History of the Park

The southern Appalachians are among the oldest mountains on earth, older than the Atlantic Ocean. The rocks at Kuwohi (formerly Clingmans Dome) are more than a billion years old, and the range was once taller than the Himalayas before wearing down to today's rounded summits.

People have lived here since at least 9,000 BCE, when small hunting groups moved through the valleys. Agricultural communities developed by about 1000 BCE, and the Mississippian culture, with its town mounds, was active in the river valleys by around 1000 CE. The Cherokee had towns throughout the region by about 1500 CE.

Spanish expeditions under Hernando de Soto (1540) and Juan Pardo (1567) made the first European contact with Cherokee communities in what is now western North Carolina. They were looking for gold and silver. They moved on, but the diseases they brought devastated Native populations.

British traders from coastal Carolina were trading with the Cherokee by the mid-1700s. Treaties with Britain gave way to a long series of forced land cessions to the United States, and Cherokee territory shrank steadily.

In 1838 and 1839 the U.S. government forcibly removed about 16,000 Cherokee people from their southeastern homelands to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Roughly 4,000 died. A smaller group avoided removal in the mountains, and with others who were later allowed to stay, formed the core of today's Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. The Qualla Boundary, their sovereign land, sits just outside the park. See our Cherokee culture guide for more.

After removal, mostly Scots-Irish, German and English families settled the hollows and built small subsistence farms. By 1850 thousands of people lived in what is now the park, in Cades Cove, Cataloochee, Greenbrier, Sugarlands, Elkmont and dozens of smaller settlements.

They were largely self-sufficient: corn, beans, squash, livestock, hunting and timber. They built churches, one-room schools and water-powered mills. Many of the buildings you can visit today date to this era.

In the early 1900s large-scale logging swept the southern Appalachians. The Little River Lumber Company, based at Townsend, and the Champion Fibre Company, based at Smokemont, cut enormous tracts. Logging railroads ran up nearly every major drainage, and by the 1920s much of the range had been cut. What remained, some of the last big old-growth forest in the East, became a central argument for protection.

By the 1910s, Americans who had watched the loss of western forests began to push for an eastern national park, and the Smokies were a leading candidate. Key figures included:

• Horace Kephart, author of Our Southern Highlanders (1913), who wrote about the mountains and the need to protect them.
• David Chapman, a Knoxville businessman who led the campaign for a park.
• Laura Thornborough, a writer whose work helped spread the case for a Smokies park.
• Willis and Anne Davis, Knoxville conservationists who helped found the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association in 1923.

Money was the obstacle. Unlike western parks carved from federal land, the Smokies required buying private land. The legislatures of Tennessee and North Carolina each pledged about $2 million in 1927, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave $5 million in 1928 in memory of his mother. Private donations and schoolchildren's pennies added more. Congress authorized the park in 1926, subject to the land being acquired, and it was established in 1934.

Creating the park meant removing more than a thousand families from their homes. Buyouts were more orderly than the Trail of Tears, since families received compensation or, in some cases, lifetime leases (a few people stayed into the 1980s), but the displacement was still painful. Whole communities disappeared. Family cemeteries, churches and homesteads were abandoned or partly preserved.

The park now tells those stories with more honesty, through the Mountain Farm Museum, the preserved buildings at Cades Cove and Cataloochee Valley, and interpretive signs across the park.

President Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps built much of the park's early infrastructure between 1933 and 1942. Work included:

• Roads and bridges, along with stone walls
• Trails and campgrounds
• Fire lookouts, most since removed (the Mount Cammerer tower was preserved)

The CCC's young men, many from Appalachian families, shaped the park you see today. The Kuwohi observation tower is a later addition, built in 1959.

Roosevelt dedicated the park on September 2, 1940, at Newfound Gap, in front of a crowd of roughly 10,000. The park had been officially established in 1934, but the 1940 ceremony marked its public opening. The Rockefeller Memorial at the gap marks the occasion.

• 1976: the park is designated an International Biosphere Reserve.
• 1983: UNESCO names it a World Heritage Site.
• 1996: the Kituwah mound site is returned to Eastern Band ownership.
• 2001: elk are reintroduced in Cataloochee.
• 2016: the Chimney Tops 2 wildfire starts in late November. On November 28, hurricane-force winds drive it into Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, where 14 people died and about 2,500 structures were damaged or destroyed, and it burned thousands of acres of the park. The Chimney Tops summit scramble remains closed.
• 2023: the Park It Forward parking tag program begins on March 1.
• 2024: Clingmans Dome is officially renamed Kuwohi in September, restoring the Cherokee name. Hurricane Helene later that month damages trails and roads on the North Carolina side, and some are still being repaired in 2026.

The park preserves dozens of historic structures across several districts:

• Cades Cove: the John Oliver Cabin (early 1820s), three churches, the Elijah Oliver Place, John Cable Mill, the Tipton Place and Carter Shields Cabin.
• Cataloochee: Palmer Chapel, Beech Grove School, Caldwell House and the Woody homes.
• Roaring Fork: the Ephraim Bales and Alfred Reagan places and the Bud Ogle homestead.
• Mountain Farm Museum: relocated log buildings arranged as an 1850s-era farmstead near Oconaluftee.
• Elkmont: the ruins of the Wonderland Hotel, the Appalachian Clubhouse and historic summer cottages.

Most exteriors are open, with rules against climbing and removing artifacts. Mingus Mill, near Oconaluftee, is currently closed for preservation work, so check before you plan around it. The Walker Sisters cabin in the Little Greenbrier area is worth the walk: five unmarried sisters lived there into the 1960s and declined to leave after the park was created.

• Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart (1913), the foundational book.
• Strangers in High Places by Michael Frome, a classic history of the park.
• Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community, 1818 to 1937 by Durwood Dunn.