Gatlinburg Roots

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Gatlinburg Roots Home of the official Gatlinburg Roots Podcast. Their stories, along with the stories of countless other mountain families, form the foundation of this project.

Founded by sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-generation descendants of Martha Jane Huskey Ogle, Gatlinburg Roots preserves the stories, memories, and history of White Oak Flats and Gatlinburg. Gatlinburg Roots was founded by seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-generation descendants of White Oak Flats families whose roots run deep in these mountains. Through the Ogle and Reagan family lines, including direct descent from Martha Jane Huskey Ogle, the project grew from inherited photographs, family stories, and memories passed from one generation to the next. For generations, these families lived, worked, worshiped, raised children, and built lives in the community known as White Oak Flats. Through photographs, family histories, historical research, and firsthand accounts, Gatlinburg Roots works to preserve the people, places, traditions, and everyday life of White Oak Flats, Gatlinburg, and the Great Smoky Mountains. Every photograph has a story. Every family has a place. Every generation leaves something worth remembering. Most of us are only three generations away from being forgotten. Gatlinburg Roots exists to help ensure those memories, stories, and legacies are preserved and passed forward to the generations that follow. Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary. Keep on Rootin'.

10/09/2026

In the Old Mountain Days, Supper Came Straight From the Farm

She's cooking over an open fire, and she'll tell you plainly where every bite came from.

"I'm cooking cornbread, and it come from the farm, ground made."

That corn grew in their own field. It was shelled, ground into meal, and poured into a hot skillet set down in the coals. Nothing about it came off a store shelf.

Then the sweet potatoes. She raised those too. She boils them first, then covers them in sugar and butter and bakes them until the sugar melts down into every piece.

That was the rhythm in these hollers for generations. You planted it, you tended it, you dug it up, and you cooked it yourself, over the same kind of fire your mother and grandmother cooked on. A pan of cornbread and a dish of sweet potatoes wasn't a side order. It was a whole season of work, sitting right there on the table.

When folks talk about mountain cooking today, this is the root of it. No recipe card, no measuring cup. Just a woman who knew her ground, her fire, and her family.

Nobody back then called it farm-to-table. Depending on the time of day, they just called it dinner or supper.

So tell us in the comments: in your family, was it dinner or supper?

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OLD MOUNTAIN SKILLET CORNBREAD

It doesn't get any simpler than this.

Get your cast iron skillet good and hot.
Put a little bacon grease in it.
Mix your cornmeal with water.
Pour it into that hot skillet.
Set it in the fire, or in the oven if you had one, and bake it till it's done.

That's it. No fuss, no fancy ingredients. Just meal, water, grease, and heat.

How did your family make cornbread? Share it below.

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________

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Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

Keep on Rootin'.

10/08/2026

Back Before the Electric Stove Came Up the Mountain

Breakfast at six. Dinner at twelve. Supper at five, maybe five-thirty. In the old Smoky Mountain homes, that was the clock, and nobody needed one hanging on the wall.

She tells it plain, the way mountain women always did. Three meals a day. Morning at six, the middle of the day at twelve, and evening around five, "something like that." The sun, the chores, and the fire kept the time.

And the fire was the kitchen. Everything that came to that table came off the hearth. She says it without a bit of shame: she can cook on a fireplace, but she can't cook on an electric stove. She doesn't even know how to work one.

That isn't a confession. It's the measure of a lifetime. Hands that learned on live coals never had any reason to learn k***s.

She'll grant that a stove might let you regulate your heat a little better. Then she sets the record straight. If you're used to the fireplace, you can regulate it too.

And mountain cooks could. They raked the coals forward for a hot fire and pulled them back for a slow one. They moved the pot closer to the flame or eased it away. They heaped embers on a Dutch oven lid so the bread browned top and bottom at the same time. No dial, no numbers, just years of knowing what the fire was telling you.

Three meals a day, every day, off one hearth. Breakfast before the work started, dinner when the sun was high, supper before dark. Whole generations of Smoky Mountain families were raised on food cooked exactly that way.

The electric stove came along and changed kitchens everywhere. But some cooks never needed it. They already knew how to make a fire do whatever they asked of it.

STAY WITH US

If these old Smoky Mountain stories matter to you, tap Follow on Gatlinburg Roots so you never miss the next one.

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

Keep on Rootin'.

10/07/2026

Cabins Hewn by Hand

Late 1700s and 1800s: before there were roads winding through these mountains, families coming into the Smokies faced dense forest, steep ground, and miles of isolation. If they wanted a home, they had to build it from the trees standing around them.

The trees were felled and the heavy timbers worked by hand. With simple tools, each log was shaped, lifted into place, and fitted at the corners until the walls began to rise. There were no power saws, no machinery, and no truck bringing a load of lumber up the road. The cabin came from the woods around them.

Some of those old walls still carry the marks of the people who built them. Thick hand-hewn timbers, interlocking corners, and rough surfaces remain as evidence of the enormous amount of labor hidden inside what looks today like a simple mountain cabin.

They weren't just building a house.

They were carving out a home in the Smokies with their own hands.

Follow • Remember • Preserve

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.
Keep on Rootin’.

10/07/2026

Cooperation on a farm was just horse sense.

Everybody had a part to play. Families worked together, neighbors helped neighbors, and when the work changed, people learned new skills and found new ways to get it done.

The farm stayed a farm. The way people kept it going simply changed with the times.

Follow • Remember • Preserve

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.
Keep on Rootin’.

A Long Way From England to a Gatlinburg RiverbankJerry and Kelli McCarter sent us this picture this week. The little pie...
10/07/2026

A Long Way From England to a Gatlinburg Riverbank

Jerry and Kelli McCarter sent us this picture this week. The little piece of china in it started its journey more than a hundred years ago, on the other side of the ocean.

Kelli found it along the river in Gatlinburg. A small, smooth chip of white china, worn soft by water and time, with part of a printed ribbon on it and five letters still showing: BRIDG. So we went digging.

Those letters are the start of a maker's mark for Sampson Bridgwood & Son of the Anchor Pottery in Longton, Staffordshire, England. The style of the mark dates it to around 1885 or later, somewhere between the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s.

Think about the trip this plate made.

It was shaped from English clay, fired in a kiln in the Staffordshire potteries, stamped with its maker's mark, and packed in straw in a wooden crate. It crossed the Atlantic in the hold of a ship, rode the rails inland, and finally came up into these mountains by wagon over rough dirt roads, bound for a general store shelf or a mail-order customer at the end of a long line.

Then it found a home. Maybe on a family table along the river, back before the park, or at a CCC camp in the 1930s where crews ate three meals a day on heavy white plates just like this one. Somebody ate supper off it. Somebody washed it, stacked it, and set it out again the next day.

And one day, it broke.

The pieces were swept up and tossed out, and the river took it from there. For a century or more, the water turned it over and over, rounding off its sharp edges, until one small piece came to rest on the bank right where Kelli would see it.

From an English pottery to a Gatlinburg riverbank. That's a long way to travel just to be found.

Thank you, Jerry and Kelli McCarter, for sharing it with us.

This is part of our fan challenge, The Photo Nobody Else Has. Got a picture with a piece of Gatlinburg history in it, whether it's from the early days, the 60s, 70s, 80s, or this week? Post it in the comments, or send it to us in a message like Jerry and Kelli did, and we'll share it. Tell us what it is, where it came from, and about when.

https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/gatlinburgrootsfanchallenge

Don't forget to add to your picture so we can find it.

Keep on rooting.

10/06/2026

The Land Belongs to the Lord

Standing in the mountains he knew as home, an old preacher spoke about faith the way mountain people had understood it for generations.

A man could break the ground, plant the seed, and work that hillside until his hands were worn raw — but he couldn’t make the rain fall. He couldn’t call out the sunshine. And when the crop finally came up out of that mountain soil, he knew there was a hand in it greater than his own.

“All this land of ours don’t belong to us. It belongs to our Maker.”

That belief ran deeper than farming. It was a way of looking at everything around him.

The mountains, the fields, the house, the years a man was given on this earth — he could tend them, work them, and be thankful for them, but they were never truly his to keep.

And when he thought about what ought to be handed down from one generation to the next, he didn’t speak of acreage, money, or possessions.

He spoke of living for the Lord while there was still daylight left.

To him, that was the inheritance worth leaving behind — faith strong enough to carry a family through the hard years, gratitude for whatever the Lord provided, and the hope that when a person’s time in these mountains was finished, there was “a better world over yonder.”

IF YOU LOVE THESE MOUNTAINS AND THANK THE LORD FOR THEM, TYPE AMEN.

Follow • Remember • Preserve

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.
Keep on Rootin’.

10/05/2026

1807: Martha Jane Huskey Ogle brought her family into White Oak Flats and established the settlement that would one day become Gatlinburg.

Long before permanent settlement, Cherokee hunters traveled through these mountains, following the ridges, gaps, and waterways of the Smokies.

By the early 1800s, families of Scotch-Irish, German, English, and other European backgrounds were moving into East Tennessee looking for land and a place to stay. White Oak Flats became home to families whose names would remain tied to Gatlinburg for generations.

What began as a small mountain settlement slowly became a community.

The cabins disappeared. Roads replaced the old trails. White Oak Flats eventually became Gatlinburg.

But the family roots remained.

Follow • Remember • Share

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.
Keep on Rootin’.

10/04/2026

The Teacher and the Mountain

The schoolteacher had lessons for the mountain children.

Books could teach them to read and write and prepare them for a world beyond these hills. The children were seen as the hope of a better future.

But the mountain was teaching too.

It called to them through tumbling rivers. It pulled them down old paths and into laurel slicks. It taught them where the creek rose after a hard rain, which trails led home, how the seasons changed, and how to listen to the woods.

The teacher could ask them to sit still.

The mountain kept calling them outside.

And because they were mountain children, they listened to both.

The schoolhouse gave them lessons for the world ahead. The mountain gave them lessons they could carry with them wherever they went.

Maybe the real lesson was learning how to keep the best of each.

Did you grow up learning as much from the mountain as you did from the schoolhouse?

Follow • Remember • Share

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.
Keep on Rootin’.

10/03/2026

Bear didn’t make it to the table very often.

They remembered having plenty of deer meat, but bear was harder to come by. As one mountain voice put it, the bears somehow “ran too fast.”

When they did get one, though, there was no question about the taste.

“Bear meat is awfully good.”

Groundhog was different. Timing mattered. In the fall, when the groundhogs had been feeding around the corn, they were considered good eating. But come spring, after they had been filling up on green growth, folks knew better.

That was part of mountain life — knowing not only what could be hunted, but when it was worth putting on the table.

Did you or anybody in your family ever eat bear meat or groundhog? What do you remember about it?

Follow • Remember • Preserve

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

Keep on Rootin’.

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