Elkmont Historic District

Elkmont is the town the national park swallowed — twice. In 1908 the Little River Lumber Company built a company town where the campground is now: 1,500 residents, the railroad eighteen miles from Townsend, commissary, school, hotel, tavern. When the logging ended in 1925 the company pulled up the rails and closed the town — but the resort colonies beside it lived on: the Appalachian Club's cottages along Jakes Creek and the Wonderland Club's hotel on the Little River, where Knoxville's elite had summered since 1910.

The park bought the land in the 1930s — and the cottagers stayed, on lifetime leases that stretched to 1992, 1996, 2001. When the last leases expired, the park's plan was demolition: return Elkmont to nature. What stood instead was a ghost resort — seventy buildings of the Appalachian Club's 'Daisy Town,' the Wonderland Hotel collapsing in its own clearing — while preservationists fought the plan the park had written before anyone argued the cottages were historic.

The compromise saved a row — the Levi Trentham cabin (moved in 1932, nineteenth-century), the Appalachian Clubhouse, the restored cottages of Daisy Town — and demolished the rest. The Wonderland Hotel finally fell in pieces. What remains is the strangest ghost town in the national parks: the summer colony inside the wilderness, where the screened porches and gingerbread trim face woods that were clear-cut, then town, then resort, then park.

Elkmont is the archive's lease file — the Smoky Mountains resort colony inside the national park, abandoned when the leases expired, where the saved cottages of Daisy Town stand among the woods that were a lumber town.