Nichols and Shepard traction engine rests in Injun Creek, Great Smoky Mountains National Park

See the Greenbrier Region web page for an interactive location map.

A wrecked Nichols and Shepard steam traction engine is located three miles down the Grapeyard Ridge Trail when starting from the Greenbrier Road trailhead. The wreck is at the bottom of a hill where the trail crosses Injun Creek, and it is impossible to miss. You must make your way down into a gully to get to it, but this is not too difficult. This is one of the coolest things I found in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

A steam traction engine looks like an old tractor, but instead of hauling things, it served as a portable steam engine that can be driven to and from different destinations and hooked up to any belt-driven machine and used as a source of power. Here in the Smokies it was used to run the saws of a small lumber mill. I found a YouTube video featuring a restored Nichols and Shepard engine actually powering a lumber saw at a Pioneer Days festival. I’m not sure if this is the same model, but the video gives you an excellent idea as to what this tractor looked like and how it operated.

Nichols and Shepard was a company based out of Battle Creek, Michigan, that made farm machinery, steam engines, and mill machinery. Threshing machines were its main farm equipment, and the company had about 10% of that market by the late 1800s. Another of their products was the steam traction engine, one of which now lies in Injun Creek.