Sevier County: Gateway to the Smokies

Sevier County was formed on September eighteenth, seventeen ninety-four, from part of neighboring Jefferson County, named for John Sevier, frontier hero and first governor of Tennessee. The county seat, Sevierville, became the eighth-oldest city in the state. For most of its history Sevier County was a quiet Appalachian farming community, growing corn and raising hogs on the mountain slopes.

Everything changed with the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the nineteen thirties, which placed roughly thirty percent of the park's total acreage within the county's borders. Today the county hosts millions of park visitors annually, making it one of the most tourism-intensive counties in the American South, while still carrying the mountain character that shaped it for two centuries before the tourists arrived.