Where American History Comes to Stay

Long before there was a Gatlinburg, there was a gap in the mountains.

In the summer of 1773, Daniel Boone led the first settlers across the Appalachian Mountains through the Cumberland Gap — adventurers who remained a short six months before hardship sent them back to the Carolinas. Three years later, Boone returned, led another group through the gap, and founded the first permanent settlement west of the mountains. That was the world these cabins were born into.

The cabins of Timberidge come primarily from the mountains of East Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Some are the work of our forefathers — hand-hewn log homes built over two hundred years ago, constructed with native hardwoods using tools no longer made. Each adze mark in the timber is a fingerprint of the craftsman who made it. Each dovetail corner joint is a decision made by a human hand.

When Timberidge was founded, those cabins still stood — scattered across remote mountain land, slowly being reclaimed by the forest. They were found, documented, tagged, disassembled log by log, and trucked to their new home above Gatlinburg. There, they were reconstructed with every modern comfort inside and every hand-hewn wall intact. The small white farmhouse that once anchored a two-hundred-acre farm still sits at the entrance to the property — a quiet marker of everything that came before.

The result is something the Smoky Mountains have never seen: an exclusive community of authentic log homes, where the oldest structures have stood for more than two centuries and every cabin carries the story of the family that first built it.

Then came November 2016.

The wildfires that swept through Gatlinburg were among the deadliest in Tennessee history. The mountain that had sheltered these cabins for decades became a threat. In the days that followed, the Timberidge community faced what those original settlers knew well — loss, uncertainty, and the choice of whether to rebuild.

They rebuilt. Cabins that had survived two centuries were carefully dismantled, transported, and restored to stand again. What the fire could not take was the history cut into every log. That survived.

Today, Timberidge is the only place in the Smoky Mountains — perhaps in all of America — where you can spend the night inside a genuine hand-hewn log home from the 1800s. Not a cabin built to look old. One that is old, saved twice, and still standing.

That is the story of Timberidge. It is as long as your arm, and as old as these mountains.