Newfound Gap

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Newfound Gap (elevation 5048 ft/1539 m), is a mountain pass located near the center of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park of the southern Appalachian Mountains in the United States of America. Situated along the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, the state line divids the gap, as does U.S. Highway 441 (also known as Newfound Gap Road), on its way over the mountains between Gatlinburg, Tennessee and Cherokee, North Carolina. The Appalachian Trail also traverses the gap, as do a small number of other hiking trails.

Newfound Gap is also home to the Rockefeller Memorial, a popular destination within the national park and the site from where former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt formally dedicated the park on 2 September 1940[link].

History

Prior to the development of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Newfound Gap was an undiscovered pass two miles east of what was long thought to be the lowest mountain pass over the Great Smoky Mountains, Indian Gap[link]. Indian Gap Road, an unpaved, arduous trail frequented by traders, farmers, and even by the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, was completed in 1839 and named after the old Cherokee Indian trail that the road paralleled. Newfound Gap itself was not recongnized as the lowest gap in over the mountains until 1872, when Arnold Guyot measured many of the mountains in the area and determined the "Newfound Gap" to be a lower, more accessible mountain pass[link]. With the development of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park came the came the construction of a newer, more modern highway from Tennessee to North Carolina, completed in 1932--this time crossing Newfound Gap--replacing the now defunct Indian Gap Road.

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