Gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains

Look south and the ridgelines stack up in blue haze toward the most visited national park in the United States. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park draws more than eleven million recreational visits a year, far more than any western park, and Pigeon Forge is one of its front doors. But this park was born differently from Yellowstone or Yosemite.

There was no vast block of federal wilderness to simply fence off. Nearly all of this land was privately owned, more than a thousand tracts of farms, homesteads, and logging camps. To make a park, Tennessee and North Carolina had to buy it, parcel by parcel.

The money came from the states, from a five million dollar gift from the Rockefeller family's Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, and from ordinary people, including school children who donated their pennies. Congress authorized the park in nineteen twenty-six and formally established it in nineteen thirty-four, and President Franklin Roosevelt stood at Newfound Gap in nineteen forty to dedicate it before a crowd of thousands. The cost was human as well as financial.

More than a thousand families were removed from the coves and hollows they had farmed for generations, their churches, cabins, and schools left to the forest. What you see today as pristine wilderness is in large part a landscape that was emptied of its people to become a park, and Pigeon Forge grew up right at its gate.