Whatever it is, the carpentering and designs tell you that it's not 100 years old. Maybe 50 or 60. Whatever it was, it could have been a church camp or girl scout camp. The white building looks like a dormitory for girls/women, and the single-story cabins for the boys/men. I'll just bet you would find a common dining room with adjunct large cooking/dish washing kitchen in the white building.
Town, with hardware store, grocery store, booze joint, a school, and other small businesses? Naaah -- geddaddahere -- no backwoods country folks would build stuff like that, especially that close together, for a town.
It was a lodge for the well to do out of Knoxville. It was accessible by motor car. It just sits and crumbles today. The Fed owns it and as far as I’m concerned, let it go.
Mother Nature will run its course.
The main part of it is about 100 years old. The cabins? No. If I remember right some people who lived in the park before establishment were allowed to lease back this area. It was supposed to be lifetime leases and I think families started passing the cabins down etc. That ended in the mid 1990's I guess when Clinton Admin started grabbing and cracking down on federal land use.
Like I post earlier what this area looked like in 1910 and what it looks like now is very different. I'm guess Civilian Conservation Corp also was in that area with the building of the trails etc. Building trails mainly meaning taking up old abandoned narrow gauge railroad tracks used in logging.
Resorts were built all along those mountains including one in Cocke County in an area outside of Del Rio called Max Patch. That was the area where "Christie" Katherine Marshall wrote about taught school.