A new front porch at LeConte

Architect's rendering of the newest building on Mount Le Conte

Decades of guests at LeConte Lodge have looked forward to sharing songs, rocking chairs, shopping for souvenirs, and checking the temperatures in "the office," a long log cabin built by Herrick Brown in the 1970s. The cantilevered cabin was weakened by winter weather, and has been closed for the past two seasons.

On Wednesday, July 8, the Lodge and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park announced that a new recreation hall will open in 2027. The new hall will include a gift shop, guest registration desk, and a north-facing deck (approximate elevation 6,400) overlooking the Tennessee Valley more than a mile below.

The old office is beyond repair, and it will be torn down starting July 14. The new recreation hall will rise in the same corner of the mountaintop campus.

The office project was originally conceived in 1968 as a possible replacement for the 1939 dining hall. Brown operated a sawmill and milled timber from trees that grew on the mountaintop. His design used logs so long that they were prone to warping, and in recent years the walls were held up by steel braces. The basement included the lodge's first flush toilets.

The national park will remove the old structure, and timbers for the new office will be airlifted to the site.

This will be the first new guest accommodations at the lodge since 1984, when Jim Huff opened the East Lodge on the site of his uncle Jack Huff's original 1925 cabin. In the early 2000s, the lodge added porches to the single-room cabins and built facilities for storage and crew.

The "old office" with the famous thermometer under the porch.