Little River

Under Kuwohi

There are Little Rivers all over the South. This one drains the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountains. It rises inside the national park in Sevier County, near Collins Gap on the north slope of Kuwohi, at about 5,100 feet, and about a mile down several small streams come together at a place called Three Forks, where the river gathers itself. Its first eighteen miles are in the park. The remaining forty-odd run out of the mountains through Blount County to the Tennessee River, which it meets in Fort Loudoun Lake on the Blount and Knox county line at about 814 feet. TVA and the EPA both give it about sixty miles and 380 square miles of drainage, and the Little River Watershed Association says fifty-nine.

Two big tributaries come in from the west. The Middle Prong forms at Tremont, where Lynn Camp Prong and Thunderhead Prong meet, and the West Prong drains the ground under Spence Field. They join the main river at the Townsend Wye, which in summer is a swimming hole, and just past it the river leaves the park for Tuckaleechee Cove.

The railroad river

The road up the river was laid by a lumber company. W. B. Townsend organized the Little River Lumber Company around 1901, and its railroad was chartered as a subsidiary that November. The company built about 150 miles of track up the river and its prongs, with one branch ending at Elkmont and another at Tremont, and a sawmill in the town that took Townsend’s name. None of the track is left. State Route 73, the Little River Gorge Road between the Townsend and Gatlinburg entrances, runs on the old bed.

The sources agree on the shape of this and on very few of the numbers. The company’s land is 80,000 acres in one account, about 86,000 in another, over 76,000 in a third. It cut 560 million board feet by one count and 750 million by another, and a third source puts two billion board feet out of the Little River watershed. Townsend sold to the park in 1924, 1925 or 1926 depending on who is telling it. One version gives a price of $273,557, or $3.58 an acre. Two of the accounts have him keeping the right to go on logging inside the new park, and the railroad shut in 1939, when the cutting was done.

Elkmont

Elkmont, where Jakes Creek comes into the river, began in 1908 as a logging camp and transfer station on the railroad. Within a few years it was also a resort. Knoxville sportsmen formed the Appalachian Club in 1910, and the Wonderland Hotel opened on the hill in 1911 or 1912. When the park came, the cottage owners got lifetime leases, later cut to twenty-year terms, and the Park Service let them lapse in 1992. The hotel and several dozen cottages were listed as the Elkmont Historic District in 1994. In 2009 the Park Service decided to restore the Appalachian Clubhouse and eighteen cabins and remove the rest, and the last of those came down in 2018. A campground sits on the old logging town.

Brook trout and the Sinks

Below Elkmont, Wikipedia reports native brook trout and water that only expert paddlers should try. The best-documented trout work is on the Middle Prong’s headwaters. In 2008 the Park Service began treating eight miles of Lynn Camp Prong with the piscicide antimycin to remove rainbow trout from above the cascades, which keep fish from coming back up, and made the final treatment in 2011. Native brook trout were put back above the cascades. The Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture’s report describes the restocked fish as wild southern Appalachian strain. The park counts eleven restored brook trout populations on 27.6 miles of stream.

Lower on the main river, at the Sinks, the water drops about ten feet into a pool and seems for a moment to go underground. It doesn’t. The rock here is Precambrian metamorphic, and the caves are downstream in the limestone of Tuckaleechee Cove, so the Sinks is one of the better-named misunderstandings in the park. Metcalf Bottoms, a picnic ground, sits on a pocket of soft phyllite among harder sandstones.

Out of the park

Below Townsend the river passes Walland and Maryville and Alcoa, and at Rockford the low-head dam at the Rockford Manufacturing Company is a dangerous one for paddlers. TVA said in 2005 that for a river its size the Little held one of the most diverse fish populations in the Southeast, and the EPA names among them the endangered duskytail darter. It is also a working river. Somewhere between 85,000 and 120,000 people in Blount County drink from it, depending on the source. The stretch inside the park is an Outstanding National Resource Water, a benchmark for the Blue Ridge, and the state classes the river as threatened, with lower tributaries listed as impaired for bacteria, sediment and nutrients. TVA reported a fish consumption advisory for PCBs below the Rockford dam.

Its watershed once marked a nation’s edge. The Treaty of Holston in 1791 set the Cherokee boundary with the United States at the ridge between the Little River and the Tennessee, by Wikipedia’s reading of the treaty texts.