why is the great smoky mountains a national treasure Archives - TravelsFinders.Com ® http://travelsfinders.com/tag/why-is-the-great-smoky-mountains-a-national-treasure Tue, 28 Mar 2017 15:23:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.8 History and Hiking in the Smokies http://travelsfinders.com/history-and-hiking-in-the-smokies.html http://travelsfinders.com/history-and-hiking-in-the-smokies.html#respond Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 http://travelsfinders.com/?p=235468 CATALOOCHEE TO BIG CREEK The land encompassing Great Smoky Mountains National Park hasn’t always looked like the natural oasis it is today. Back in the 1930s, eighteen timber companies owned 85 percent of the park. They were feverishly logging the mountain slopes from the bottom up. The other 15 percent of land consisted of some 1,200 farmsteads and more than 5,000 summer homesites. When the land became public, the government removed hundreds of structures, let thousands of acres of farm fields turn fallow, abandoned thousands of miles of old trails, wagon paths, and logging roads, and took up miles of

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