The road to The Sinks follows an abandoned railroad bed built for logging in the early 1900s, when large mechanized companies used trains to move timber from the forests to saw mills. The Little River Lumber Company laid tracks from Townsend to Elkmont in 1908, and within a year of completing the railroad it began offering tourist excursions to the area. The same trains that carried timber out of the mountains brought in visitors drawn by the Smokies’ scenic beauty. Logging at Elkmont ended in 1925, and the tracks were removed and replaced by a gravel road as automobile tourism grew along the former mountain rail route. The Sinks itself is a man-made waterfall on the Little River, created when loggers trying to break up a massive flood-driven log jam in the late 1800s used dynamite, blasting a deep hole in the rocky streambed and changing the river’s course.