Gatlinburg History
The land occupied by Gatlinburg today was likely first settled by Cherokee Indians around 500 years ago, but by the end of the 1700s, white settlers occupied much of the land. One of the town’s early pioneers, Martha Jane Huskey Ogle and her family established a home in what was then known as White Oak Flats in 1805. The name change took place in the 1850s, when a man named Radford Gatlin arrived in town, opened a general store and secured himself a postal commission, which he used to name the town in his own honor in 1856. Interestingly, Gatlin was not a beloved man in the community, and by 1859, he agreed to leave town as long as the remaining citizenry agreed to keep the Gatlinburg name. And they did.
Little progress occurred in Gatlinburg between the time of its founding and its limited involvement in the Civil War. In the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, however, the Pi Beta Phi Women’s Fraternity, a national organization dedicated to education and health care, began visiting the area as missionaries, bringing formal education to the region and eventually establishing a school in Gatlinburg. Among the group’s goals was to provide formal education to the mountain children, which would then help their families supplement their farming incomes.
Taking notice of the locals’ use of native handcrafts, which had all but disappeared throughout the rest of the country during the Industrial Revolution, the Pi Phi’s began encouraging local craftspeople to teach their skills to the younger generations and to produce their goods for sale on the market. As a result, Pi Beta Phi opened the Arrowcraft shop as a crafts outlet in 1926, and the works of the local craftsmen were also shipped to other Pi Phi shops around the country. The Arrowcraft shop still exists today, and in 1945, Pi Beta Phi and the University of Tennessee established the Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts, which is also still going strong.
By the early 1930s, Gatlinburg crafts were on the map, and the establishment of Great Smoky Mountains National Park only helped in drawing visitors to the small mountain community. The town was considered a full-fledged tourist destination by the 1940s.
Today, businesses like hotels, restaurants, shops and attractions are packed tightly into the narrow valley in which Gatlinburg rests. Daily visitation can easily exceed 35,000 guests per day, although the permanent population is still around 4,000 people. Most of what Gatlinburg has to offer is located around a mile-long stretch of the main Parkway and a handful of adjoining roads. Among the local points of interest are the Great Smoky Arts and Crafts Community, an 11-mile loop of artists and craftsmen, and Ober Gatlinburg, which keeps tourism going in the winter as a ski resort. Gatlinburg also sits at the gateway to the main Tennessee entrance to the national park.