White Rock Lookout Tower, On Mount Cammerer near the Appalachian Trail, Cosby, Cocke County, TN

2012 Leicester B. Holland Prize, First Place
Significance: The White Rock Lookout Tower, built between 1937 and 1939 by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), is representative of that time's fire management policy of complete fire suppression in all national parks and forests. The young men of the CCC provided the labor to construct thousands of fire towers across the country, including nine of the ten found in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GRSM). These sites served as a cohesive unit that both detected and suppressed fires. In spite of their reliance on other towers, the lookouts lived a life of isolation that required the patience to watch the forests daily from sunrise to sunset and the agility to be on alert at a moment's notice during a lightning storm. In the 1970s, fire management techniques and approaches to fire patrol changed, and the towers in GRSM were abandoned. Over the next decade, the park removed most of the structures from this fire management system, and the White Rock Lookout Tower is one of only four remaining towers within the park's boundary.
This tower and other fire towers across the country have evolved through the years from functional structures to symbolic architecture. They provide some of the only references to early Park architecture in their remote locations and show how man has intervened on the landscape and left his mark.
Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N1795
Survey number: HABS TN-262
Building/structure dates: 1939 Initial Construction