Smokies became America’s first cost-shared national park
Great Smoky Mountains National Park straddles North Carolina and Tennessee across 522,419 acres of Blue Ridge Appalachians. Chartered in 1934 and dedicated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, it was the first park partly bought with federal money plus private and state funds.
The main road, U.S. 441 over Newfound Gap, links Gatlinburg in Tennessee with Cherokee in North Carolina. The park is split almost evenly between the two states, taking in parts of Blount, Sevier, and Cocke counties on the Tennessee side, and it protects most of the Great Smoky Mountains, an east–west subrange of the Blue Ridge within the Appalachians. Kuwohi is Tennessee’s highest point, and sixteen summits inside the boundary top 6,000 feet.
Between the ridges lie deep valleys called coves, the broadest being Cades Cove, a flat plain between the main range and the foothills. The whole park sits in the Tennessee River watershed and holds about 2,900 miles of streams, with the Little Tennessee along its southwestern border. Four historic districts, an archaeological district, and nine separate National Register listings preserve old churches, mills, and farm buildings.
Most of the bedrock is late Precambrian Ocoee Supergroup, metamorphosed sandstone, phyllite, schist, and slate, while the oldest gneisses formed more than a billion years ago from marine sediment and igneous rock. About 20,000 years ago the ice sheets never reached the range, but they chilled it and brought more precipitation.
Humid air forced upward by the slopes delivers 50 to 80 inches of rain and snow a year, and Newfound Gap, at 5,048 feet, runs roughly 10 to 13 °F cooler by day than the valleys. Mountain waves drive gusts of 80 to 100 mph a few times each cool season. A 2004 conservation report named it the most polluted national park, while next door Sevier County’s tourism, led by Dollywood, the state’s second-most visited attraction, thrives on park traffic.
Source: Great Smoky Mountains National Park
