Tourism came to halt in the 1930s during the Great Depression.
Many hotels, inns, restaurants and other businesses catering to the needs of tourists and summer residents closed. The plans to develop Laurel Park and Mountain Home as summer destinations for folks fleeing the hotter climates of Florida stopped. Laurel Park Estates went bankrupt as early as 1926.
Plans did continue for development of a golf course. A golf course was completed in 1933 and 1934 at the site of the Hendersonville Country Club near Laurel Park. Title to the land was transferred to the city in order that work relief labor and funding could be used for the club’s construction. The property was reassigned to the club in 1945.
Edwards Park was established in 1933 as a center for Boy Scout activities. In the late 1940s, a Girl Scout cabin was added.
Boyd Park was established in 1936. This park had shuffleboard courts, tennis courts and later mini-golf. The teen-age canteen moved from a location in the basement of a bank building at the corner of Fourth Avenue West and Main Street to Boyd Park about 1963. Today, this is the location of the Hendersonville Fire Department.
The town still had parks at Lenox Park and Toms Park.
Two summer camps opened in the county in the 1930s.
Camp Ton-A-Wandah for girls was established in Flat Rock in 1933 by Grace B. Haynes.
In 1937, the Bell family established Camp Arrowhead for boys in the Green River community.
The Huckleberry Mountain Workshop Camp opened in Fruitland in 1939 by Evelyn Haynes, whose family had opened Camp Minnehaha earlier in Bat Cave. This was an artists’ and writers’ colony through the 1950s, with famous artists and writers spending summers in log cabins at the colony.