Gatlinburg's first settlers

Wiley Oakley's mother, Elmina Conner, was a great granddaughter of Gatlinburg's first settler, Martha Jane Huskey Ogle, whose cabin is pictured here next to the Arrowcraft shop. Oral history tells that Martha's husband William came to the area as a hunter and trader with the Cherokee and fell in love with the beauty of what would become known as White Oak Flats. He felled the trees for a log home and returned to South Carolina to prepare to move his family. While storing up food for the coming year of travel and settling the new home, he became ill with a fever and died.

Martha and their seven children traveled with her brother and his family to Virginia to deliver the news of William's death to his family there, then came to build the cabin from the cured logs that William had cut. They continued to live there, and Martha was among the members of the Fork of the Little Pigeon Church who requested in 1817 that an arm of that Sevierville church be established in the White Oak Flats community. Martha is reported to have been part Cherokee.