Building a Park, Buying Out a People

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited national park in America, drawing more than eleven million people a year, but its creation came at a very human cost. Unlike the great western parks carved from federal wilderness, this one had to be assembled from private land, thousands of parcels owned by farmers, loggers, and mountain families who had lived here for generations. Beginning in the nineteen twenties, a coalition of boosters, schoolchildren who donated pennies, and philanthropists including John D.

Rockefeller Junior raised the money to buy it all. Ben Hooper, a former governor of Tennessee, served as the principal land purchasing agent. The park was officially established by Congress on June fifteenth, nineteen thirty-four, and dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt in nineteen forty.

But behind those milestones lay evictions. Homesteaders, timber crews, and whole communities were bought out and forced to leave the coves and hollows their families had farmed for over a century. Some sold willingly, some fought, and a few negotiated lifetime leases that let them stay until they died.

The little farms and mills vanished, the forest crept back, and Gatlinburg, sitting right at the new park's doorstep, transformed almost overnight from an isolated mountain hamlet into a booming gateway town. The park's beauty is real, but so is the memory of the families who gave up their homes to make it.