Greenbrier: The Smoky Mountain Valley That Was Erased
Near Gatlinburg, Tennessee
The Greenbrier valley on the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountains was once home to several hundred people. Today it is wilderness, crossed by hiking trails and a single paved road that dead-ends at a trailhead. The difference between those two realities is the story of what it cost to create a national park.
The first Euro-American settler here was William Whaley, who arrived from South Carolina around eighteen hundred and built at the confluence of Porters Creek and the Middle Fork of the Little Pigeon River. His brother Middleton followed soon after. Over the next century, a tight community of extended families grew around them, Whaleys, McCarters, Burnses, Ogles. By the early nineteen twenties, Greenbrier had eight distinct neighborhoods, multiple churches, schools, stores, sawmills, a hotel, and a campground. It was isolated, but it was not poor in the ways outsiders imagined mountain communities to be.
In the nineteen twenties, conservationists and boosters in Knoxville began pushing for a national park in the Smokies. The effort required buying or condemning hundreds of thousands of acres of private land. Tennessee and North Carolina used eminent domain to remove families who refused to sell. One Whaley family was displaced three times, first by park land purchases, then by a dam project, then by wartime relocation for the Manhattan Project.
The park was formally established in nineteen thirty-four. By then the houses were gone, the churches were gone, the stores were gone. The Civilian Conservation Corps moved in between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen thirty-six, building roads and trails through the cleared land. What they built is still here: the Porters Creek Trail, the Maddron Bald Trail, the stone walls and footbridges that look ancient but date to the Depression era.
The John Messer Barn, built in eighteen seventy-five, is the last standing structure from the old Greenbrier Cove community. Everything else is reclaimed forest. Walk far enough in and you will find chimney stones and garden terraces half-buried in rhododendron. That is the only monument the community got.
