Perry's Camp: Tourism Comes to the Smoky Mountains
Near Gatlinburg, Tennessee
The strip of road between Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge is one of the most heavily developed tourist corridors in the United States, a continuous run of hotels, go-kart tracks, pancake houses, and amusement attractions that draws tens of millions of visitors a year. It did not start that way. It started with a man named Charlie Perry and a handful of cabins along the Little Pigeon River, around nineteen twenty-eight.
Perry bought land where Flat Branch joins the Little Pigeon and began building what he called a tourist court, one of the earliest in the region. He was working six years before Great Smoky Mountains National Park officially opened, which means he was betting that the mountains would draw visitors even without federal designation. He was right, though he could not have imagined how right.
The original resort was modest but inventive. The resort had eleven cabins around a central restaurant with living quarters upstairs. One of them was a log and stone house that already existed from the eighteen fifties, which he incorporated into the layout. To generate electricity, he constructed a small dam across the river and ran water through a powerhouse. Guests on the east bank of the river reached their cabins by a swinging bridge. Outside the restaurant, Perry hung a disabled moonshine still as advertisement, a wink at the culture of the mountains and a hook for visitors who came from cities and had no idea what a real still looked like. Inside the dining room, a water wheel drove a fan in the ceiling.
Perry continued expanding the property over the next two decades. The Mack Marshall family bought it in nineteen fifty-two and operated it for generations. The property was added to the National Register of Historic Places for what it represents: the beginning of a tourist economy that would eventually overtake everything else in this valley.
Charleston had sea islands. The Berkshires had grand resorts. The Smokies got Perry's Camp, and from that modest beginning, everything that followed.
