Little River Rail Road and Lumber Company Museum

The museum is run by the Little River Railroad and Lumber Company, a non-profit founded in 1982 in Townsend, Tennessee, to preserve the story of two intertwined companies that shaped the Smokies. The original Little River Railroad was created as a subsidiary of the Little River Lumber Company on November 21, 1901, with Colonel W. B. Townsend owning both. Primarily a logging railroad — Shay locomotives did most of the work, joined by a 4-6-2 Pacific and the first 2-4-4-2 Mallet articulated — it also carried passengers beginning in 1908, with the advertised Elkmont Special running from Knoxville into the mountains. The lumber company controlled more than 76,000 acres of forest in Blount and Sevier counties and laid roughly 150 miles of track over its lifetime, none of which survives. In 1925, Townsend agreed to deed the company's holdings to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for $273,557, a milestone in the park's creation, with logging permitted inside the boundary until 1938. By the time cutting ended, two billion board feet of lumber had come out of the Little River watershed; the railroad shut down in 1939, and the Townsend museum now collects, preserves, and exhibits that history.