The Appalachian Alps
A Population History of the Smoky Mountain Resort Towns
Gatlinburg is threatened by wildfires. This is sad. I have many very fond memories of Gatlinburg and the Smoky Mountains area generally. Driving on I-64 over Thanksgiving, I couldn’t help but notice how hazy the skies were, in part due to the wildfires in Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
There are a lot of angles of approach for this issue. Many commentators have already noted how climate change might make Appalachian wildfires (previously fairly rare) more common, adding yet another problem to the region’s formidable issues. I won’t beat that horse again. Instead, I want to zoom in and use this issue as a “media hook” for looking at the population history of the Smoky Mountain resort towns. I define these as Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, and Sevierville. I know some people will say I should extend out to include Asheville or Knoxville as well; but those are much bigger topics and I’m just not interested for today’s purposes.
Where is Gatlinburg?
Is That Really a Question?
I feel like all human beings know where Gatlinburg is, because it is one of the great resort and vacation towns on earth, in my mind. It is also a rational route for driving into the south if you have kids, since there are scenic vistas and toy shops by the road. Thus, in my mind, everybody knows where these towns are, everybody has been there, and we don’t need to review the geography.
But a while back I encountered someone from out west who, to my horror, had no idea what Gatlinburg was. So let’s get into exploring this town, which is, in ever fiber of its being, a festival of the greatness of the post-war American consumer.
So here’s where Sevier County is:
We can also zoom in on our key cities to see them in greater detail:
The cities get smaller as we follow Highway 441/321 south from I-40 towards Smoky Mountain National Park. Gatlinburg is nestled right up against the Smokies. You can see it from the ski-lift here:
The presence of mountains and a ski-lift tells you a lot about Gatlinburg’s appeal: as a ski and mountain resort! In fact, it’s the furthest-south ski restort in the western Appalachians, and the only such resort in Tennessee. Before the national park opened in 1934, Gatlinburg was a small lumbering outpost with less than a dozen houses. But when the park opened and the town took off as a tourist watering hole, the city began to grow. In its first census appearance in 1950, it already had over 1,000 people: some improvement from 6 houses in the 1900s!
Tourism is everything to this town. But part of tourism means preserving the look and feel of the town, and limiting growth into the surrounding mountains. If it grows too much, the city could lose some tourist appeal.
It’s no surprise then that many larger attractions, hotels, and more land-intensive operations locate themselves on the north side of the greenbelt around Gatlinburg, in Pigeon Forge.
Pigeon Forge is miles of this:
Low-density, space-intensive, totally-unwalkable, mixed retail, services, and lodging. Set back from the parkway are some neighborhoods, as well as “neighborhoods” of vacation homes and resort chalets.
Pigeon Forge didn’t really get going up the 1970s and 1980s, by which time Gatlinburg’s real estate was getting expensive, and the region’s mass-market appeal joined with the spirit of the times to encourage the suburbanization of tourist amenities. With millions passing through each year, there’s plenty of business to go around.
And as tourist dollars have flowed, the area has attracted a separate wave of tourism. Sevierville’s Great Wolf Lodge draws in tourists utterly uninterested in the traditional attractions of the mountains. The area’s numerous resorts, lodges, and other amenities (Dollywood!) all benefit from each others’ guests, meaning that this tourist hub keeps spinning off more tourism attractions. There’s innovation at work in this process as well, with the region generating many novel tourist attractions, like the awesome Smoky Mountain Knife Works store.
All of these towns are concentrated along the highway headed into the Smokies. Pigeon Forge sits at the furthest penetration of flat, developable land into the sharp foothills of the Smokies, while Sevierville is beyond the last of those foothills, in a wider valley. Here’s a 3D image, looking from the south towards Pigeon Forge:
And here’s a 3D image of Gatlinburg, wedged into the last flat-ish valley space before the sharp rise of the Smokies, viewed from the north.
While I don’t have exact data given how Census Tracts are drawn, some quick approximations suggest that downtown Gatlinburg probably has a population density of roughly 2,000 people per square mile, which isn’t bad for a town of just 4,000 people. As in the case of Pikeville, so in Gatlinburg: the surrounding mountains engineer a kind of artificial densification, although in Gatlinburg’s case, the city on the whole is very low density because of the numerous mountain chalet areas included in its municipal borders.
Basic Population Estimates
Let’s do the population thing now, and look at how these cities have developed.
Woah! Rural Sevier County is growing fast!
This is a product of rising rural and exurban tourism and semi-tourism. The number of Knoxville-commuters wanting to live full-time in a resort community is rising. The number of people wanting to reside in a mountainous resort at least part of the year is growing. Several large unincorporated communities have resisted annexation or incorporation due to concerns over increased tax burdens (Sevier County is one of the most Republican in the nation; the last Democratic Presidential candidate to win it was Andrew Jackson, and Donald Trump received 80% of the vote).
The non-municipal decline from the 1910s to the 1950s represents the decline of lumbering, mining, and farming in the region, as it simply proved to be a less efficient area for those industries, and Federal conservation rules related to the national park made some former practices more difficult. But then, as the resort towns began to take off, the rural population rose too. Indeed, non-city Sevier County has risen so much it kind of blows the city population lines out of the water. So let’s zoom in.
As you can see, Sevierville is by far the largest of these three cities, yet Gatlinburg is arguably the most essential for the region’s driving industry: tourism. Gatlinburg’s growth was slow in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1990s, Gatlinburg’s population actually fell, even as Pigeon Forge and Sevierville grew like gangbusters. Gatlinburg’s experience of the 90s was not helped along by a fire that damaged a major downtown city block in 1992. In the 2000s and 2010s, Gatlinburg’s growth has returned, led by resort-home development, while Pigeon Forge has flagged. Sevierville and the non-municipal areas, of course, have thriven.
Regular readers will be surprised to hear me say that the fire in 1992 was a bad thing; aren’t I the guy who infamously argues at every opportunity that urban disasters are often extremely beneficial? Yes, I am! However, to be beneficial, those disasters need to:
- Destroy pieces of the street grid or other land-use-rule-related features, if the city has strict land use rules.
- Destroy large amounts of residential real estate, provoking large-scale, long-term evacuations, if the city is economically struggling.
- Not destroy high-yielding productive assets unless doing so is necessary for the above 2 conditions to be met.
Burning down one nonresidential block that generates a large amount of business is not creative destruction. It is just destruction destruction.
Will These Fires Ruin Gatlinburg Forever?
The current spate of wildfires is devastating for numerous reasons. Let’s review the criteria I laid out above for a potentially “creative” episode of destruction and see if these fires fit the bill:
A beneficial episode of urban creative destruction must destroy pieces of the street grid or other land-use-rule-related features, if the city has strict land use rules.
This one might happen. Gatlinburg does have some pretty strict rules, so a large fire could facilitate new development getting around those rules. However, just the opposite may also occur: the new developments may be placed under even stricter rules, especially relative to fire-resiliency, which may lead to worse usage of land. Now, we can hope that redevelopment will give the are a chance to think about how the cleared ground can be put to even better use, but there’s no way to know for sure until we see how much destruction there is.
Plus, most of Gatlinburg’s land use rules and practices aren’t due to arbitrary laws. They’re there because, if every hillside is developed, real value will be loss. For scenic tourism destinations like Gatlinburg, the surrounding aesthetic is the extremely commercially valuable public good, so it’s likely new development will have to abide by many of the same rules as before, because those rules were largely protecting a real, actual public good.
A beneficial episode of urban creative destruction must destroy large amounts of residential real estate, provoking large-scale, long-term evacuations, if the city is economically struggling.
It seems likely these wildfires will lead to substantial population dislocation and residential disruption. Numerous homes have burnt already, and we don’t know for sure how far the fire will spread. This is the kind of disruption that can lead to extremely beneficial out-migration.
But only if the burned area was actually economically depressed! Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge aren’t doomed towns! They’re growing! They have valuable, functional assets that people want and spend lots of money to get, and they were providing livelihoods for thousands of people apparently with success. Now, granted, from 2002–2011 Sevier County’s personal income per capita greatly underperformed Tennessee’s generally, but that may in part be due to a growing commuter population from Knoxville, and increased fertility. Since 1969, the county’s personal income has doubled as a share of Tennessee total. And since 2011, population has risen, while personal income has risen even faster. This is not an economically failing area. There’s no a priori reason we should want these people to be pushed past their root-breaking point to pick up and move.
A beneficial episode of urban creative destruction must not destroy high-yielding productive assets unless doing so is necessary for the above 2 conditions to be met.
The wildfires began around Chimney Rock, in the national park. Chimney Rock is an enormously popular hiking trail not far from the scenic road that leads into the park. That is to say, these fires have burnt down much of the forest around the scenic vistas that make Gatlinburg valuable. Likewise, many key tourist attractions and amenities in the town are likely to be damaged, while a huge amount of the vacation housing stock in the countryside will also probably be compromised. These are productive assets.
The one comforting note is to look at the Yellowstone fires in the 1980s. While the big fire may have slightly reduced population growth in the area for a year or two, it barely reduced annual visitors at all, and the visibility given to the park by coverage of the fires seems to have greatly increased visits to Yellowstone, from 2.6 million the year before the fire to 3.1 million 3 years later.
However, the Yellowstone fire had comparatively little impact on populated areas. Sure, it burned trees, but not towns; and Yellowstone is a vast area with great amenities that have nothing to do with forested views (i.e. geysers). The Smokies are 100% about the scenery, and these fires may heavily impact the tourism infrastructure.
We’ll see how it all shakes out. I certainly hope that these fires don’t injure the economic prospects of these booming rural, Appalachian, mountain towns. There is no compelling reason to believe these fires will give rise to a Phoenix, unlike in the cases of historic fires in Chicago, Boston, Albany, and elsewhere. But maybe I’ll be wrong. Here’s hoping!
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I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate of Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research.
