[6] For thousands of years a site of Native American occupation by varying cultures, Townsend is one of three "gateways" to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

[9] 19th-century anthropologist James Mooney recounted an attempted raid on the Cherokee villages in Tuckaleechee by the Shawano (Shawnee) in the mid-18th century.

The raid was thwarted when a Cherokee conjurer named Deadwood Lighter envisioned the position of the Shawano ambush.

[9] In 1843, humorist George Washington Harris published an account of a country dance held that year in Tuckaleechee ("Tuck-a-lucky") Cove on the farm of "Capt.

Moonshine, cornbread, eggs and ham were served, and revelers danced to music provided by a fiddle-and-dulcimer duo.

[11] The exiled Irish patriot and Young Irelander John Mitchel lived and farmed here with his family for some years in the late 1850s.

Flatland forest resources in the Ohio Valley and along the Mississippi Delta were quickly exhausted by the high demand for wood for fuel for steamboats.

Townsend of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania purchased 86,000 acres (350 km2) of land along the Little River, stretching from Tuckaleechee Cove all the way to Kuwohi.

Townsend also incorporated the Little River Railroad to both transport the wood products to market, as well as (after about 1909) tourists escaping the summer heat of Knoxville to a resort town he developed in the cleared land, Elkmont.

In 1916, he reported that Little River Lumber's consistently high rate of planks per acre showed no sign of decline.

[13] The rapid destruction of the forests of southern Appalachia led to increased efforts by conservationists to slow or halt logging operations.

Col. Townsend initially opposed the effort, but after some wavering, sold at base price 76,000 acres (310 km2) of his Little River Lumber tract in 1926 to what would eventually become the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

[15] Although some predicted that the loss of the lumber industry would doom Tuckaleechee, the explosion in tourism as a result of the park's founding contributed to the area economy, keeping it relatively healthy,[16] even though the first resort hotel (Appalachian Club) burned in 1932 (and was restored) and the other, the historic Wonderland Hotel at Elkmont collapsed in 2005 and arson destroyed the remainder (and some historic cottages) in 2017.

The Little River, its source high in the mountains on the north slopes of Kuwohi,[18] slices east-to-west through Tuckaleechee and drains much of the cove.

As of 2016[update], road construction on the parkway to complete the "missing link" from Walland to Wears Valley can be seen from Townsend during the mid-day and afternoon.