You don’t have to be a Methuselah, though it helps, to recall some of the many callings that been lost to our new, fast paced world. But here in the heart of the Smoky Mountains, it is just a little easier to imagine a time that consisted of hand cut nails, a homemade shoe last, a coffee mill, an ox-yoke and a grindstone.
It was only yesterday or maybe it just seems that way to the old timers, the small town milliner was still making hats for the ladies. Like so many of the lost occupations, that business could not compete with mass production.
One of the most welcome characters was the traveling medicine man. But he, too, like the aviation barnstormer, has passed on. Neither the peddler nor the scissors-sharpener, both very familiar figures, come around anymore. Gone too are the lightning rod salesman, the liveryman, the streetcar conductor and the Western Union messenger boy on his bicycle. There is no longer a place for the lamp lighter and the chimney sweep.
In a mechanized and motorized world there is no longer a place for the cartwright, the wheelwright and the wainwright. They have been retired along with the local gunsmith and tinsmith. The old time cobbler who went from house to house has gone the way of the tanner and his tanbark mill.
The great lumber boom of the 19th century brought on a great cry for axmen and well as men skilled in the use of the cross cut saw. But the age of speed killed off the ax specialist. And the maker of ox-yokes had to turn to another occupation when timber started moving by rail and truck.
The harness-maker, who turned out his trappings by hand, fell the victim of the machine and the horseless carriage. The iceman found himself out of a job with the advent of the home freezer.
Right now many an occupation will be obsolete tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. And they will take their place along with cobbler and chimney sweep in the world of yesterday.