Smokemont

Smokemont is a company name. Until the early nineteen hundreds this community on the river was called Oconaluftee. Then a lumber company set up its headquarters here and called its camp Smokemont. Today it's a campground, across the river over a small bridge, and one of only two in the park that stay open all year. The other is Cades Cove. In the early nineteen twenties, Champion Fibre's sawmill here cut forty-five thousand feet of lumber a day, plus as much pulpwood again. That wood helped feed Champion's paper plant at Canton, east of the park. The company's operations needed over thirty-five million gallons of water a day, and worry over that water and timber helped push the park idea along. On March thirtieth, nineteen thirty-one, Champion finally agreed to sell its land, for three million dollars. By nineteen thirty-nine, a state guidebook was calling Smokemont an abandoned lumber village. People were here long before the company. The first settler homesteads in this valley, the Mingus and Hughes places, were cleared in seventeen ninety-five. And the church building outlasted the town. It sits on a hill overlooking the campground. Its congregation, also known as Lufty Baptist, was organized in eighteen thirty-six with twenty-one charter members. One of its first deacons was a Robert Collins, very likely the same valley man who later guided the geographer Arnold Guyot up the highest mountain in Tennessee. And the church kept records. Between eighteen thirty-six and eighteen ninety-four, members were called before the church and charged with swearing, lying and slander. Many were thrown out. If you stop by the church, mind your language on the steps.