Gatlinburg Roots

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.
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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'.

09/07/2026

Tending the smokehouse

Tending the smokehouse was just part of how the week worked — nobody thought twice about it.

It took most of the morning, sometimes longer. An old farmer didn't have the luxury of doing it halfway — if it wasn't done right, the family felt it soon enough.

That kind of work got passed down without much ceremony. Nobody sat you down for a lesson. You just showed up enough times that your hands knew what to do before your head caught up.

It wasn't easy. But it was steady, and steady was worth something back then.

Nobody made a big deal out of tending the smokehouse. It just got done, and that was that.



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'.

09/06/2026

Making soap over an open fire — early 1900s in Gatlinburg

In the early 1900s, making soap over an open fire was simply part of keeping a household going in these mountains.

There wasn't an easier way to do it, and if there had been, most families up here couldn't have afforded it anyway.

So a mother and daughter did it the way it had always been handed down — over that same fire, in the same light, the same way it had been done for a generation before.

It's easy to romanticize now, from a distance. It wasn't romantic then. It was just Tuesday. But there was something in that steadiness worth remembering.

Nobody made a big deal out of making soap over an open fire. It just got done, and that was that.

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’.

09/05/2026

Sitting on the porch after supper — late 1970s in Gatlinburg

By the late 1970s, there were plenty of televisions inside.

But after supper, a lot of people still ended up on the porch.

A rocking chair. A glass of tea. Somebody leaning against the rail. Somebody telling the same story they’d probably told twenty times before.

The air cooled off. The light dropped behind the ridge. Cars passed somewhere down below, but up around the house things got quiet again.

Nobody called it family time.

Nobody called it anything.

You just sat there until it was dark enough to go inside.

What do you remember about summer evenings on the porch?

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’.

09/04/2026

Before an apple ever made it to the kitchen, somebody had to get it off the mountain.

Picking apples in the orchard

By late summer, the apple trees were starting to bow under their own weight.

You didn’t just wait for harvest. You watched the limbs, propped the heavy ones, knocked off what needed thinning, and kept an eye on the fruit as it came along.

Then came the picking.

Buckets, baskets, ladders, and hands moving from branch to branch until the trees were lighter and the work was done.

Some apples went to the table. Some were canned. Some became pies, apple butter, or cider.

Nothing about it felt unusual then.

It was simply part of living here.

Did your family grow apples?

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’.



09/02/2026

1930s - TVA Comes to the Tennessee Valley

In the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority began changing life across East Tennessee and the Tennessee Valley.

TVA was created in 1933 to tackle some very practical problems — flooding, poor navigation, lack of electricity, soil erosion, and the need for better management of the region’s rivers and land.

The work included dams, hydroelectric power, rural electrification, flood control, agricultural programs, and improvements that reached communities all across the Valley.

These old silent TVA films give us a look at that period when East Tennessee was moving into a very different age.

For people living in these mountains, electricity and better infrastructure would eventually change everyday life in ways that would have been hard to imagine only a generation earlier.

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’.

09/02/2026

Churning Butter — 1900s in Gatlinburg

There was a rhythm to churning butter that households in these mountains once knew by heart.

Fresh cream was poured into the churn, and then the work began — up and down, over and over, sometimes for what felt like most of the morning. You couldn’t rush it. The cream had to be worked until the butter finally began to separate from the buttermilk.

For a young girl, this was often one of those jobs learned without anybody announcing that a lesson had begun.

You watched your mother. You took your turn at the churn. You learned how the handle should feel, when the cream was changing, and when the butter was finally beginning to come together.

That was how a lot of knowledge moved from one generation to the next in Gatlinburg and the surrounding mountains. Not from a book and not from a classroom. You learned by standing beside somebody who already knew how to do it.

It was repetitive work, and it could wear your arms out. But butter was part of the household table, and making it was simply one more job that had to be done.

Years later, a woman might not remember the first time her mother showed her how to churn butter.

She just remembered that somehow, she had always known.

Did your family still churn butter this way?

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’.

The Best Mother — Lillian Reagan OgleThese are excerpts from an interview with Doris Marr.Doris Marr had the best mother...
08/31/2026

The Best Mother — Lillian Reagan Ogle

These are excerpts from an interview with Doris Marr.

Doris Marr had the best mother a girl could ask for. Lillian Reagan Ogle let her go outside and play all day, free to do anything she wanted.

Across the street from their house, a field had been dug up for planting corn — long rows like trenches, with mounds of dirt piled on either side, running almost the whole way across the field. To a child's eye, it looked just like the battlefields she'd seen at the movies. Every Saturday, before the picture started, the theater ran newsreels showing soldiers down in trenches, fighting and shooting.

So the cornfield became a battlefield of its own. Doris and her friends would climb down into those rows and gather up ammunition — big clumps of dry dirt that they hurled at each other like bombs. The dirt was so brittle it usually broke apart before it landed, which meant nobody ever really got hurt, and nobody ever wanted to stop.

They threw dirt all day long.

By the time Doris made it home, she'd be covered head to toe. And that's the part of the story that stayed with her longest — not the battle, but what waited for her afterward.

Her mother never said a word about it. She just took her clothes off, washed her clothes, and put her in the bathtub — never an unkind word.

Doris had a neighbor friend whose mother fussed at her constantly for getting dirty, but her own mother never did.

Looking back on it now, Doris says it made her realize just how wonderful a mother she'd had.

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’.

08/31/2026

Lucinda Ogle on Her Grandfather’s Porch

Sitting on the front porch of the Noah “Bud” Ogle cabin along Cherokee Orchard Road, Lucinda Ogle wasn’t just talking about an old homeplace.

She was talking about her grandfather.

Lucinda was the daughter of Wiley Oakley and Rebecca Ann Ogle Oakley. Rebecca was the daughter of Noah “Bud” Ogle, whose homestead still stands today just outside Gatlinburg.

Looking around the place where her grandfather had lived and worked, Lucinda remembered the skill that went into nearly everything he made.

“My grandfather made the locks and the hinges,” she recalled. “He was an artist, really.”

To Lucinda, that was the point.

A man could be an artist with wood, iron, tools, furniture, beds, wagon parts, feeding troughs, and whatever else had to be made. Bud worked with what he had around him. He turned wooden pieces on a homemade lathe. He whittled troughs for the livestock. He made wooden hinges by hand.

“Everything was made with an artist’s hand.”

And the memories were still tied to the place itself.

Lucinda said that every time she came back, she had to walk up to the barns and see those old handmade pieces again.

Then she tried the cabin door.

She wanted to hear whether the old hinge still squeaked.

Somebody had greased it.

“It didn’t squeak,” she said.

But the one up at the barn still did.

For Lucinda, the cabin and barns weren’t simply preserved buildings.

They were her grandfather’s hands still at work.

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

Keep on Rootin’.

08/29/2026

When the Forest Glowed

By the late 1800s, families living in the Smokies were still walking mountain paths after dark without the electric light we take for granted today. And on certain damp nights, they could encounter something genuinely strange — dead wood glowing green in the darkness.

It was called foxfire.

The glow wasn't flame, and the wood wasn't burning. Certain fungi living inside decaying logs, stumps, and roots can produce their own light through bioluminescence. In complete darkness, that faint green glow can become visible to the human eye.

The science explains what caused it.

The mountain stories tell us what it was like to see it.

Foxfire became part of folklore across the Southern mountains, where stories were passed from one generation to another about strange glowing wood discovered along trails, creek bottoms, and deep in the forest.

Imagine seeing it before you knew the explanation.

No electric lights around you. No flashlight in your hand. Just darkness beneath the trees — and an old piece of timber glowing green on the forest floor.

Today we know there was a fungus behind the light.

But for the people who encountered foxfire generations ago, it was simply another strange thing these mountains could do after the sun went down.

Did your parents or grandparents ever tell you about seeing foxfire in the mountains?

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project sharing rare images, forgotten family stories, and voices from the mountains, preserving Gatlinburg history and the everyday life and memory of earlier generations.

Keep on Rootin'.

08/28/2026

Wiley Oakley Day — Gatlinburg
Official Day: Saturday, September 12, 2026
Events Begin Friday, September 11

This year marks the very first Wiley Oakley Day in Gatlinburg.

Wiley Oakley was born September 12, 1885, and became one of the Smokies’ best-known mountain guides, storytellers, writers, and naturalists. Known to many as the “Roamin’ Man of the Mountains,” Wiley spent his life in these hills, sharing their stories and helping generations of visitors and locals remember what made this place special.

The official Wiley Oakley Day is Saturday, September 12 — his birthday — but the celebration begins Friday with a proclamation, music, and Wiley tales.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11

Wiley Oakley Day Proclamation
Gatlinburg City Hall
Time TBD

7:00 to 8:00+ PM
Tunes & Wiley Tales
Luke Ellis & Lew Bolton
Roamin’ Man Pizza, Pigeon Forge

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 — WILEY OAKLEY DAY

10:15 AM
Proclamation Excerpts & Plaque Recognition
Mynatt Park

11:30 AM
Wiley Tales
Noah “Bud” Ogle Cabin & Barn

It is a fitting tribute that Gatlinburg’s first official Wiley Oakley Day falls on the very date he was born, bringing his name, his stories, and his mountain legacy back to the people and places that knew him best.

— Gatlinburg Roots —
Follow the Legacy of the Families Who Built These Mountains.

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