Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center: Before the Park
Near Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
The Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center opened in Townsend in two thousand six, sitting on ten acres at the western entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and it exists to answer a question the park itself tends to skip over: who was here before it became wilderness?
The answer is layered. The Cherokee had used these mountains for centuries before European contact, hunting, fishing, gathering plants, maintaining towns and trade routes through the high valleys. They were removed from most of this land by treaty and force in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, though the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians retained a reservation just over the ridge in North Carolina that exists to this day.
Behind the Cherokee came the Scots-Irish and English and German settlers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They built farms in coves and hollows, raised cattle on bald summits, logged the lower slopes, ran grist mills on fast streams. The Little River Lumber Company, incorporated in nineteen oh one, began the industrial clear-cutting of the Tennessee side of the range, and by the nineteen twenties virtually all the old-growth forest on the lower elevations was gone.
When the national park was established in the nineteen thirties, the state of Tennessee used eminent domain to remove the remaining farming families. Some left willingly for payment they considered fair. Others fought and lost. The landscape that visitors walk through today, so apparently wild and ancient, is largely second-growth forest no more than ninety years old, growing back over the footprints of farms and communities.
The Heritage Center holds that history in its galleries, its outdoor Appalachian village of reconstructed historic structures, and its archive. It interprets Native American life, pioneer settlement, the logging era, and the complicated human cost of park creation. The five-hundred-seat outdoor amphitheater hosts traditional music events that connect the living Appalachian culture to everything the museum describes. It is a small institution doing a large job: keeping the human story legible inside a landscape that was designed to look as though people were never here.
