A Sweet History: Taffy Is a Tennessee Town’s Generational Tradition

The aroma of vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, mint, and countless other flavors waft around the outside and inside of an old building on Gatlinburg, Tennessee’s main thoroughfare. In fact, the appealing scents are so prominent that in the fall of 2011, a black bear broke through the glass door and helped itself to Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen’s taffy and other sweet treats.
The store’s interior has a large-scale timeline that provides details about when and how Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen taffy was first made. The company explains their taffy-making process this way:
“First, we weigh out all of our ingredients in a big copper pot. Next, we cook our mixture on the same stove we used in the 1950s! Once the taffy is bubbling hot, it’s poured onto a cooling table. Then, the taffy is transferred to our puller. Here, it’s stretched into a fluffy consistency and gets flavored and colored. Finally, it’s put on our taffy machine to get wrapped. Our taffy machines are over 125 years old!”
It’s truly fascinating to watch a thick, smooth, and colorful “log” of taffy—“pulled” to aerate it into a chewy consistency—be cut up into hundreds of 1.5-inch tiny logs. The colorful taffy is then individually wrapped and packed into the Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen’s signature old-fashioned boxes. They feature the words “Taffy Logs” spelled out in illustrated taffy letters. Also decorating the boxes are fanciful drawings of Appalachian heritage scenes, such as a fiddle player and a woman spinning wool.
This “dream shop” location, as Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen’s founders called it, came to fruition in 1960. After it was founded in 1950, the business hopped between a garage, gas station, barbershop, and warehouse, but the “dream shop” fulfilled the owners’ every wish. It features a turret-type pitch roof and wide, tall glass windows and a recognizable four-sided sign sporting their original lettering.
Inside the store are barrels, boxes, and bins of candies—primarily multi-hued taffy. Up to 33 flavors are listed up on a board for visitors to peruse before they purchase, but there are always more seasonal flavors. This fall, the kitchen offered pumpkin-flavored taffy. They now have peppermint taffy, just in time for the Christmas holiday.
Gatlinburg is definitely an out-of-the way destination. Unless travelers are exploring the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and exiting through the Sugarlands Visitor Center, the best way to get to Gatlinburg is by jumping off Interstate 40 about halfway between Asheville, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee. Exit onto U.S. 321, and meander through the Appalachian Mountains until you arrive at this small, touristy town.
While many of the structures in Gatlinburg are new, Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen’s building and the tradition it preserves is a historical step back—a truly unique and unexpected historical treat.