Boom Town

Boom Town. . This land was home to several farming families who arrived here in the 1830s. Some fifty years later, logging companies began to selectively gut timber from easily accessible areas and haul it out using animal power. Large scale, mechanized logging started when the Little River Lumber Company purchased land and built the Little River Railroad to Elkmont in 1908., The town of Elkmont grew in order to support industrial logging operations in the surrounding mountains. Here, in what is now the campground, stood a commissary, company boarding house, and infirmary along with a machine shop, coaling and watering stations, and other buildings connected with the railroad., Captions , (Photo #1) The Little River Railroad Company built rail lines into the area to facilitate the removal of valuable hardwoods. Tourists began visiting when daily train excursion service from Knoxville was initiated in 1909. For a time, timbering and tourism coexisted, but by the mid 1920s, Elkmont's logging era came to a close and the resort era boomed., (Photo #2) The Little River Lumber Company owned more than 76,000 acres of prime forest in the Great Smoky Mountains. By the time it completed operations, it had harvested an estimated two billion board feet of lumber from the Little River watershed., (Photo #3) The first houses built in the logging town of Elkmont were little more than mobile homes. Known as "set-off" houses, they were brought to the area on flatbed rail cars and set off onto pre-constructed foundations to provide temporary housing for the loggers., (Photo #4) "String towns" such as this one near Jakes Creek, were temporary camps made from "set-off houses".