Little River Railroad: The Tracks That Cleared the Smokies

In nineteen oh one, a Pennsylvania timber businessman named W. B. Townsend and a group of investors chartered the Little River Lumber Company and the Little River Railroad. They acquired more than seventy-six thousand acres of old-growth forest on the Tennessee side of the Smoky Mountains and laid one hundred fifty miles of track to reach it.

Over the next four decades, the company logged most of that land and removed about two billion board feet of lumber. The railroad also carried tourists and sportsmen into the mountains, giving many city dwellers their first experience of the Smokies, and inadvertently building the case for a national park. When the park was established in the nineteen thirties, the railroad ceased operations. Today the Little River Railroad and Lumber Company Museum in Townsend preserves the story of the company and the railroad, telling the story of an industry that stripped a mountain range and, in doing so, created the conditions for its preservation.