The Sugarlands: A Valley Erased to Make a Park

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of the most visited places in the United States, but before it was a park it was home to people. The Sugarlands valley, now the site of the park headquarters and visitor center, was once an Appalachian community of farms, mills, orchards, and family cemeteries. Its erasure is an essential part of the park's history, one that visitors rarely hear.

The valley took its name from the sugar maples that lined its streams. Settlers had been farming this land since around eighteen hundred. The first Europeans arrived and found a place already shaped by centuries of Cherokee use; the Oconaluftee River drainage just south of here had been a Cherokee thoroughfare for generations. By the early twentieth century the Sugarlands was home to three distinct communities clustered in the valley, including the Fighting Creek community, connected by wagon roads and populated by extended families who had worked the same ridges for five or six generations.

The campaign to create a national park in the Smokies began in earnest in the nineteen twenties. Unlike western parks carved from federal land, this park required the forced purchase of private land. Tennessee and North Carolina used condemnation proceedings to acquire the property; the Rockefeller family donated five million dollars to accelerate the buyouts. Families who resisted were ultimately removed.

Most structures were demolished or allowed to decay. A few were preserved as interpretive exhibits. The community that had called this valley home for a hundred and thirty years simply ceased to exist. The land was reforested, the orchards reclaimed by forest, the cleared fields grown back to oak and tulip poplar.

Today the Sugarlands Visitor Center stands near the heart of what was once a living neighborhood. The park is magnificent. The community it replaced is worth remembering.