Newfound Gap
Ridge gap in the Great Smoky Mountains
Newfound Gap (el. 5,048 feet (1,539 m)) is a mountain pass located near the center of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park of the southern Appalachian Mountains in the United States. Situated along the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, the state line crosses the gap, as does Newfound Gap Road (which overlaps U.S. Route 441 through the park and ends at the park's boundaries near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and Cherokee, North Carolina). The Appalachian Trail also traverses the gap, as do a few other hiking trails.
Newfound Gap is home to the Rockefeller Memorial, a popular destination within the national park and the site from where President Franklin D. Roosevelt formally dedicated the park on September 2, 1940. According to the National Weather Service, Newfound Gap has around 19 snowy days per year. From 1991 to 2005, annual snowfall ranged from 43.5 inches (110 cm) to 106 inches (270 cm).
History
Prior to the development of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Newfound Gap was an undiscovered pass two miles east of what was long thought to be the lowest mountain pass over the Great Smoky Mountains, Indian Gap. Indian Gap Road, an unpaved, arduous trail frequented by traders, farmers, and even by the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, was completed in 1839 and named after the old Cherokee Indian trail that the road paralleled. Newfound Gap was not recognized as the lowest gap over the mountains until 1872, when Arnold Guyot measured many of the mountains in the area and determined the "Newfound Gap" to be a lower, more accessible mountain pass.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Newfound Gap” as ridge gap in the Great Smoky Mountains. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7017800. Authority coordinates are 35.611, -83.425. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1940, 1991, 2005 and 1839.
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This entry incorporates text from “Newfound Gap” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.