The Sugarlands
Near Gatlinburg, Tennessee
Just south of Gatlinburg, where the road climbs toward the crest of the Smokies, lies a broad valley called the Sugarlands. The name is said to come from the sugar maples that once filled it, whose sap early settlers boiled down into syrup in the eighteen hundreds. As the Ogles and their neighbors spread out from White Oak Flats, families pushed into these bottomlands and built small farms, forming three little communities along the Little Pigeon River and Fighting Creek.
The Sugarlands also gathered a reputation as moonshine country, immortalized in the writings of the outdoorsman Horace Kephart. But locals who grew up there insisted he exaggerated. Some who grew up there said most of their neighbors were simply hardscrabble farmers.
When the national park was created in the nineteen thirties, those communities were bought out and cleared away, and the forest reclaimed the fields. Today the valley holds the park's headquarters and the Sugarlands Visitor Center, one of the busiest gateways into the whole park, the first stop for millions of people heading up toward Newfound Gap. Walk the quiet nature trail here and you can still find old stone walls and homesites hidden in the trees, the ghost outlines of a community that farmed this ground long before it became the front door of America's most popular park.
