Newfound Gap, 1940: Roosevelt Dedicates the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

On September 2, 1940, a crowd of thousands gathered at Newfound Gap, a notch in the Smoky Mountain crest at about 5,000 feet. A stone platform there straddled the line between North Carolina and Tennessee. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who could not walk unaided because of polio, spoke from it to people from both states and dedicated the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The ceremony came six years after the park was formally established. By then the land was mostly in public hands. Getting it there had taken nearly two decades of lobbying, fundraising, lawsuits and removals.

A park the East had to buy

The big western parks, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, were carved from federal land. The southern Appalachians had little of that. Their forests and farms were privately owned, and much of the forest was owned by timber companies that were cutting it fast.

Support for a park grew in the 1920s in Knoxville and Asheville. Boosters there included Willis and Anne Davis of Knoxville, and the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association, formed in Tennessee in 1923. Writer Horace Kephart and photographer George Masa also helped build the case for protecting the range. Congress authorized a park in 1926 but would not pay for the land. The two states and private donors had to find the money.

Pennies, legislatures and Rockefeller

North Carolina and Tennessee each appropriated money for land purchases. Campaigns also collected small gifts from ordinary citizens, including schoolchildren. It was not enough to buy the land.

In 1928 John D. Rockefeller Jr. pledged $5 million, in memory of his late wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller. The pledge matched the funds raised locally and made large-scale buying possible. Congress added money in 1930. The Park Service declared the park established in 1934, once enough land had been acquired.

The people who had to leave

Assembling the park meant dealing with thousands of separate tracts. Historians commonly cite more than 6,000. The owners included large lumber and paper companies, such as Champion Fibre Company in North Carolina and Little River Lumber Company in Tennessee. They also included many small farmers and landowners.

The companies could bargain, and some fought hard over price. Mountain families in places such as Cades Cove, Cataloochee, the Sugarlands and the Oconaluftee valley had less leverage. Some sold willingly and some were bitter. Others were pushed out through condemnation proceedings. Some people got lifetime leases that let them stay on. The Walker sisters of Little Greenbrier were the best-known example, and they lived there into the 1960s. Families such as these lost land that kin had farmed for generations, and many resented it long afterward.

The park also lies next to the Qualla Boundary, home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. The range had been central to Cherokee life long before the 1838 removal that most of the tribe suffered.

What the CCC built

After 1933 the Civilian Conservation Corps supplied labor on a large scale. Young men lived in camps in and near the park. They built trails and roads, set up campgrounds, fought fires, planted trees and put up fire towers and other structures. Much of what visitors still use in the park dates from this work.

The road over Newfound Gap, which links the two states, was another key project. Roosevelt's audience reached the dedication by it. The gap is said to have been named because it was found to be a lower crossing than nearby Indian Gap.

Why it mattered

In his speech Roosevelt dedicated the park "to the permanent enjoyment of the people," a phrase that echoes the wording of the park's founding act and is also carved on the Rockefeller Memorial at the gap. He spoke as war spread in Europe. The park he dedicated was no wilderness left alone. It was a landscape that people had logged, farmed and then bought back.

The model proved lasting. A park in the East could be assembled by states, private donors and federal agencies working together. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park now spans about half a million acres and is the most visited unit of the National Park System. Its history also shows what that creation cost the people who lived there first.