Feature
Photo by Derek Halsey
Photo by Derek Halsey Photo courtesy Asheville Citizen-Times
Bulus B. Swift
An Acঞvist for Women’s and Children’s Rights Spent Her Later Years in Avery County In these beautiful mountains here in the High Country, there are many opportunities to hike on wonderful trails that meander through gorges, rivers and streams as well as clifftop summits. Yet one day here in my neighborhood near Linville, N.C., just a short drive from Boone, I decided to take a walk closer to home. That exploration led to an old, local cemetery full of discovery. I wanted to climb a ridge where the coyotes often gather in late summer and fall, using a line of trees to project their yelps for miles in the night air. To get there, I walked through Montezuma Cemetery and decided to look at the tombstones to see how old they were and what stories they could tell. With years carved on the gravestones going back to the early 1800s, the first impression that I got was that many local families experienced great tragedy with many lives lost at an early age. As I read the headstones of Montezuma Cemetery, located on the western slope of Sugar Mountain, I found a couple known as L.B. and E.L Townsend. The 22 | July-August 2020
small tombstones next to them told an unfortunate story as the couple had lost a nine-day-old infant in 1892, a two-year-old daughter named Doshia in 1896, and they lost yet another infant in 1908. A few yards away were the tombstones of the Bumgarner family, which sadly included four gravestones depicting the death of the infants born to W. and C.E. Bumgarner. Wife Celia E. Bumgarner was born in 1857 and died just 37 years later, according to her epitaph. The couple did raise a son named Ira who reached adulthood, but he died just a few months shy of his 20th birthday in 1892. Using my smartphone, I began to take photographs of unusual names on the gravestones from long ago that I found interesting. On a whim, I decided to research some of the names online and almost instantly I hit pay dirt, no pun intended. To my amazement, a couple of names in particular lit up my laptop screen. One name of fame buried in Montezuma Cemetery was Malinda Blalock, wife of William Blalock. Malinda and William were well-known Northern sympathizers
during the Civil War who wreaked havoc on the locals with guerrilla warfare during the insurrection. Malinda, as it turns out, made history by being one of only three women who successfully dressed up like a man to fight in the War Between the States. Another name from the Montezuma Cemetery that led to a great story was Bulus B. Swift. The first thing that popped up in my research concerning Bulus Bagby Swift was a blurb about her in the Avery Journal newspaper from 2018. In an article about life in Avery County in 1935 written by Michael Hardy, he quotes the Asheville Citizen Times newspaper from 85 years ago. “Bulus Bagby Swift was known regionally as ‘the Bread Woman’ for the cakes, breads and pastries she baked,” says the article titled “Folks Worth While in W.N.C.” “Swift was a graduate of the North Carolina College for Women at Greensboro, had served as president of the North Carolina Congress of Parents and Teachers, and was with the Guilford County child welfare bureau during aawmag.com
