The Sugarlands was a Tennessee mountain community along this valley, with a five-cornered Baptist church built in 1816. It emptied when the national park was assembled from timber company land and some twelve hundred farms, some of it taken by condemnation. A clock tower from a Civilian Conservation Corps camp still stands along the Old Sugarlands Trail.
A Baptist church with five corners went up in this valley in eighteen sixteen. Before there was any meetinghouse at all, people here held services under the trees. This was the Sugarlands. The name is said to come from the sugar maples settlers tapped here. It was rocky ground. Settlers cleared the same field twice, once of trees and once of stones. You won't find any of it now. More than eighty-five percent of the land that became this park belonged to eighteen timber and pulpwood companies. About twelve hundred more tracts were farms, many of them homesteads passed down through generations. Owners who wouldn't sell had their land taken by condemnation, and the hard feelings haven't entirely faded. Then the part the roadside signs leave out. The Park Service first set out to erase the human traces. Most of the buildings the families lost were torn down for scrap lumber or burned. What survives is in the woods. Along the Old Sugarlands Trail, a clock tower from a Depression-era work camp still stands. The Sugarlands had one more reputation. This was moonshine country, and that's Boone's territory, not mine.
Photo: 2025 Park Break Fellows, National Park Service · Public domain