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    Lost Attractions of the Smoky Mountains
    Lost Attractions of the Smoky Mountains
    Lost Attractions of the Smoky Mountains
    Ebook198 pages43 minutes

    Lost Attractions of the Smoky Mountains

    By Tim Hollis

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    About this ebook

    The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is among the most visited national parks in the country, and countless attractions around its borders have tried for decades to siphon some of those valuable tourist dollars. From ersatz western towns and concrete dinosaurs to misplaced Florida-type attractions and celebrity theaters, you will find them all preserved in this book. Author Tim Hollis showcases those businesses that no longer exist, from Hill-Billy Village in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg's theme parks on the Tennessee side to the motels of Cherokee and Ghost Town in the Sky on the North Carolina side.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateApr 13, 2020
    ISBN9781439669617
    Lost Attractions of the Smoky Mountains
    Author

    Tim Hollis

    Tim Hollis has written thirty-seven books on pop culture history, a number of them concerning southeastern tourism. He also operates his own museum of vintage toys, souvenirs and other pop culture artifacts near Birmingham, Alabama.

    Read more from Tim Hollis

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      Book preview

      Lost Attractions of the Smoky Mountains - Tim Hollis

      collection.

      Introduction

      Welcome, friends, to the latest volume in the ongoing Lost Attractions series. For those who are new in this neighborhood, perhaps it would be best to begin by explaining the title. Just what is a lost attraction of the Great Smoky Mountains, anyway? Well, it is very simple. A lost attraction can be any type of tourism-related business—roadside attraction, motel, restaurant or other—that no longer exists. Casually flipping through the pages, one may conceivably run across an image and comment, Hey, that place is still there! That would bring us to the secondary definition: a business that has changed radically over the years and no longer resembles its depiction in vintage photos and postcards, even though technically it may still be operating. Everything clear now?

      My own personal connection to the Smokies goes back to when I was three years old. Apparently, by that time my parents had decided that I was old enough to withstand the environment of a road trip, and for reasons that are now unknown to me, they chose the Smokies as our initial destination. Judging from the photos my dad shot with his trusty 35mm camera on the trip, it appears that we saw Gatlinburg only by passing through it, spending most of our time on the other side of the mountains in Cherokee. Maybe the fact that my mom always loved Western movies had something to do with it, but considering how badly she hated any kind of vacation trip that meant leaving home and her beloved cats, I doubt that Cherokee’s appropriation of the customs and costumes of the Plains Indians had any influence on our itinerary.

      Looking back through the lens of history, what is really bizarre is to realize that at the time of our visit (August 1966), Smokies tourism was only about thirty-five years old. The geographical isolation of the mountain country had ensured that hardy farmers had been scraping out a living in the valleys of the Smokies for centuries with very little contact with the larger outside world. For the well-to-do people in Knoxville, the nearest city of any size, the communities of Sevier County—including Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge and Sevierville—seemed to be quaint reminders of a bygone day. It was this thinking that prompted the Pi Beta Phi sorority to establish a school in Gatlinburg in 1912, first, to help educate the uneducated, and second, to establish an arts and crafts program to preserve the way the mountaineers had been doing things all along.

      Crafts—of the mountain variety on the Tennessee side and Native American on the North Carolina side—drew some tourists into the isolated region, but it was when the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in bits and pieces between 1934 and 1940 that the tourism industry really got started. Improved roads, allowing access to the new national park, had a lot to do with it, and by the time World War II and its travel restrictions were over, the region was ready for success. Now, let’s pile into our Chevrolet and see what the USA once had to offer in those formerly sleepy Smoky Mountain communities.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Hillbillies and Indians and Bears, Oh My

      We will begin our tour of the Smokies’ lost, if not completely forgotten, attractions with the most logical ones: the places that made at least an attempt to tie themselves to the region’s native culture. On the Tennessee side of the mountains, that translated into bears and hillbillies; crossing the national park via U.S. 441 brought tourists into an alternative universe where bears remained but their human counterparts were Native Americans—not always, however, the ones who had occupied that land for hundreds of years.

      The attractions and other businesses that employed these stereotypes were among the first to spring up once the area had discovered that there was gold in them thar touristers. While handicrafts were the initial draw on both sides of the mountains, it did not take long for business owners to latch on to the depiction of mountaineers and American Indians as portrayed in motion pictures, animated cartoons and comic strips. Bears were yet another matter. As we shall see, they were often depicted in their natural state, but even more

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