Favorite Places Fall Travel Series: Elkmont

In the past my Fall Travel Series has been used to showcase all the great Wisconsin locations that are only a hop and a skip away from me.  But I have traveled to some amazing places beyond my home state that I have been hoping to share as well.  So I am opening up this season’s travel series to feature favorite places from all of our journeys!  And after last week’s post about a re purposed old cabin, I was reminded of a surreal experience we had a few November’s ago in the Smoky Mountains…the abandoned vacation town of Elkmont, TN.

Once a summer destination for city folk to escape to the beauty and seclusion of a mountain side community, Elkmont flourished in the 20’s and 30’s when most of the cottages were built.  Due to a desire by the National Parks System to convert the area around the Little River trail back to it’s natural state, the homes were mostly abandoned by the 90’s and left to return to the earth, and many have.

What remains is a row of homes along a road through the park.  Referred to as a Ghost Town, they showcase the simply structure and heart of cottage design from that era.

While you are not technically permitted to enter any of the structures, I got close enough to one door opening to snap a pictures of the interior.  I love how the white washed wood siding was used as walls throughout most of the cottages, a trend today to add that coastal or farmhouse character to our modern homes.  Back then it was simply the best available material when building these cottages.

Some homes were in better shape than others, some looked like they had been inhabited until their final date of evictions by the Parks System.  We walked the entire trail of the beautiful river, imagining the journey from the bustling city one would take to get here, back in a time when transportation was much more of a challenge than it is today.  The cottages that would have once lined this river were all but gone, very little rubble even marked their existence, except for one definitive feature.

The fireplaces…above all else I was struck by the eerie beauty of the still standing stone chimneys, once a centerpiece in these great lodges and summer homes, now the only remains left among the trees.

In pictures it is hard to depict how many there were.  It was as if the more you looked, the more you saw.  The rows and rows of chimneys stretched on as far as the eye could see, one more beautiful than the next.  They felt like markers of another life, one that is lost now.  As if these stone chimneys were in their own rite a gravestone to a fallen home and we were walking within the most bizarre cemetery we have toured yet.  The energy of past times was palpable.  It hung in the air, both joyous and mournful.

The day we were there it was misty and quiet, only a few campers remained in the park, only a few tourists drifted in and out of our peripheral as we surveyed these accidental monuments.

  I couldn’t stop searching the landscape for the next ruin.

I couldn’t stop myself from wondering about the people who spent their summers here.

If ever there was a place I would call haunted, of all the historical sites I have visited of tragedy and loss, it would be Elkmont, Tennessee.  But it’s not haunted by any maniacal force, just haunted by what was and used to be…

More of my Favorite Places Fall Travel Series Coming to the Blog in October!