Riverside Cabin minutes to Downtown Gatlinburg

The Reagan family, one of Gatlinburg's most historic families, began building cabins around 1925. At the time, Otha Reagan worked stripping tanning bark in the Sugarlands area of what is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and his wife, Emma, was a weaver at Arrowmont. In 1923, Otha and Emma had saved enough money $500 to be exact to purchase five acres of land on the Roaring Fork Creek where Brookside Resort is today. Just a few years later they began building small cabins and chicken coops on the property to rent to men who were in the area building the road from Newfound Gap to Clingman Dome. These cabins were built with timbers from the Roaring Fork School House and Church, and some were built from log homes moved straight out of the National Park. Many of the Reagan family's ancestors were even born in these cabins!

In 1971, Gatlinburg Southern Building Code required the remodel of nearly all the buildings in the area to a Bavarian type of exterior, so the Reagan cabins were updated to conform. Not too long after that in 1980, all of the original cabins and chicken houses were moved to their present location in picturesque Emerts Cove by a local river hangout called the Flint Rock Swimming Hole. To make a few larger cabins to accommodate larger families, two of the original cabins were placed on each side of a concrete slab to form a bedroom and a bathroom, and the middle was built to form a living area. Don't worry, though, the cabins haven't lost any of their history rumor has it that old chicken feed bags from the cabins earliest years have been found in their attics! Today's owners, Beville and Lisa Reagan, are proud to bring a little piece of their family's Gatlinburg history to your Gatlinburg vacation!