In August, 1924, representatives of the Southern National Park Commission camped on Mount Le Conte as they considered whether the Great Smoky Mountains were great enough to become a national park. That camp was the genesis of LeConte Lodge. Paul Adams hosted the first paying guests in July 1925, so this year represents the 100th season of guest accommodations on top of old Smoky, and next year will be the actual centennial.
The following is an excerpt from LeConte Lodge / A Centennial History of a Smoky Mountain Landmark, written by Tom Layton and Mike Hembree and soon to be published by McFarland Books. To order your copy, go to mcfarlandbooks.com/leconte-lodge.
In 1924, Col. David Chapman traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, to solicit representatives of the Southern Appalachian National Park Commission, who had bypassed Tennessee as they evaluated possible locations for a new national park.
Massachusetts conservationist Harlan Kelsey was among the dignitaries who agreed to come see the Smokies. Kelsey was acquainted with the Southern Appalachians, as he had been president of the Appalachian Mountain Club in Boston in 1921, when a survey was commissioned to determine if Le Conte outranked Mount Mitchell as the highest mountain in eastern America, and his father was the founder of Highlands, a resort town atop the Blue Ridge in North Carolina.
The night before they climbed Le Conte, the commissioners stayed at the Mountain View Hotel in Gatlinburg, where they rubbed shoulders with innkeeper Andy Huff (and presumably his 21-year-old son Jack). Gatlinburg was still a rough settlement that had just opened its first school in 1912. In the hour before the commissioners checked in, a feud erupted into a shootout on the porch of a nearby store. “Probably over a still,” the commissioners were told.
Chapman wanted the commissioners to hear from Paul Adams and Paul Fink, who had explored many of the Southeastern mountains that were also nominated for national parks—Grandfather Mountain and Linville Gorge in North Carolina, Roan Mountain along the Tennessee-Carolina border, and the Shenandoahs.
“We told them that all these places were beautiful,” Adams said. “But we also told them that these did not compare with the Great Smokies for height of mountains, ruggedness, amount of virgin forest, lovely streams with cascades and waterfalls, and for having both grassy balds and timbered tops and slopes.”
On a rainy Thursday, August 7, 1924, a group of 25 men—four federal commissioners as well as local leaders—saddled up in Gatlinburg at 9:30 a.m. and rode horses for two hours up to Cherokee Orchard. Then they hiked up a freshly cleared path that was the forerunner of the Rainbow Falls trail.
They were hardly dressed for the wilderness or the weather. Some wore riding breeches with leggings, or golf knickers with starched white dress shirts. Princeton professor Horace Longwell had the foresight to carry an umbrella. Newspaperman E.E. Burtt got soaked under his black felt hat, but an Army campaign hat worked for World War I hero Cary Spence, as did a flat-brim straw skimmer for state forester R.S. Maddox.
Newspaperman Loye Miller described Chapman, 47, as the “Beau Brummel of our party … caparisoned for the climb up LeConte in a flannel shirt barred in bright hues and with a kerchief of many colors knotted around his neck.”
The delegation paused for lunch at Rainbow Falls. Burtt described the falls as “a miniature Niagara 75 to 100 feet high, the water running with a roar due to the heavy rains of the morning.”
Adams sized up the challenge before them: “Back then, one needed both strong arms and legs to gain the top of Rainbow Falls. The ‘trail’ went up a leaning tree near the bluff, about 100 feet west of the falls. Helpers at the base of the tree helped some of our less agile guests reach the first tree branches. Others at the top helped them from the tree branches to solid ground. But everyone had to climb the middle distance under his own power.”
Above the falls, the original trail rock-hopped along Mill Creek, which is now known as Le Conte Creek. The hikers reached Cliff Top about 4 p.m. after ascending four miles. “Far below, a panorama of clouds enveloped the mountain,” Burtt wrote.
From Cliff Top, they scrambled down to a camp along the ridgeline toward West Point. The Alum Cave Bluff Trail did not yet exist, but the camp was near what upbound hikers call the Hallelujah Turn—where the trail crests and crosses the ridgeline, leaving an easy flat stroll to the lodge. Guide Wiley Oakley chose the location to take advantage of rainwater trickling off the rock ledges. Adams was certain there was a better spring nearby, but Oakley (raised at the foot of Mount Le Conte in a hollow called Scratch Britches) insisted that none of the Smokies had substantial springs near the top. The 1925 discovery of that spring would dictate the location for LeConte Lodge.
John Morrell, who was a law student when he first climbed Le Conte in 1913, described the campsite:
A bark lean-to camp was erected just under the west end of Cliff Top of Le Conte about 1922. My guess is this was built by W.R. (Will) Ramsey and Wiley Oakley under direction of Andy Huff, as a camp for men he had swamping out and improving the old Rainbow Falls Trail to Le Conte.
This camp was used as an overnight stay by the commissioners appointed by the Secretary of the Interior to ascertain whether the Smokies came up to national park standards as regards to scenery. The site was later abandoned, however, on account of an inadequate water supply.
Morrell cooked the meals and must have made a good impression—because he made his career in the park, and the headquarters building is named for him. “We had delicious baked beans, along with baked potatoes and ham for supper,” Adams wrote.
The commissioners shared beds padded with balsam boughs, as a chilly rain fell all night and wild animals screeched in the darkness. Some guests had a sleepless night as they wondered: Was that an owl? Or a panther?
The temperature had been 66 when the commissioners left Knoxville but it was 52 at supper and dipped to 40 overnight. The coffee kettle was especially popular, and Russell Hanlon asked for donations of a dollar per cup, raising $25 in cold cash for the Great Smoky Mountain Conservation Association. In the long run, that would be enough to cover the average cost of an acre of the park.
Chapman worried that the overcast weather would ruin the sunrise panorama that he wanted to show off for the national park delegation.
Eastern Tennessee was then in the Central Time Zone, so the night passed quickly and sunrise felt early. Adams woke up the camp with steaming coffee, bundled the VIPs in blankets, and lit lanterns to guide them through a dark fog toward Myrtle Point, the 6,534-foot promontory on the eastern flank of Le Conte.
As the commissioners arrived at Myrtle Point on the morning of August 8, the eastern clouds drew back like stage curtains, and they were treated to a dramatic cloud inversion that filled the valleys like a rippled bay, fringed by violet-colored ridges all the way to the horizon. Here is how Adams described it:
The sky overhead was clear. But we looked down on billowing tops of thunderheads in the valleys. A south breeze touched us lightly. We knew that stronger winds were at work below us.
Through a moderate haze in the east, we could see Mt. Guyot. And then the sun, a ball of red fire, rose over Guyot. Its rays sprinkled splendor on the cloud tops below us.
The winds in the clouds grew more restless and began to agitate them more violently. Great chunks of clouds began to rip loose from the main mass and rise a thousand feet. As they arose, they sometimes briefly blocked the sun. A constant wind picked up those cloud chunks and hustled them off to the northeast.
We were small spectators, awe-struck by the vast, primitive, beauty of an extra-special Myrtle Point sunrise.
From where the dignitaries stood, there was no doubt that they had found a worthy national park.
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