Gatlinburg is a city in Sevier County, Tennessee, United States. As of the 2000 U.S. Census, Gatlinburg had a population of 3,828. The city is a popular vacation resort, as it rests on the border of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park along U.S. Highway 441, which connects Gatlinburg to Cherokee, North Carolina through the national park.
Geography
Gatlinburg is located at 35°43′19″N 83°29′58″W / 35.72194°N 83.49944°W / 35.72194; -83.49944 (35.721925, -83.499334). According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 10.1 square miles (26.3 km²) 10.1 square miles (26.3 km²) of it is land and none of the area is covered with water.
Gatlinburg is hemmed in on all sides by high ridges, with the Le Conte and Sugarland Mountain massifs rising to the south, Cove Mountain to the west, Big Ridge to the northeast, and Grapeyard Ridge to the east. The main watershed is the West Fork of the Little Pigeon River, which flows from its source on the slopes of Mount Collins to its junction with the Little Pigeon at Sevierville.
U.S. Route 441 is the main traffic artery in Gatlinburg, running through the center of town from north to south. Along 441, Pigeon Forge is approximately 6 miles to the north, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (viz, the Sugarlands) is approximately 2 miles to the south. TN-73 (Little River Road) forks off from 441 in the Sugarlands and heads east for roughly 25 miles, connecting the Gatlinburg area with Townsend and Blount County. U.S. Route 321 enters Gatlinburg from Pigeon Forge and Wears Valley to the north before turning east, connecting Gatlinburg with Newport and Cosby.
History
Early history
For centuries, Cherokee hunters (and Native American hunters pre-dating the Cherokee) used a footpath known as the Indian Gap Trail to access the abundant game in the forests and coves of the Smokies. This trail connected the Great Indian Warpath with the Rutherford Indian Trace, following the West Fork of the Little Pigeon River from modern-day Sevierville through modern-day Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, and the Sugarlands, crossing the crest of the Smokies along the slopes of Mount Collins, and descending into North Carolina along the banks of the Oconaluftee. US-441 largely follows this same route today, although it crests at Newfound Gap rather than Indian Gap.
While various 18th century European and early American hunters and fur trappers probably traversed or camped in the flats where Gatlinburg is now situated, it was Edgefield, South Carolina native William Ogle (1751-1803) who first decided to permanently settle in the area. With the help of the Cherokee, Ogle cut, hewed, and notched logs in the flats, planning to erect a cabin the following year. He returned home to Edgefield to retrieve his family and grow one final crop for supplies. Shortly after his arrival in Edgefield, however, a malaria epidemic swept the low country, and Ogle succumbed in 1803. His widow, Martha Jane Huskey Ogle (1756-1827), moved the family to Virginia, where she had relatives. Sometime around 1806, Martha Ogle and her brother, Peter Huskey, made the journey over the Indian Gap Trail to what is now Gatlinburg, where William's notched logs awaited them. Shortly after their arrival, they erected a cabin near the confluence of Baskins Creek and the West Fork of the Little Pigeon. The cabin still stands today near the heart of Gatlinburg.
In the decade following the arrival of the Ogles and Huskeys in what came to be known as White Oak Flats, a steady stream of settlers moved into the area. Most of these settlers were veterans of the American Revolution or War of 1812 who had converted into deeds the 50-acre tracts they had received for service in war. Among these early settlers were Timothy Reagan (c. 1750-1830), John Ownby, Jr. (1781-1869), and Henry Bohanon (1760-1842). Their descendants still live in the area today.
Radford Gatlin and the Civil War
In 1856, a post office was established in the general store of Radford Gatlin (c. 1798-1880), thus giving the town the name "Gatlinburg". Despite the town bearing his name, Gatlin, who had only arrived in the flats around 1854, constantly bickered with his neighbors. By 1857, a full-blown feud had erupted between the Gatlins and the Ogles, probably over Gatlin's attempts to divert the town's main road. The eve of the U.S. Civil War found Gatlin, a Confederate sympathizer, wildly at odds with the residents of the flats, who were predominantly pro-Union, and he was forced out sometime in 1859.
In spite of its anti-slavery sentiments, Gatlinburg, like most Smoky Mountain communities, tried to remain neutral during the war. This changed when Confederate commander Colonel Will Thomas occupied the town in an attempt to protect the salt peter mines at Alum Cave, near the Tennessee-North Carolina border. Federal forces marched south from Knoxville and Sevierville to dislodge Thomas' forces, which had erected a fort on Burg Hill. Lucinda Oakley Ogle, whose grandfather witnessed the ensuing skirmish, later recounted her grandfather's recollections:
... he told me about when he was a sixteen year old boy during the Civil War and would hide under a big cliff on Turkey Nest Ridge and watch the Blue Coats ride their horses around the graveyard hill shooting their cannon toward Burg Hill where the Grey Coats had a fort and would ride their horses around the Burg Hill ...
As Union forces converged, Thomas was forced to retreat back across the Smokies to North Carolina. Although the direct threat from Confederate forces was over, sporadic raids continued until the war's end.
Gatlinburg at the turn of the century
In the 1880s, the invention of the band saw and the logging railroad led to a boom in the lumber industry. As forests throughout the Southeastern United States were harvested, lumber companies were forced to push deeper into the mountain areas of the Appalachian highlands. In 1901, Colonel W.B. Townsend established the Little River Lumber Company in Tuckaleechee Cove to the west, and lumber interests began buying up logging rights to vast tracts of forest in the Smokies.
A pivotal figure in Gatlinburg at this time was Andrew Jackson Huff (1878-1949), originally of Greene County. Huff erected a sawmill in Gatlinburg in 1900, and local residents began supplementing their income by providing lodging to loggers and other lumber company officials. Tourists also began to trickle into the area, drawn to the Smokies by the writings of authors such as Mary Noailles Murfree and Horace Kephart, who wrote extensively of the region's natural wonders.
In 1912, the Pi Beta Phi women's fraternity established a settlement school (now the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts) in Gatlinburg after a survey of the region found the town to be most in need of educational facilities. While skeptical locals were initially worried that the Pi Phis might be religious propagandists or opportunists, the school's enrollment grew from 33 to 134 in its first year of operation. Along with providing basic education to children in the area, the school's staff managed to create a small market for local crafts.
The journals and letters of the Pi Beta Phi settlement school's staff are a valuable source of information regarding daily life in Gatlinburg in the early 1900s. Phyllis Higinbotham, a nurse from Toronto who worked at the school for six years, wrote of the mountain peoples' confusion over the role of a nurse, their penchant for calling on her over minute issues, and her difficulties with Appalachian customs:
I soon found that people weren't used to hurrying, and that it takes a long time of patient waiting and general conversation to find out what they have really come for, or to get a history of the cases when making a visit. I have had to get used to getting most of a woman's symptoms from her husband, and not having heart failure when a messenger comes with the news that so and so is "bad off", "about to die", or "got the fever."
Higinbotham complained that there was an unhealthy "lack of variety" in the mountain peoples' diet and that they weren't open to new suggestions. Food was often "too starchy," "not well cooked", and supplemented with certain excesses:
One of the doctors was called to several cases of honey poisoning. The men had robbed some bee gums, eaten a pound or two of each and been knocked unconscious where they stood.
Evelyn Bishop, a Pi Phi who arrived at the school in 1913, reported that the mountain peoples' relative isolation from American society allowed them to retain a folklore that reflected their English and Scots-Irish ancestries, such as Elizabethan Era ballads:
Many times it is the ballad that the child learns first, no Mother Goose melodies are as familiar, and it is strange indeed to listen to a little tot singing of the courtly days of old, the knights and 'ladyes' and probably the tragi
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