Gatlinburg Roots

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Gatlinburg Roots Home of the official Gatlinburg Roots Podcast. Their stories, along with the stories of countless other mountain families, form the foundation of this project.

Founded by sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-generation descendants of Martha Jane Huskey Ogle, Gatlinburg Roots preserves the stories, memories, and history of White Oak Flats and Gatlinburg. Gatlinburg Roots was founded by seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-generation descendants of White Oak Flats families whose roots run deep in these mountains. Through the Ogle and Reagan family lines, including direct descent from Martha Jane Huskey Ogle, the project grew from inherited photographs, family stories, and memories passed from one generation to the next. For generations, these families lived, worked, worshiped, raised children, and built lives in the community known as White Oak Flats. Through photographs, family histories, historical research, and firsthand accounts, Gatlinburg Roots works to preserve the people, places, traditions, and everyday life of White Oak Flats, Gatlinburg, and the Great Smoky Mountains. Every photograph has a story. Every family has a place. Every generation leaves something worth remembering. Most of us are only three generations away from being forgotten. Gatlinburg Roots exists to help ensure those memories, stories, and legacies are preserved and passed forward to the generations that follow. Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary. Keep on Rootin'.

10/26/2026

Back When Every Mountain Home Had a Loom

In the early 1900s, you could hear a handloom working before you ever reached the cabin.

It sat in a corner of the house, big and heavy, built from timber cut close to home. When a woman sat down at it, everybody under that roof knew the sound.

The wool came off their own sheep. She washed it in the creek, carded it by hand, and spun it by firelight while the children slept. The color came from walnut hulls and bark the young ones gathered off the hillside.

At the loom, it was one pass of the shuttle, then another, then thousands more. A single coverlet could take most of a winter. Blankets for the beds, cloth for shirts and dresses, something warm for a baby on the way.

Nothing was wasted. Nothing was rushed.

And when a daughter got tall enough to reach the treadles, she sat down beside her mother and learned the same rhythm her grandmother had known.

Was there a loom in your family, or a coverlet still folded away somewhere that a grandmother made by hand?

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Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

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Around 1906: The Boy With the Hog R***eSomewhere in the Smokies around 1906, a boy stood against the stump of a tree so ...
10/26/2026

Around 1906: The Boy With the Hog R***e

Somewhere in the Smokies around 1906, a boy stood against the stump of a tree so big it could have been a table for a dozen people.

The r***e stood taller than he did, the long barrel resting against his shoulder and his hand wrapped around it like he'd done it a thousand times. Across his chest hung a powder horn and a leather pouch, the two things a hunter in these hills never left the cabin without. The horn carried the powder. The pouch carried the lead. Everything else was up to him.

His coat had been mended and worn soft. The knees of his britches were patched. The cuffs were frayed, and his feet were bare on the cold ground. Nobody in the mountains had money to spare, but a boy with a gun on his shoulder was a boy trusted with something that mattered.

A long r***e like this was called a hog r***e. In those days, families let their hogs roam the woods and ridges to fatten on chestnuts and acorns, and somebody had to look after them, and put meat in the smokehouse come fall. In a mountain home, that was not a game. It was part of the year's work.

He looks into the camera with no smile, no show, nothing put on. Just a steady, serious face under a hat pulled low, the face of a boy who had probably already seen more of the woods than most grown men see in a lifetime.

We don't know his name. We don't know what he hunted that day, or whether the day ended with meat on the table. But we know he stood still long enough for a stranger with a camera to catch him, and more than a hundred years later he is still standing there, r***e in hand, looking right at us.

Did your people hunt these mountains with a long r***e and a powder horn? Tell us their story in the comments.

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ABOUT THIS PHOTO

Original historical photograph with modern text treatment.

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STAY WITH US

If these old Smoky Mountain stories matter to you, tap Follow on Gatlinburg Roots so you never miss the next one.

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Follow the Legacy: Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

Keep on Rootin'.

10/25/2026

Pioneer Days: When the Fiddle Came Out, the Whole Settlement Danced

Up here in the mountains, the work came first. But once the corn was shucked, the cabin logs were raised, or the last of the molasses was stirred off, somebody went home and got the fiddle.

Word moved fast. By sundown, families were coming in on foot and on horseback, some of them walking miles over the ridges with a lantern swinging in their hand. The biggest room in the cabin got cleared out. Beds were shoved against the wall, chairs carried out to the porch, and the little ones bedded down wherever there was room, sleeping right through the racket.

The fiddler took his seat in the corner, sometimes with a banjo picker beside him. He'd tuck that fiddle under his chin, tap his foot a few times, and tear into Turkey in the Straw. Everybody knew it. Before the first time through was over, the floor was full.

Somebody always called the dance, hollering it out over the music. Swing your partner. Circle left. Promenade home. The young folks learned by jumping in and getting it wrong until they got it right. The old folks had been doing it since they were barefoot children. Boots pounded the boards so hard the dust shook down from the rafters, and the whole cabin seemed to bounce right along with the tune.

Those old fiddle tunes were handed down by ear, not on paper. Nobody wrote them down. A boy learned by sitting close to his granddaddy, watching his fingers and humming along until the tune lived in him too. That's how the music survived for generations in these hills.

Not everybody approved. Some preachers called the fiddle the devil's box, and more than one mother kept her daughters home on a dance night. But the dances went on anyway, often past midnight, and sometimes right up until daylight, when it was time to go home and milk the cows.

For mountain people living miles apart, those nights were everything. It was where news got shared, where neighbors laughed after a hard season, and where a young man worked up the nerve to ask a girl to be his partner. More than one Smoky Mountain marriage started with a fiddle tune and a swing across a cabin floor.

Did anybody in your family play the fiddle, pick the banjo or call the dances? Tell us about them in the comments.

STAY WITH US
If these old Smoky Mountain stories matter to you, tap Follow on Gatlinburg Roots so you never miss the next one.

Follow • Remember • Preserve

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.
Keep on Rootin'.

10/24/2026

When Butter Came From a Churn

Long before butter came wrapped in paper off a store shelf, it came out of a wooden churn, one slow stroke at a time.

Before anybody touched the dasher, the old-timers would tell you the first rule: you don't never put up warm milk. Not if you want good butter, and good buttermilk with it.

So the milk went in cool, and then it waited. Overnight it would clabber, thickening and souring as it fermented, turning tangy the way real buttermilk ought to taste. Nobody rushed that part. The clabber did its work while the house slept.

Then came the churning. Up and down, up and down, about thirty minutes of it. More often than not the dasher got handed to a child, and every one of them learned the same thing: just when your arms are ready to quit, you feel it change. The splashing turns heavy. The butter has come.

It was lifted out and washed in clean, cold water until the last of the buttermilk rinsed away, because any left behind would sour the butter. Then it was salted and set somewhere cold. If a family had a refrigerator, that's where it went. If they didn't, it went to the spring box, a wooden box set down in cold running spring water, and stayed there until it got good and cold.

Once it was firm, it was printed. It got pressed into a carved wooden mold that stamped a design on top. Some families had a flower, some a wheat sheaf, some a star. At a church dinner you could almost tell whose butter was whose by the print.

Just fresh butter, made by hand, waiting for a hot biscuit or a skillet of cornbread.

CHURN YOUR OWN BUTTER

1 quart heavy cream (not ultra-pasteurized)
2 tablespoons cultured buttermilk
Ice-cold water
About 1/2 teaspoon salt, more to taste
A churn, a stand mixer, or a big jar with a tight lid

1. Stir the buttermilk into the cream, cover it loosely and let it sit at room temperature 12 to 24 hours, until it thickens and smells tangy. That's your clabber.

2. Chill it in the refrigerator a couple of hours. Churn it cool, never warm.

3. Churn it. That takes a few minutes in a mixer and about 30 in a churn. Shake hard if you're using a jar. It goes thick like whipped cream, then suddenly breaks into yellow butter and thin buttermilk.

4. Pour off the buttermilk and save it for biscuits and cornbread.

5. Wash the butter in a bowl of ice-cold water, pressing it with a wooden spoon. Pour off the water and repeat until it runs clear.

6. Work in the salt, press the butter into a mold or dish, and chill it until firm.

Makes about a pound.

Did your mother or grandmother churn butter? Do you remember a spring box, or one of those old wooden butter molds?

• END OF STORY •

STAY WITH US
If these old Smoky Mountain stories matter to you, tap Follow on Gatlinburg Roots so you never miss the next one.

Follow • Remember • Preserve

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

Keep on Rootin'.

10/24/2026

When the Hearth Was the Heart of the Kitchen

Back when supper in these mountains started with an axe instead of a k**b, every cook knew the secret was never the flame. It was the coals.

Ask an old-timer how it was done and the answer comes quick: hickory. Not just any hickory, either. Most of the time it was green wood, cut fresh and still heavy with sap. Dry wood would flare up and burn itself out before the bread ever browned. Green hickory took its time. It hissed and popped and fought the fire a while, but once it caught, it burned down into a deep bed of coals that held their heat for hours.

That was the whole trick. If you fixed it right and had plenty of hot coals, you had what you needed. Everything else came down to experience.

There were no dials and no settings. Heat control lived in the cook's hands. When a pot got to rolling too hard, it didn't come off the heat the way we'd do it now. It got pulled out onto the hearth, a little farther from the fire, where the stones still held warmth but wouldn't scorch. Need it hotter, slide it back in closer. Need it slower, ease it out. That stretch of hearth in front of the fireplace was the real kitchen. That's where the cooking happened.

And through all of it, the coals stayed real hot. A cook kept them fed and kept them raked, because a dying fire meant a cold supper and a long night.

It sounds simple, and in a way it was. But it took years of burned fingers and ruined pans to learn just how far from the fire a skillet of cornbread wanted to sit.

The old mountain cooks didn't need a temperature dial. They knew their fire.

Did anybody in your family ever cook on a hearth, or pass down a story about it?

• END OF STORY •

STAY WITH US
If these old Smoky Mountain stories matter to you, tap Follow on Gatlinburg Roots so you never miss the next one.

Follow • Remember • Preserve

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

Keep on Rootin'.

10/22/2026

Witch-Hobble: The Shrub Smoky Mountain Folks Named for the Witches

Run your finger down the Appalachians, from Nova Scotia to Georgia, and you've traced the long spine of mountains that holds the Smokies. All along those highlands grows a sprawling shrub that most people walk right past.

A botanist has a Latin name for it. The folks who lived in these hills never needed one. They knew it by many names, the way people name the things they live beside.

In our Smoky Mountains, they gave it the one that stuck.

Witch-hobble.

A name like that doesn't come from a shrub's leaves or its blooms. It comes from what people did with it. In the old days, when mountain families believed witches were abroad, they cut twigs from this shrub, tied them in bundles and hung them to ward the witches off the house. The shrub kept the witches hobbled, and the name said so.

That's how a plant growing wild on a mountainside came to carry the fear and the faith of the families who lived here, in a single word.

Did your family have a name for a plant or a tree in the Smokies that nobody outside these mountains would know? Tell us in the comments.

• END OF STORY •

STAY WITH US

If these old Smoky Mountain stories matter to you, tap Follow on Gatlinburg Roots so you never miss the next one.

Follow • Remember • Preserve

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

Keep on Rootin'.

When Becky Cable Sat Down to SpinIn Cades Cove, Rebecca "Becky" Cable became known simply as Aunt Becky.She lived in a h...
10/22/2026

When Becky Cable Sat Down to Spin

In Cades Cove, Rebecca "Becky" Cable became known simply as Aunt Becky.

She lived in a house that had once held a store, later helped support her brother Dan's family, and after Dan and his wife died, she raised their children. The Becky Cable House still stands in the Cable Mill area of Cades Cove today.

This photograph shows Becky spinning on her porch.

Spinning was slow work.

Fiber had to be prepared, drawn out and twisted into yarn one length at a time. That yarn could become cloth, stockings, blankets or whatever the household needed next.

There was no reason to think of it as heritage then.

It was simply another piece of the day.

A porch. A spinning wheel. A woman working with her hands while life carried on around her.

That is how so much mountain history survived.

Not because somebody stopped to call it history.

Because somebody kept doing the work.

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ABOUT THIS PHOTO

Original historical photograph with modern text treatment.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

STAY WITH US

If these old Smoky Mountain stories matter to you, tap Follow on Gatlinburg Roots so you never miss the next one.

Follow • Remember • Preserve

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Follow the Legacy: Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

Keep on Rootin'.

10/21/2026

The Broadaxe: How the First Mountain Homes Were Squared by Hand

A frontier family could not buy a floor. They had to hew one.

The tool for that job was the broadaxe, a heavy, wide-bladed axe made for one purpose: turning round logs into flat timbers. A man would first score the log with a regular axe, chopping notches along its length, then come back with the broadaxe and split away the wood between them, one swing at a time, until the side lay flat and true.

From those timbers came the floors underfoot, the tables where families ate, and the benches where they sat.

A settler with a good carpenter nearby was a fortunate one. A man who could hew, shape and peg wood together could turn a log stump into a stool for a household that had nothing to sit on, and he could outfit a family heading off to make a life where there were no stores to fill the gaps.

The first families in these mountains knew that work by heart. As the old story goes, Billy Ogle cut and hewed the logs for a cabin in the valley that became White Oak Flats, and after he was gone, Martha Jane Huskey Ogle and her children came and raised it around 1807.

Every hewn log still standing in these hills carries the marks of those swings. Look close, and you can still see where the blade bit in.

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STAY WITH US

If these old Smoky Mountain stories matter to you, tap Follow on Gatlinburg Roots so you never miss the next one.

Follow • Remember • Preserve

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

Keep on Rootin'.

10/21/2026

Sweet Refrigerator Pickles and Dried Apples — Two Old Mountain Recipes

If you grew up around Gatlinburg and the Smoky Mountains, you might remember walking into your grandmother's kitchen and finding a big bowl of sliced cucumbers sitting on the table.

There might be onions and peppers beside them, a kettle of vinegar and sugar warming on the stove, and a row of clean jars waiting to be filled.

And if it was apple season, somebody might be sitting nearby with a paring knife, peeling apples and cutting them into thin slices.

Those were familiar sights in mountain kitchens.

Nobody needed a special occasion to make pickles or dry apples. It was simply what you did when the garden was producing more than the family could eat and the apple trees were loaded.

A good batch of sweet pickles could brighten up a plate of beans and cornbread. Dried apples could be saved for winter, then brought out for fried pies, apple stack cakes, or a pan of cooked apples on a cold morning.

The recipes weren't always written down. Sometimes you learned by standing beside your mother or grandmother, watching how much sugar she poured into the vinegar or how thin she sliced the apples.

And years later, you might find yourself making those same things in your own kitchen.

Here are two simple recipes that bring back some of those old mountain traditions.

**Old-Fashioned Sweet Refrigerator Pickles**

**Ingredients**

2 quarts sliced cucumbers
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1 bell pepper, sliced
2 cups vinegar (5% acidity)
2 cups sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon celery seed
1 teaspoon mustard seed

**Directions**

Slice the cucumbers, onion, and bell pepper.

Sprinkle the vegetables with salt and let them stand for about an hour. Drain well.

In a large saucepan, combine the vinegar, sugar, celery seed, and mustard seed. Bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

Add the vegetables and simmer gently for about 10 minutes.

Transfer to clean jars, allow to cool, cover, and refrigerate promptly.

These are refrigerator pickles, not shelf-stable canned pickles. Keep refrigerated and use within two weeks.

**Old-Fashioned Dried Apples**

**Ingredients**

Fresh apples
Water
Lemon juice (optional)

**Directions**

Wash and core the apples. Peel them if you prefer, then slice them evenly, about ⅛ to ¼ inch thick.

To help prevent browning, dip the slices briefly in water mixed with lemon juice.

Arrange the apple slices in a single layer on dehydrator trays.

Dry at approximately 135°F until leathery, with no moisture remaining when cut or squeezed. Drying may take 6–12 hours or longer, depending on the apples and equipment.

Let the apples cool, then loosely pack them into jars for about a week, shaking daily and checking for condensation. If moisture appears, dry them further.

Once completely dried and conditioned, store in airtight containers in a cool, dark, dry place.

Years ago, some mountain families spread their sliced apples on screens to dry. Others used whatever drying arrangements they had available. The important thing was getting the apples dry enough to keep.

When winter came, those apples could be soaked, cooked down, and turned into something good.

And there was something special about opening a jar of homemade pickles or bringing out a bag of dried apples that had been put away months earlier.

You remembered the summer garden, the apple picking, and maybe even the person who taught you how to make them.

For a lot of us, those memories are as much a part of mountain history as the old buildings and photographs.

**Now we'd like to hear from you.**

Did your family make sweet pickles? Did your grandmother dry apples on a screen, or did she have another way of doing it?

And who made the best fried apple pies in your family?

Share your memories and family recipes in the comments. We'd love to keep those old traditions going.

Follow • Remember • Preserve

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

Keep on Rootin’.

10/20/2026

The Old Ballads Mountain Mothers Brought From Scotland, Ireland and England

The little boy is sick, and his mother already knows it.

She holds him close, her curly hair falling forward as she works him out of his clothes and into something clean. Her hands stay busy, and while they work, she sings.

What do you want for your breakfast, oh Willie, tell me?

The answer comes back in the song, slow and worn out. I don't want nothing, Mother. Fix my bed soon. I'm sick at my heart, and I want to lie down.

It sounds like a lullaby. It is far older than that.

Those verses come from a ballad that crossed the ocean with the Scotch, Irish and English families who settled these mountains, and it was sung here long before anyone thought to write it down.

In the mountains, the old ballads were the songs mothers had, handed down from their own mothers before them. Whatever was close at hand when a child needed comfort, that is what got sung.

The words were old. The voice singing them was the safest sound that little boy knew.

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STAY WITH US

If these old Smoky Mountain stories matter to you, tap Follow on Gatlinburg Roots so you never miss the next one.

Follow • Remember • Preserve

Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project preserving the history of Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains through forgotten family stories, voices, and rare images, using alternative media forms when necessary.

Keep on Rootin'.

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