Nannette Enloe: A Remembrance

Late last year, Tremont lost someone who has been a friend to Tremont and to Walker Valley for a long time.

Nannette Enloe (1932-2025) was a longtime program participant from Georgia. She died on December 14 after suffering a fall and then a significant brain bleed. She was 93.

If memory serves, Nannette first came to a photography workshop in the late 2000s. When she learned about the Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program, she doggedly began attending every course until she graduated in 2013.

Around this same time, she started attending our twice-annual hiking weeks, conducted in partnership with Road Scholar. It was then that she made fast friends with Sandy McHone, an intrepid and insuppressibly positive presence at each and every hiking week.

It was during one such week, on the final night, that I was leading a ramble to Girl Scout Island. While there, Nannette broke into song.

“What tune is that?” I asked.

“That’s the theme song from Camp Margaret Townsend,” she replied.

It turned out that she had spent a single summer as a counselor at the Girl Scout camp, then located on the former farmstead of Will and Nancy Walker. This was in 1949, when she was a student at nearby Maryville College. More than six decades later, she still remembered the song.

A nationwide polio outbreak occurred that summer. Public swimming pools were closed, as were movie theaters and other recreational spaces. When parents began arriving in the parking lot to take their girls home, Nannette was assigned to convince them to follow the advice of healthcare authorities, who believed it was safer for girls to stay at camp.

In more recent years, for three years in a row, Nannette attended Naturalist Week (“summer camp for adults”) at Tremont. Her last visit was in June 2024, when she shared this advice with everyone during the closing circle:

“We need to continually find ways to grow. I still have ways to grow, even at age 90.”

“It is important to find connections in nature. Not just at Tremont but back home. For me, bear Atlanta. The Lord provides. You just have to look for it.”

– Jeremy Lloyd, Manager of Field and College Programs

“For me, at my age, it’s so wonderful to think that a little old lady can come up and add to this. And at the same time, learn. I don’t know it all – these kids know so much more than me. It’s just been so wonderful, fun, and invigorating.”

I remember doing yoga next to Nannette during the first-ever Naturalist Week. It was early… 7:15 am or so, and she was right next to me. Her practice was beautiful, and it was such a gorgeous morning in Walker Valley, right in front of the dorms, birds singing, and the summer air slightly chilled. I remembered watching her breathe deeply and with her eyes closed and thinking that I wanted to grow up to be like her. Always trying new things and caring deeply about places and people… Wow, we were lucky to have her.

– Megan Womack, Development Director

“God’s creation is so magnificent, and the splendor of all of that can be overwhelming, but we must realize our responsibility for taking care of that so it will be there for your children’s children and your children’s children’s children.”

Read Counselor at Girl Scout Camp Margaret Townsend in 1950 still drawn to Tremont in the Daily Times

I had the privilege of sitting next to Nannette one afternoon during Naturalist Week. Around us, people were carving wooden spoons, stitching felt artwork, and filling pages of their nature journals – a lively day at adult summer camp.

That’s when I learned that she had first come to Tremont as a camp counselor, back when it was Camp Margaret Townsend in the early days of the national park. I’ve seen photographs of those Girl Scouts, and it delighted me to imagine Nannette among them – practicing archery, splashing in the swimming hole, singing around the campfire with her friends.

I asked her how Tremont had changed since the 1940s. She thought for a moment and said the spirit of the place is the same – giving kids the chance to experience the grandness of nature and exploration – but “that forest over there is new.”

The response made me laugh, but also blew my mind. I knew that much of Walker Valley had been logged – that many of the Smokies’ forests are younger than they appear – but I had never felt that truth so personally. In her lifetime, a forest had grown. Time suddenly felt compressed. “A century ago” no longer felt distant. It broke the barrier between “then” and “now” – a reminder that it is all part of the same unfolding story.

Nannette was funny and fun-loving. It was so apparent. I will miss seeing her in the summer, and I remain thankful for the new perspective she gave me.

– Erin Rosolina, Director of Marketing