Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Elkmont: The Logging Town That Became a Resort and Then a Park Problem
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Elkmont went through three identities in a few decades.
First came large-scale logging.
Timber companies built railroads into the mountains and created industrial camps.
The Little River Lumber Company cut vast areas of forest and moved logs toward mills and markets.
Rail access then brought tourists.
Wealthier visitors from Knoxville and elsewhere discovered the same mountains through excursion travel and built club communities and seasonal cottages.
A working industrial landscape became a leisure landscape before it became a national park.
When park creation advanced, owners sold land under arrangements that sometimes allowed them to keep using cabins for fixed periods.
Those leases later became controversial.
Private vacation houses inside a national park conflicted with ideas about equal public ownership and wilderness.
Eventually many structures were abandoned or removed.
Some have been preserved as part of the Elkmont historic district.
That layered history is useful because it destroys the myth that the park simply rescued untouched forest from loggers.
Logging was real and destructive at industrial scale.
Tourism was already present.
Private property rights had to be negotiated.
For visitors, old cottages can look like a ghost settlement.
The disappearance was largely policy, not mystery.
Elkmont became parkland through transactions and lease expirations.
The forest returned around structures people stopped maintaining.
Nature did not erase the town by itself.
Public ownership changed what the town was allowed to be.