06/07/2026
Gatlinburg Roots — Mimi's Little World on Bishop Street
Gatlinburg Roots sat down with Doris Ogle Marr a few weeks ago for a conversation about her childhood. In that conversation, she talked about a rock, a mimosa tree, a nickel, and a husband who knew exactly what mattered. We call her Mimi — and that's who she'll be throughout this story.
When Mimi was two years old, her mama told her she could not go past the rock. The road was right on the other side, and that was the rule. The rock sat in the front yard of the old house on Bishop Street, behind Pi Beta Phi School, and it marked the edge of the world she was allowed to be in.
It wasn't even two feet tall. But Mimi was little too, and to her it was something worth climbing. She would go out there and work her way up, slow and careful, because it wasn't easy. It was hard to climb up on that rock. And on one side there was a smooth slope, and once she got herself turned around she would slide right back down, and then go around and climb up again, and slide down again. Climb up and slide down. Around and around she went. She'd forgotten about the sliding for a long time, and then one day the memory came back clear as anything. That rock had been her little slide before she even knew there were such things as playgrounds.
When she got older, too old for sliding, it became her store. She would lay leaves and berries and things from the yard out on top of it and wait for people walking down the road to stop and buy something. Nobody ever did. There wasn't anything anybody needed. But it was her store, and that was enough.
The yard around that rock was its own small world. Miss Trentham lived next door, with a garden running between their two places. On the other side of the house was where their own garden had been, until Arthur Ogle built the cleaners there when Clell Ogle came back from the service. There was a barn, but Mama told her not to go in the barn, and Mimi didn't. There was a cow in there for a while, but even that wasn't enough temptation to make her disobey. Out back, her mama and daddy kept chickens — a whole bunch of them, wild and unfriendly — and Mimi stayed out of the backyard most of the time because she was always barefooted, and if she went back there barefooted she was going to step in chicken p**p, and that was about as bad as anything could be. But when a mama chicken had biddies, Mimi would go back there anyway and catch herself one and hold it and play with it for a little while. They had two or three apple trees in the yard. Arthur Ogle had a row of bees across the back. He had a little carport big enough for two cars, though he never parked a car in it. He kept other things there.
Mimi always wanted animals. She wanted a dog. But more than anything, she wanted a horse. She wanted one so badly that one day, when she was about three, she told her daddy flat out: do not come home without bringing me a horse. She didn't have any idea what they would have done with a horse. That wasn't the point. She wanted one. So Arthur went to a craft shop after work and came home with a little bronze horse, the cutest thing, with something like a tiny keychain collar on it. He had listened. He had brought her a horse.
The real horse story came when a man up at the end of the road had a mule get loose. To Mimi, a mule was a horse. It had four legs, and that was close enough. The mule came running down the road and the moment Mimi saw it, she took off after it. She was going to catch that horse. She was going to have herself a horse at last. Her mama came running behind her screaming, Doris, Doris, come back. And Mimi hollered back that she was going to catch that horse, she was going to catch it. The man who owned the mule came running too, and for a little while Bishop Street had its own parade — a loose mule, a three-year-old girl in full chase, a frightened mama calling after her, and the man trying to catch all of it at once. The mule outran her. Of course it did. But she never forgot the feeling that for just a minute, she almost had a horse.
They had planted a lot of trees around the old house, and by then they were all big trees, and the place was shady and full. And next door, in Miss Trentham's front yard, there was a mimosa tree that Mimi thought was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. It was huge, and it wept all the way down, the branches hanging so low she could reach up and touch the flowers. She was about five. She would take a little blanket over there and spread it out underneath that tree and lie there and pick the blooms right off the low-hanging limbs. They were like little pink puffballs, soft and pretty, and they smelled so good that she would press them right up against her nose just to breathe them in. She'd make herself a little bouquet and lie there in the shade smelling those flowers. She wondered later if Miss Trentham thought she was crazy. But she loved it there. And there was always a breeze coming through, moving those limbs, stirring those flowers, making the whole tree seem alive around her. That tree was something.
It was because of that tree that Mimi had her first store.
She had always wanted a store, for some reason. She was about four or five when she decided she was going to have one. She found a box and carried it down near the road, to the little space between her yard and Miss Trentham's place, and she set it up. Then she went to work gathering inventory. Not leaves this time, not berries. She pulled up a whole bunch of tiny mimosa sprouts from around Miss Trentham's tree. They were little things, maybe three inches tall, maybe not even that. She pulled them up roots and all, and then she wrapped the roots carefully in little towels or paper towels, whatever she had, trying to keep them from drying out. She laid them out across her box. She made a sign. Her store was open.
Before long, a couple staying over at Johnson's Motel across the street wandered over to see what the little girl was doing beside the road with her box and her sign.
"What are you doing?" they asked.
"I have a store," Mimi told them.
They looked at the little sprouts laid out on the box.
"What are you selling?"
"Mimosa trees," she said. And then she turned around and pointed to the great big tree right behind her, the one with the low-hanging limbs and the soft pink flowers, the one she had been lying under all summer.
"If you buy one of these little trees," she told them, "it'll grow up to look like that."
They were so sweet. They gave her a nickel for two trees, and she was so happy. That was her first sale. The first sale she ever had was selling mimosa trees. Miss Trentham's mimosa trees, pulled right out of Miss Trentham's yard. And she was proud of it.
She always found something to do growing up. There were neighborhood boys — James Wolf was a good friend, and they played together a lot. They would make roads in the dirt of the front yard for his toy cars and build little villages, and Mama didn't care, she let them. One time they'd play with his cars, and the next time he came over he had to play dolls. That was just how it was. Nobody thought anything of it.
There was another rock she remembered from those years too. Up at their second house, before Johnson's bought the property and built the motel, there was a massive chunk of white flint rock sitting in the yard — bigger than a coffee table, and beautiful. Mimi used to climb all over it. She always wondered what happened to it. Somebody should have saved it, pushed it down into a garden somewhere and put it on display, because it was one of the prettiest big white rocks she ever saw.
But back to the first rock. The Bishop Street rock.
For a while Mimi thought it was just gone. That happens to old places. Roads get widened. Houses come down. The things that mattered to children become obstacles for somebody else's work. She didn't know where it ended up, and for a long time she figured it was gone for good.
Then one day in 1976, her husband Steve came pulling into the driveway at Hidden Hills fast, excited about something. Mimi looked out wondering what in the world was going on, and behind him came one of those machines with a big scoop on the front, the kind they use to move dirt and heavy things. It came flying right into the yard behind him. Steve got out and called her over.
"Come here," he said. "Where do you want your rock?"
She said, what?
He said, I got your rock.
They had been doing road work down on Bishop Street, widening the road in front of the old house and the cleaners, and somehow Steve had found out about it. He went and talked to the city crew and told them that was Doris's rock, and asked if they could bring it to their house. And they said sure, they'd take it. So they loaded it up and brought it all the way through the middle of Gatlinburg, all the way out Highway 321, all the way up Hidden Hills Road, all the way to the top of the mountain. They set it in the front yard down by the barbecue pit and angled it so it looked pretty.
And there it stayed, from 1976 on.
The kids climbed on it. They played on it. They got to enjoy it the same way she had enjoyed it when she was little, when it was her slide and her store and the edge of the world her mama told her she could not cross.
Mimi never forgot that Steve was thoughtful enough to go down there and talk those men into bringing her that rock. He had gone to Bishop Street, near Pi Beta Phi School, and he had told them whose rock it was, and they had carried it all the way through the middle of Gatlinburg and up the mountain and set it in her yard. Wasn't that precious.
Years later, Mimi had the rock sent to Maryville Monument Company to be engraved — to give it the recognition it deserved after everything it had meant to her. Somewhere in that process, the rock disappeared. If anyone out there knows where it ended up, Gatlinburg Roots would love to hear from you.
What she does know is that she hopes somebody's enjoying it. Because she enjoyed it. From the time she was two years old and climbing up that hard little slope and sliding down the smooth side, around and around, that rock was hers. It was the center of everything — the yard, the barn, the chickens, the bees, the apple trees, the mimosa flowers, the mule in the road, the nickel store, Miss Trentham's garden.
All of it lived around that rock.
And the rock carried it with her, all the way from Bishop Street to the top of the mountain.
Some things don't stay where they started. They just keep moving, carrying the story with them.
Follow the Legacy — Gatlinburg Roots is an ongoing heritage project sharing rare images, forgotten family stories, and voices from the mountains, preserving Gatlinburg history and the everyday life and memory of earlier generations.
If you have old photos, family stories, or memories connected to these mountains, send us a message. Your story could be featured in a future post.
Keep on Rootin’.
