the century, but not all have familial ties. “We always say that at first our family made the community but now the community makes up our family,” Katrina says.

Some Smiley ancestors have stayed close to their Ridgetop and agricultural roots. There is Smiley’s Produce, located alongside Highway 41, which has grown and sold produce for decades. There is also Turning Point Farm, a wedding and event venue located on the very same spot of land that Dave and Temperance first built their homestead centuries ago, but no longer owned by a member of the Smiley family. 

The family who now owns the land, The Greens, extended a special gesture to honor the Smileys and their contribution to this community. “Mrs. Green was arm-in-arm with my Pepaw, walking him around and pointing things out to him. It was so neat for him to be walking around the land that he was literally born on and seeing what it had become. At one point he put his hand on the barn and looked out over the property and I could just feel it all coming back to him.  He was looking out over his lifetime and it had come full-circle," Krislyn reminisced.  

“I feel that it’s a part of my legacy now to keep this alive and put it all together,” she says as she sits in the same living room her mother learned to walk in and amongst the trees upon the ridge that her great-great-great-great-great grandfather once decided to call home.

Special thanks to Derek Gillhamer of Dot Road Photography for photographing Katrina's homestead and sharing his photos with Stay Positive News.