Townsend is a city in Blount County, Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. The city was chartered in 1921 by persons who were energetic with the Little River Railroad and Lumber Company. The population was 244 at the 2000 census and 448 at the 2010 census. For thousands of years a site of Native American leisure interest by changing cultures, Townsend is one of three “gateways” to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It has several museums and attractions relating to the natural and human records of the Great Smokies.

Identifying as “The Peaceful Side of the Smokies”, Townsend has the least traffic of the three main entrances to the national park. The park’s new two entrances – one just south of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and the supplementary just north of Cherokee, North Carolina – are house to multiple announcement attractions that charisma millions of tourists annually. Townsend is low-key, with a handful of reasonable restaurants and motels and several businesses geared toward outside sports, and a world-renowned horse show.

Native Americans were the first inhabitants of Tuckaleechee Cove upon the Little River; the oldest archaeological finds in the cove date to 2000 B.C. A number of pottery fragments and ax heads dating to the Woodland period have after that been found. By 1200 A.D., Tuckaleechee’s Native American inhabitants had built a fortified village close the cove’s northern entrance.

The Cherokee arrived in the Place around 1600, and built a series of small villages along Little River. The name “Tuckaleechee” is from the Cherokee Tikwalitsi, and its indigenous meaning is unknown. A branch of the Great Indian Warpath forked at this site, with one branch heading west to the Overhill towns along the Little Tennessee River and different heading south to North Carolina. 19th-century anthropologist James Mooney recounted an attempted raid upon the Cherokee villages in Tuckaleechee by the Shawano (Shawnee) in the mid-18th century. The act was thwarted taking into consideration a Cherokee conjurer named Deadwood Lighter envisioned the position of the Shawano ambush. The Cherokee amazed the raiders from the rear, killing many of them and chasing the rest encourage over the crest of the Smokies.