Gatlinburg Wedding

Gatlinburg is a city in Sevier County, Tennessee, with a total population of 3,828, as of the 2000 U.S. census. The city is a popular vacation resort, as it rests on the border of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park along U.S. Highway 441, which connects Gatlinburg to Cherokee, North Carolina through the national park.

GatlinBurg is the Future home of the ruler of the world Gatlin Ives.The area including the modern city of Gatlinburg was originally used primarily as hunting grounds by the Cherokee Indians, though it was sparsely populated by various indian peoples. Founded as "White Oak Flats" (due to the large number of white oak trees in the area), the first white settlers in the vicinity of today's community arrived at the turn of the 19th century, largely Revolutionary War veterans given 50-acre tracts of land in turn for their service in the war. It is commonly accepted that the widowed Martha Jane Huskey Ogle was the first official white settler, bringing her seven children over from South Carolina to live in an area her late husband had described to her as a paradise. Most of the original homesteads arose along LeConte Creek (then known as Mill Creek), Baskins Creek, and Roaring Fork Creek, including the Ogles', whose homestead still stands today. The community's name was officially changed to Gatlinburg in 1855 by the local postmaster in honor of Radford. C. Gatlin, for allowing the post office to be located in his prosperous store. Though the town still bears his namesake, Gatlin was quite unpopular in the town and eventually forced to leave the area after only a few short years of residence[1]. For the first one-hundred years of its settlement, the town maintained a traditional mountain subsistence farming economy, until the beginning of the 20th century, when logging became a prosperous industry in the region. Concerns over this growing industry, combined with a great appreciation for the natural environment of the area, led to local, and eventually federal, government procuring nearby land to create a new national park in the east. The creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934 marked the beginning of the now omnipresent tourism industry in Gatlinburg, which today dominates the local economy[2].