Hidden in the Smoky Mountain National Park you can find a row of cottages that have experienced a plethora of eras throughout their lifetime. You’ll find these homes, known as the Elkmont Ghost Town, by greater known Elkmont Campground. The best thing about this Smoky Mountain attraction is that it can be explored FOR FREE! As any Gatlinburg tourist knows, the cost of a vacation in the Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge area can skyrocket. Finding places like the Elkmont Ghost Town can keep your family entertained and make the Smoky Mountains a budget friendly travel option.
The History
What began as a homestead for early settlers in the 1800s bloomed into a thriving community for loggers and their families. While you can not see any of these structures in the present day; you can picture a small mountain borough complete with a church, school, and railroad. Life stayed this way until the 1900s when the logging company who owned the town of Elkmont sold property off to a wealthy few who started a private social club. City sophisticates escaped to the mountains lodging at the Appalachian Clubhouse and building their own vacation cottages. The Wonderland Hotel added accommodations to this bygone resort town. It too was eventually bought off by a affluent businessman and became a club for the elite.
In the 1930s The Smoky Mountain National Park was established. Cottage owners were asked to sell their property in return for a lifetime lease. Many, but not all, did this willing supporting the national park movement. Through the years these leases were reduced to twenty years, and then in the 1990s were not renewed at all. Forcing former cottage owners off the land left upward of seventy structures behind with no one to maintain them. As was the plan for all the structures, many had deteriorated past the point of restoration and were demolished. The National Register of Historic Places protected and preserved the cottages that withstood the test of time from their original fate. While most of the homes have been reclaimed by nature, a small number of them have been preserved and are open to the public.
The Preservation
Although the preservation process was not 100% complete as of our latest visit, almost all of the homes in what was previously known as Daisy Town are open for viewing. I have been here both before and after preservation. I can not stress enough how lucky we are to be able to physically walk through history. Even though it has lost some of its dystopian edge since the preservation, it’s still eerie AF. Maybe it’s just me but there’s something about walking through what remains of a once thriving community that gets a death grip right on my days of old loving soul. It’s like I can feel it. No one gets it, but I feel the exact same way about Thurmond, WV.
The Cottages
Oh my damn, y’all, these cottages are BEAUTIFUL! I can only imagine what it must have been like to OWN one of these. They’re amazing by today’s standards, much less the early 1900s. There are some quirks in the design here and there. One that stood out to me was a kitchen that you had to walk along an outdoor deck to access. There are teeny tiny bathrooms in some. Beautiful fireplaces adorned them all. You can get carried away imagining what “summering” in this town must have been like.
Putting the Ghost in Ghost Town
Another interesting thing I did in the spirit of Halloween was play with my ghost hunting app, the iovilus. While I by no means fully believe in a $1.99 app, it produced some curious results. I became familiar with an actual ovilus a few years ago on a haunted history tour of Gatlinburg. It basically picks up on the energy of an area and somehow converts that energy into words. Even if your not a Halloween Eve baby visiting Elkmont on your birthday like I was, it’s a fun thing to add to the experience.
Outside of one cottage I got the words “products, grew, and farmers”. Inside a home I got “March, coffin, and remove”. In a kitchen I got “bacon and hours”. It was spitting words out left and right in this lost town of the elite. If you want to bump the spooky up to ten, do a little ghost hunting while you’re there 👻!
How to Get There
Take US-411 from Gatlinburg to the Sugarlands Visitor Center.
Drive toward Cades Cove for about 7 miles until you see a sign for Elkmont Campground.
You’ll turn here until you see the ranger station about 4 miles down the road.
Take a left at the sign for Elkmont Nature Trail, where you’ll find a parking lot.
The lot is within walking distance of the historic structures in Elkmont.
( directions taken from https://www.visitmysmokies.com/blog/smoky-mountains/about-elkmont-ghost-town/ )