Formerly the site of a Cherokee village and an Appalachian community, the valley is now North Carolina's main entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Near the park boundary, a large and relatively flat bottomland has been created by the river's junction with Raven Fork, which flows down from the northeast.

These rocks were formed from ocean sediments nearly 400 million years ago, and were thrust upward during the Appalachian orogeny, when the North American and African plates collided.

[8] The location of the village was unknown, although early although anthropologist James Mooney believed it to be situated near modern Birdtown, between Cherokee and Bryson City.

[8] An archaeological survey and its evidence, however, has identified a Cherokee settlement along the Oconaluftee north of the Qualla Boundary and just inside the present-day national park.

[10] John Jacob Mingus, who arrived in the Oconaluftee in the 1790s, was the first Euro-American settler in the valley and the first within the boundaries of what is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

[6] Later Euro-American arrivals included Isaac Bradley (1772–1855), whose family settled in the vicinity of the stream that now bears their name, and Aden Carver (1844–1945), who lived near Smokemont.

The company widened the Indian Gap Trail from Oconaluftee to the crest of the Smokies, allowing wagon access to saltpeter mines on Mount Le Conte.

His land purchases for the tribe included the Qualla Boundary, which became the backbone of the federal trust for the Eastern Band of the Cherokee.

In 1925, a massive forest fire quickly swept across the dried brush left over from the extensive logging, scorching much of the southern slopes of the Smokies.

[14] After the establishment of the national park, a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp was set up at Smokemont for workers to construct roads and trails in the area.

In the 1950s, several log structures were moved to an area adjacent to the Oconaluftee Visitor Center to form the Mountain Farm Museum, which provides an exhibition of pioneer European-American life in Appalachia.

Along with the historic sites in the vicinity of the Oconaluftee Visitor Center, the park service maintains a large campground at the former logging camp of Smokemont.

The museum is a collection of several log buildings from various places around the park, the purpose of which is to depict a typical mountain farm in pioneer Appalachia.

Structures at the Mountain Farm Museum include:[17] Other buildings include a hog pen, a sorghum press and still (used to draw sorghum from cane and boil it into syrup), an ash hopper (water was filtered through the ashes to extract its lye, which was then mixed with hog lard to make soap), a woodshed, and native fencing.

The Oconaluftee Indian Village is operated by the Cherokee Historical Association on the slopes of Rattlesnake Mountain inside the reserve.