The Rockefeller Gift: Five Million Dollars That Finished a Park

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was the first national park east of the Mississippi established without federal land purchases. That unusual condition had a practical consequence: Tennessee and North Carolina had to raise the money themselves to buy out the private landowners, roughly sixty-five hundred of them, including major timber and railroad companies that had already logged much of the watershed.

By nineteen twenty-seven, the fundraising had stalled. The states had raised enough to acquire some of the land, but not nearly enough to complete the acquisition. Private landowners were losing patience. The timber interests had already stripped the merchantable trees from their holdings and were in no hurry to sell at prices that reflected what the cutover land was now worth rather than what it had been worth before the logging.

That year, John D. Rockefeller Jr. contributed five million dollars to the acquisition fund, routed through the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, named for his mother. It was, at that time, the single largest private gift to a national park in American history. It broke the logjam. Tennessee and North Carolina completed the acquisition by the early nineteen-thirties.

The money solved one problem and created no solution to another. The land could be bought without compensating the families who were already living on it. Some of those families received something; many received far less than they had expected. The five-million-dollar gift that finished the park and the displacement that accompanied it are part of the same transaction. The dedication stone at Newfound Gap, three miles ahead, records the gift. It does not record what it cost the people who were home.