About Davis House (Mountain Farm Museum)
The Mountain Farm Museum is built around one house, and the Davis House is it. Everything else at the museum, the barn, the cribs, the springhouse, is arranged around the main dwelling the way a family would have arranged a farm.
The house
The Davis House dates to about 1900 and is a more substantial home than the cabins that came before it. It is a frame house of the early twentieth century with a porch, set in a yard with a garden. The setting is what the museum is for: the house is meant to be read with its yard, outbuildings and fields, not alone.
The house and its neighbors were moved to the Oconaluftee site from other parts of the park, and the park's own booklet, keyed to numbered posts, lets you walk through the farm in sequence.
Visiting
- Where: the Mountain Farm Museum, beside the Oconaluftee Visitor Center at 1194 Newfound Gap Road, Cherokee, on the North Carolina side.
- Access: the grounds are free and open in daylight. The house is typically viewed from the outside, with signs explaining how it was lived in.
- Time to allow: 45 to 60 minutes.
- Parking: the visitor center lot; a parking tag is required for stops over 15 minutes.
- Nearby: elk graze in the meadow beside the museum, usually at dawn and dusk.
Notes for planning
Mingus Mill, about a half mile to a mile north, is closed until further notice, but the museum is unaffected. The Oconaluftee River Trail starts at the visitor center and is a flat, easy walk to Cherokee. See the NPS Oconaluftee page for the latest. If you have time, combine the museum with the drive to Newfound Gap, 45 minutes up the mountain.
Good to know
- Do I need a parking tag?
- A Park It Forward parking tag ($5 a day, $15 a week or $40 a year) is required for any vehicle parked more than 15 minutes inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Entry is free, and federal passes such as America the Beautiful do not replace the tag.
