Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Site information

• Official name: Great Smoky Mountains National Park
• Location: Tennessee and North Carolina, United States
• Type: Natural
• Year of inscription: 1983

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park lies along the southern ridge of the Appalachian Mountains in the southeastern United States, spanning across the states of Tennessee and North Carolina. It is part of a connecting chain of national forests in the region that span the southern portion of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The official park consists of 522,419 acres, or just over eight hundred square miles, and includes seventy miles of the Appalachian Trail. It was one of the first parks to receive federal funding to help with its establishment and is one of the largest swaths of protected land in the United States. One of only a few national parks to not charge an entrance fee, it is the most visited national park in the United States, surpassing the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone national parks. It is one of the most biodiverse parks in the National Park System, hosting nearly as many tree species as all of Europe. It is home to the world's largest patch of virgin red spruce. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is special in being able to offer old growth virgin forests, while still allowing a flourishing ecosystem with many evolving species.

History

Long before the area became a national park, it was considered home to many people. The Cherokee people have roots in the area dating back over a thousand years. Spread out into many small communities throughout the region, Cherokees focused primarily on hunting, trading, and agriculture. When European settlers arrived, the Cherokees were open to trade with them and adopted various European tools and weapons into their own culture. This in turn developed Cherokee culture and opened them to the idea of hunting for not only food but also furs. In the early 1800s, the Cherokee declared themselves a democratic nation and wrote a constitution and laws in their own language.

However, land conflicts arose between the Cherokee and European settlers that culminated in the controversial 1835 signing of the Treaty of New Echota. In accordance with the treaty, much of the Cherokee population was forced to move west in an act of ethnic cleansing that became known as the Trail of Tears. A small faction of the population resisted and stayed in the area. An official reservation was later created for the remaining members. Unlike many Indian reservations, this one is open to tourists and works to preserve and share Cherokee culture.

From 1818 to 1821, the first non-Indian inhabitants settled in the area in a community called Cades Cove. The settlement's population would grow to almost three hundred in the next decade. Through the interest of gold in the southern region and continued settlement growth, the Rocky Mountains saw an assortment of settlements populate the future park space. During the Civil War, local people were divided based on their allegiances, and raiders frequently attacked supporters of both sides in the war.

In the early to mid-1920s interest gathered for establishing a national park in the eastern part of the United States, with particular attention given to the area around Tennessee. Congress officially approved the raising of funds for purchasing land for the park in 1926, and the park was officially established in 1934. Many of the area's inhabitants moved away willingly, allowing the land to be claimed for the park. Others resisted moving, and a number of them were granted special permission to remain within the park for the remainder of their lives.

In 2016, several wildfires took hold throughout Great Smoky Mountains. They forced the evacuation of more than 14,000 and took the lives of fourteen people. Scientists believe that the spread of the fires was accelerated by the then-ongoing drought.

Great Smoky Mountains was featured on a postal stamp in 2023.

Significance

Dating back two hundred million to three hundred million years, the Smoky Mountains are among the oldest formed ranges in the world. The park contains the world's largest remaining area of the diverse Arcto-Tertiary geoflora era, allowing for insight on what late flora was like prior to recent human influence. The park also hosts some of the largest old growth forests in the United States and is home to the world's largest block of undisturbed virgin red spruce. Roughly a quarter of the park's forests are old growth, and much of the park remains relatively untouched by human impact. The mountains receive more rainfall than the surrounding area and trap humidity during the summer, offering opportune environments for growth.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park serves an important role in preserving unique and extensive biodiversity in both the United States and internationally. It boasts the greatest diversity for a park of its size in a temperate climate. Over nineteen thousand species have been recorded in the park, and as many as one hundred thousand additional species are believed to exist there. In 1998, a project called All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory was begun to document all life forms in the Great Smoky Mountains. In what has become one of the largest sustained natural history inventory ventures in the world, over ten thousand new species have been documented in the park through the project's efforts. Roughly one thousand of those were not found anywhere outside of the park and marked new finds in science.

Bibliography

Bridges, Anne, et al. Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of The Great Smoky Mountains, 1544-1934. U Tennessee P, 2014.

"Great Smoky Mountains." National Parks Service. U.S. Department of the Interior, 20 Sept. 2024, www.nps.gov/grsm/index.htm. Accessed 8 Dec. 2024.

Kephart, Horace. The Cherokees of the Smoky Mountains. The Atkinson Press, 1936.

Linzey, Donald W. "Mammals of Great Smoky Mountains National Park: 2016 Revision." Southeastern Naturalist, vol. 15, 2016, pp. 1–93.

Pierce, David S. Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park. U Tennessee P, 2000.