N-47 Skyline Drive in Autum, Near Clingman's Dome, Great Smoky Mountains National Park ~ Linen type postcard, Ashville Post Card Co., Ashville, N.C., production number E-4442. This card is unused and undated. My guess is about 1939. Overall: VERY FINE.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a United States National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site that straddles the ridge-line of the Great Smoky Mountains, part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are a division of the larger Appalachian Mountain chain. In the 1920s and early-1930s, the U.S. National Park Service desired a park in the eastern United States, but did not have much money to establish one. Though Congress had authorized the park in 1926, there was no nucleus of federally-owned land around which to build a park. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. contributed $5 million, the U.S. government added $2 million, and private citizens from Tennessee and North Carolina pitched in to assemble the land for the park, piece by piece. Slowly, mountain homesteaders, miners, and loggers were evicted from the land. Farms and timbering operations were abolished in establishing the protected area of the park. Travel writer Horace Kephart, for whom Mount Kephart was named, and photographer George Masa were instrumental in fostering the development of the park. The park was officially established on June 15, 1934. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and other federal organizations made trails, fire watchtowers, and other infrastructure improvements to the park and Smoky Mountains.