About Gatlinburg | Gatlinburg History

The early settlers named the town White Oak Flats, after the trees common in the area. In 1856, a post office was established in the general store of Radford Gatlin, and the Postmaster changed the name of the town to "Gatlinburg". Despite the town bearing his name, Gatlin constantly bickered with his neighbors. By 1857, a full-blown feud had erupted between the Gatlins and the Ogles. The eve of the U.S. Civil War found Gatlin, a Confederate sympathizer, at odds with the other residents of Gatlinburg, who were mostly pro-Union, and he was forced to leave sometime in 1859.

As was true with most of Tennessee, Gatlinburg tried to remain neutral during the war in spite of its anti-slavery sentiments.Then a Confederate commander named Colonel Will Thomas occupied the town to protect the salt peter mines at Alum Cave, near the Tennessee-North Carolina border. In the only real battle of the Civil War around Gatlinburg, Federal forces marched from Knoxville and Sevierville and Thomas was forced to retreat back across the mountains.

The invention of the band saw and the logging railroad after the Civil War led to a boom in the lumber industry. As forests throughout the Southeastern United States were harvested, lumber companies were pushed deeper into the mountain areas of the Appalachian highlands. In 1901, Colonel W.B. Townsend established the Little River Lumber Company and lumber interests began buying up logging rights to the forests in the Smoky Mountains.

Environmentalist began to lobby for protection of the Nations forests and the Weeks Act in 1911 allowed for the purchase of land to establish National Parks. When the U.S. Congress established the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in 1934, the town of Gatlinburg and the surrounding area had a population of about 600. The Park drew 40,000 visitors the first year it opened, and an estimated 500,000 visitors in the second year. The Park and the Gatlinburg area have been a major holiday vacation destination ever since.