Is it Smokey or Smoky???

Is it Smokey or Smoky?

If you think we spelled it wrong, you're in the majority. Wrong, but in the majority. Both are common spellings. But if you want to be correct about it, spell it the way the National Park Service does - the Great Smoky Mountains.

History of the name is vauge at best. The park is named for the mist or blue haze that surrounds the mountains resulting from the interaction between the moist environment of streams and waterfalls and the thick vegetation. The Cherokee name for the area, Sha-co-na-qe, means "place of blue smoke." Rising upward through the blue "smoke" arc thirty-six miles of mountain peaks standing five thousand feet or more above sea level, sixteen of which exceed six thousand feet. The Cherokee Indians, the earliest settlers in these mountains, revered them as the sacred ancestral home of the entire Cherokee Nation, which at one time stretched from Georgia to the Ohio River.

During the mid-nineteenth century, a number of American atlas publishers produced engraved maps of the United States, its regions, and individual states. Some of these maps were the earliest to show localities eventually incorporated into Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The 1861 Johnson and Browning map of North Carolina identifies the "Iron or Great Smokey Mts," as well as Cade's Cove in Tennessee, which was first settled by Americans in the early nineteenth century. Evidence of the frontier community established there is present today in the partially preserved residences, churches and other buildings exhibited in Cade's Cove, which is one of the most visited sites in the park. In addition, the map shows Quallatown, the Cherokee settlement that later became the Cherokee Indian Reservation, and Old Bald Mountain in North Carolina.

How it got from Smoke to Smoky is probably a misspelling on a map many years ago. Names have a tendency to get distorted over time in this neck of the woods. Cades Cove, for instance was really named for someone with the name Kate. And so it goes.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park, encompassing some of the oldest mountains on earth, is located in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. The state boundary line bisects the park, which is one of the largest in the eastern United States. Measuring fifty-four miles long and nineteen miles across at its widest point the park consists of slightly more than half a million acres. Great Smoky Mountains National Park attracts the largest number of visitors annually of any national park, perhaps because it is located within a day's drive of over 60 percent of the nation's population. In recent years, more than nine million visitors have come to the park each year.

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