Radford Gatlin, the Man Run Out of His Own Town

Here is a strange twist of history. The town is named Gatlinburg, but the man it honors was so disliked that his neighbors eventually ran him off. Radford Gatlin arrived in White Oak Flats in the eighteen fifties and opened a general store.

When a post office was established inside that store in eighteen fifty-six, the community took on the name Gatlinburg. But Gatlin was a difficult man. He sympathized with the South in a fiercely Union leaning community, and as the Civil War approached, he set himself against nearly all his neighbors.

He feuded bitterly with the powerful Ogle family, traded lawsuits like weapons, and is said to have started his own splinter church. He is said to have tried to claim thousands of acres of land already occupied by settled families. The friction kept building until around eighteen fifty-nine, when the town had finally had enough.

By most accounts Gatlin was driven out, leaving the mountains behind for good. He never came back, but the name stuck to the post office, and so a cantankerous storekeeper nobody wanted is remembered forever on every road sign, every postcard, and every welcome banner in one of America's most visited mountain towns.