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GATLINBURG

Memoir tells of blaze that tore through the Smokies a century before Gatlinburg wildfire

Matt Lakin
Knoxville

Before Nov. 28, 2016, the National Weather Service had no record of a mountain wave windstorm striking in the middle of a forest fire.

Wiley Oakley, who lived in the Smokies before the national park's creation, wrote of a wildfire that struck a century before the Gatlinburg fire.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park rangers had no experience with it. No such thing had occurred in the history of the park.

But it had happened before. Wiley Oakley, born in 1885 at the foot of Mount LeConte, spent his life in the Smokies as a guide for sightseers in the decades before the park's creation in 1934. Up to the time of his death in 1954, scholars guessed no one knew the mountains better.

Oakley penned a firsthand account of winds that sent flames coursing through the woods and grown men quaking to their knees a century before Gatlinburg burned.

“The fire would blow from one mountain to another, and this spread for miles,” he wrote in a 1940 memoir. “Quite a few mountain people had gone to praying, asking God to send rain to stop this raging forest fire. I have lived in these mountains all my life and I haven’t in all my life saw a fire like this one. There wasn’t a cloud in the skies or in sight. … (Then) the rain started to coming, and the fire was all put out by the rain. … I looked in the east and saw a beautiful rainbow on the sky."

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Related:

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Part I: Mountaintop spark, rising wind lit the fuse for Gatlinburg firestorm

Part II: Air attacks, big box couldn't cage fire's surge toward Gatlinburg

Part III: 'Like Armageddon': How the Gatlinburg fire became unstoppable and swarmed a city

Part IV: 'No way out': Sacrifice and survival in the final desperate hours of the Gatlinburg fire

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