Remembrance of Things Past: Gatlinburg #4

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Photo by Bruce McCamish

For this Cherokee Orchard homesite we do not have to rely on the interactive map. I have heard from two people who have seen it still standing: Mac Post and Bruce McCamish. But from Bruce's photo above, it is easy to see it was a near miss. The firestorms that swept through the park and Gatlinburg on Monday, November 28 came to within a stone's throw away. 

The site was the home of Noah Wilson "Bud" Ogle who was born July 16, 1863 and Lucinda "Cindy" Bradley born on November 22, 1862. They were married on February 6, 1883. There is an ancestral connection. My sister Darlene Bales Brett is the family genealogist and she informs me that Noah Bud's grandfather Thomas J. Ogle was our great, great, great, great grandfather. Grandma Pearl was an Ogle which would make Noah Bud Ogle our great, great, great, great, great granduncle. 

Noah Bud's own great-grandparents were William Ogle (1756–1803) and Martha Huskey Ogle (1756–1826). They were the first Euro-American settlers in the Gatlinburg area, originally known as White Oak Flats. Most people whose roots go back over one hundred years to the hollows north of Mount LeConte are related to the Ogles, Whaleys, Huskeys, Reagans, Trenthams and even the Bales.

The Ogle home itself is saddlebag style log cabin: two rooms or pens with a chimney in the center and an open fireplace into each room. The two rooms weren't built at the same time but rather roughly five years apart as the family grew. Noah Bud and Cindy had eight children that survived until adulthood—Frances (Frankie), Leonard, Madison, Rebecca (Becky Ann), Isaac, Wilson, Winnie and Polly and one child that died in infancy.

                                                       GSMNP archives

Noah Bub Ogle barn. wiki

The building beyond the house is a classic four pen barn for keeping livestock separate. A tub mill also survives on the creek. The homestead is known as "Junglebrook," perhaps because of the rhododendron thickets that surround the stream. During Bud and Cindy's day it was known as Mill Creek, but the park service changed the name to LeConte Creek because there were so many "Mill Creeks" in the region. In 1977, the homestead was placed on The National Register of Historic Places. All the buildings were probably built in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

At one point there were other outbuildings including a so-called "weaner cabin," as was a custom of large families. It was a small cabin near the family home where the newly-wed children lived for a brief period after getting married.

© 2016 From the upcoming book, 

"Vintage Gatlinburg: 
The Transformation of a Small Timber Town to a Mountain Resort
 Family Remembrances 1899-1974" 

by University of Tennessee Press author and native son  

Stephen Lyn Bales

For link to Roaring Fork homesteads click:

Alfred Reagan

Ephraim Bales

Jim Bales & Alex Cole

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