The Great Smoky Arts and Crafts Community

Just east of downtown Gatlinburg, along a winding eight mile loop through the Glades, you will find something that exists almost nowhere else in America. The Great Smoky Arts and Crafts Community is billed as the largest group of independent artisans in the country, with around one hundred makers working in studios, cabins, and shops scattered along the country roads. It traces its roots to the late nineteen thirties, when local craftspeople banded together to sell their work near the tools and materials they used to create it.

These were mountain craftsmen carrying on skills handed down through generations, in a region where the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School had helped revive crafts decades earlier. Today the loop is a living gallery of Appalachian handwork, potters at their wheels, weavers at their looms, and artisans making candles, quilts, brooms, jewelry, leather, and stained glass, many still using traditional techniques and materials. In a town famous for its neon strip, this quiet loop is where Gatlinburg's oldest identity, a community of people who make things by hand, still thrives.