Smoky Mountain Living, June 2015

JUNE/JULY 2015

Celebrating Southern Appalachians THE

TOURISM THROUGH THE CENTURIES | DOG DAYS OF SUMMER | BEST BERRY RECIPES | PHOTO CONTEST PICKS

50 Tourism Through the Centuries

EVENTS That Put Us On The Map

JUNE/JULY 2015 • VOL. 15 • NO. 3

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PEACH BUTTER | FIREFLY WATCH | DREAM CATCHERS | FIND YOUR JAM

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Contents

FEATU RE STO RIES

50 EVENTS THAT PUT US ON THE MAP Mountains form the backbone of Southern Appalachia—and tourism is our bedrock. From the national parks movement to the opening of Dollywood, these 50 events raised our profile.

PAGE

NEVER BE BORING Hitting the high notes of folklorist Joe Wilson’s life and career, from an ordinary mountain upbringing to extraordinary contributions to traditional arts and civil rights. BY MARK LYNN FERGUSON PAGE

64

AIN’T NOTHING LIKE A HOUND DOG At once fierce and loyal, Plott hunting dogs still embody the frontier character of the Smokies from whence they came. BY BOB PLOTT PAGE 2

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

44

Contents SWEET APPALACHIA

DEPA RTME N TS

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17

Comforts for the mountain soul—a look back at the patriarch of the Smokies’ Walker clan, drawing life lessons from peaches (plus a peach butter recipe worth spreading around), the best uses for a basket of fresh-picked berries, new novels by rising regional authors, and exploring the past and present of the ubiquitous dream catcher.

MOUNTAIN EXPLORER

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27

Summer means roving these hills and valleys in search of one-of-a-kind spectacles, from flashing fireflies to blooming rhododendrons. Here’s also where to find wild dandelions in your pint glass, trout cakes on your plate, agritourism on two wheels, traditional music jams with a twist, and a North Carolina family reunion with unusually strong bonds.

ON THE COVER A young Jim Morton, son of prolific North Carolina photographer Hugh Morton, admires his bedroom wall of Southern Highlands souvenirs.

PHOTO BY HUGH MORTON, NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION, WILSON LIBRARY, UNC-CH

Good Living 4

FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 CROSSWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

AT THE PARK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 MEET OUR CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

PHOTO ESSAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 STORIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

Southern Appalachian Mountains Gallery Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Visit Eastern Tennessee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Visit Waynesville, North Carolina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Select Lodging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

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5

JULY16TH THRU 26TH

Downtown Waynesville

Champion Credit Union Cherokee Preservation Foundation Evergreen Packaging HomeTrust Bank HVO Town of Waynesville VisitNCSmokies.com

PARADE OF NATIONS Friday, July 17th 1pm

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

VISITNCSMOKIES.COM

FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR Community

VOL. 15 • NUMBER 3 Publisher/Editor . . . . . . . . . . . Scott McLeod scott@smliv.com General Manager . . . . . . . . . Greg Boothroyd ads@smliv.com Sales Manager . . . . . . . . . . . Hylah Birenbaum hylah@smliv.com Managing Editor . . . . . . . . . Katie Knorovsky editor@smliv.com Editor-at-Large . . . . . . . . Sarah E. Kucharski sarah@smliv.com Art Director . . . . . . . . . . . Travis Bumgardner travis@smliv.com Graphics . . . . . . . Micah McClure, Emily Moss Finance & Admin. . . . . . . Amanda Singletary Sales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Greg Boothroyd, Whitney Burton, Amanda Bradley Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scott Collier Contributing Writers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Ashley English, Mark Lynn Ferguson, Louis Garnett, Don Hendershot, Holly Kays, Joseph A. Orser, Jeff Minick, Bob Plott Contributing Photographers . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Johnny Autry, Spencer Black, Mark Lynn Ferguson, Mark McKnight, Larry Pierson Contributing Illustrators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mandy Newham-Cobb, Ali Douglass Smoky Mountain Living has made every effort to insure listings and information are accurate and assumes no liability for errors or omissions.

For advertising information, contact Hylah Birenbaum at 866.452.2251 or hylah@smliv.com.

For editorial inquiries, contact Katie Knorovsky at katie@smliv.com.

Smoky Mountain Living assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs. Queries should be sent to Katie Knorovsky at katie@smliv.com.

When I was 11, a family road trip brought me to North Carolina’s Sapphire Valley.

One afternoon, while panning for gems at one of the area’s tourist mines, I spotted a crystalline rock about the size of a thumbnail. Sure enough, I had found a raw sapphire—just big enough to get the staffers buzzing and give me bragging rights, and just worthless enough to go in my dad’s pocket and, upon returning home, be stashed in a drawer of keepsakes and forgotten.

Among my great trove of childhood vacation memories, my Sapphire Valley discovery shines little more than a tiny glint.

Still, I grew up a traveler, my eye honed for discerning treasure beneath the surface.

Years later, as an editor at a travel magazine in Washington, D.C., I spent days learning about the wonders of the world— from the Amazon to Zimbabwe, from Paris to the Pyrenees.

But it was an article about the Smokies that really got under my skin. Long after the story went to press, I dreamed of the wildflowers and deep forests, the hikes to mountaintops and adventures in Asheville. A couple of years later, my husband and I followed that wanderlust on a road trip to Western North Carolina.

Unlike the rough stone I spied as a kid, to my adult eyes, this place sparkled from the inside out. Later, when we decided to move here, few people questioned the decision. Our region’s reputation precedes itself. Friends and co-workers from all over talked enviously of the food and music scenes, its literary traditions and cultural depth, the art-deco architecture and CORRECTION: Richie Rich mansion.

We regret the error in our Now, living in Asheville means hosting guests who arrive April/May 2015 issue, which with an agenda. My father-in-law surprised us with his misidentified Tennessee’s oldest persistence to tour Biltmore Estate, after a friend back in Iowa town. That honor rightfully had gone on and on about its opulence. D.C. friends goes to Jonesborough, mentioned only one request: a sunset cocktail on the terrace of incorporated in 1779. With the Grove Park Inn (a missive from her Asheville-loving boss). such a long history, it’s no My brother visits from Baltimore with brewery quotas to meet. wonder the town has more Indeed, Southern Appalachia’s wealth of tourism appeal than a few stories up its sleeve. has become one of the region’s top assets. And talk about a Read about Jonesborough’s diverse portfolio: We’ve got theme parks and historic National Storytelling Festival attractions, unparalleled biodiversity and outdoor adventure, on page 58. the country’s most popular national park and the birthplace of country music.

In this issue, we trace the history of our popularity. Whether by making the mountains more accessible or more alluring, the 50 events in these pages brought people here and, ultimately, put Southern Appalachia on the tourism map.

Yet for all the stats on economic impact and annual visitation, tourism is an eminently personal story. As many paths bring people here as there are passages through the woods. A Dolly Parton fan makes the pilgrimage to Sevier County. A hiker achieves a dream of completing the Appalachian Trail. A family follows painted barns to “See Rock City.”

A little girl finds a gem—and decades later, returns to bask in its radiance for good.

— Katie Knorovsky, managing editor

©2015. All rights reserved. No portion of this magazine may be reprinted without the express, written consent of the publisher.

Smoky Mountain Living is published bimonthly (Dec/Jan, Feb/Mar, Apr/May, Jun/Jul, Aug/Sep, Oct/Nov) by SM Living, LLC, 144 Montgomery Street, Waynesville, NC 28786. Periodical Postage paid at Waynesville, N.C., and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address changes to Smoky Mountain Living, PO Box 629, Waynesville, NC 28786.

Crossword answers Puzzle is on page 9.

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7

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN Crossword

Across 1 North Carolina town and resort for spa treatments (2 words) 7 Exclamation of surprise 9 Omni Grove Park ___, named after Edwin Grove who invented Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic 11 Brings natural waters 13 Source of solar energy 14 Animals once killed off in North Carolina, now being reintroduced in the Cataloochee Valley 16 Summer month, for short 17 Sight____ 18 Mountain said to reveal the faces of old men from different vantages 21 Ice cream company founder Joseph 23 Shade of color 24 Asheville’s Look Homeward, Angel writer, Thomas ____ 26 Noted photographer whose pictures were vital in the Smokies national park campaign 30 Sweet-as-apple-cider girl in song 31 Shenandoah National Park lies in this mountain range 35 There are two in willow 36 Goal 37 River that flows under Blowing Rock, NC where snow falls upside down 39 Shenandoah Valley caverns where you can see amazing stalactites and stalagmites 41 Exercise class, for short 42 Type of TV 43 Historic estate built by George Vanderbilt near Asheville

Down 1 Writer of Our Southern Highlanders _____ Kephart (about mountain people) 2 Like a tree with lots of small branches 3 Forest lands with iconic bike trails, formerly owned by the Vanderbilts 4 Nurse, abbr.

5 Out of the cold 6 “Never ___ Give You Up” song 8 Trail walkers 10 Entanglement 12 Gold symbol 15 Civil war general 19 North Carolina’s Hickory ___ Gorge, a backdrop for The Last of the Mohicans 20 “___ we meet again” 22 Forest floor debris

Answers can be found on page 7. BY MYLES MELLOR • ILOVECROSSWORDS.COM 25 26 27 28

Canoe equipment Spanish for my Window framework Pioneer of the National Parks movement, John _____ 29 Trust (2 words) 32 Hollywood city

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33 Aunt of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz 34 Letters of debtors 38 Gatlinburg resort winter equipment 39 Lion constellation 40 Road map abbr.

41 British top politician

9

AT THE PARK

AN INSIDER’S VIEW OF THE COVE

Community

T

A mother and son enjoy fishing in the Smokies.

GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK PHOTO

The Lure of the Smokies H

ow’s this for a new angle? For the first time since the 1934 establishment of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, all park streams are now open to fishing. Over the years, various streams have been closed to the public, but the reopening of a 8.5-mile section of the Lynn Camp Prong, near Tremont, Tennessee, officially marked the milestone, following a seven-year brook trout restoration project.

Park Superintendent Cassius Cash credited the turning point to the “commitment and dedication of our biologists and partners in restoring fish populations in the Smokies.”

Since 1986, park biologists have restored brook trout— Southern Appalachia’s only native trout species—to 27.1 miles of 11 different streams.

The national park features 2,900 miles of streams for fishing and remains one of the last wild trout habitats in the eastern United States. Current park fishing regulations can be found at nps.gov/grsm/planyourvisit/fishing.htm.

10

o say Cades Cove: A Personal History gives a unique testimonial of early 20th-century life in the Smokies is more than hearsay. Consider the evidence: The late Judge William Wayne Oliver wrote the book, based on his childhood in the cove bearing witness to feuds, murders, moonshining, barn burnings, the lawsuit over land for the national park, and the exodus of its residents that followed. In addition to his legal repute as a judge in the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, Oliver hailed from Cades Cove’s first white settlers, a direct descendant of John and Lucretia Oliver.

One of the latest books published by the Great Smoky Mountains Association, the judge’s fair-minded autobiography is scholarly but far from rote. Oliver’s stories captivate with his boyhood recollections of trips to the mill and to the grassy balds in summer, gathering chestnuts and fishing, and Christmas festivities and chores in the cove. Dozens of historic photos from the Oliver Family Collection show everything from baptisms to beekeeping, family pets to fiddle-playing neighbors.

Cades Cove: A Personal History ($13) is available at visitors centers in and around the national park. Sales support GSMA’s mission to preserve Great Smoky Mountains National Park. smokiesinformation.org

ALL IN A DAY’S WORK

A

ll around the country on June 21, Father’s Day celebrates men. But first—on the day prior— Great Smoky Mountains National Park gives women their due during the annual Women’s Work Festival. The historic log buildings of the Mountain Farm Museum show how families lived here a hundred years ago and more. As the Women’s Work Festival demonstrates, Appalachian women worked harder than anyone to create and sustain a mountain home—from openhearth cooking to spinning, sewing, making corn-shuck dolls and soap, and more. Festivities include hands-on demonstrations on those old-fashioned skills along with traditional music. The Women’s Work Festival is free and takes place 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 20 at the Mountain Farm Museum, adjacent to Oconaluftee Visitor Center at 1194 Newfound Gap Road, Cherokee, North Carolina.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

MEET OUR CONTRIBUTORS Community

Ashley English

F

or writer Ashley English, home is so much more than where the heart is. It’s also where her chickens and honey bees and gardens and crops rise and fall.

Along with her husband, Glenn, and 4-year-old son, Huxley Wild, English has built a life that radiates around a 1930s Craftsman bungalow tucked into an 11-acre forested cove in Candler, North Carolina. “Our home abuts a large nature preserve, and is at the end of a one-mile driveway, so, suffice to say, it's really quite private and secluded,” she says.

The English family lives at the intersection of oldfashioned homesteading and a modern, digital world.

They pickle vegetables and can fruit and warm up by a wood stove. They throw whimsical picnics in the forest, cook elaborate meals for friends, and hike along the Blue Ridge Parkway. As they go, English shares photos and snippets of their life on her popular blog, Small Measure, and with thousands of Instagram followers.

Along the way she has also published seven books focused on the DIY ethos, including four titles in The Homemade Living Series (Canning & Preserving, Keeping Chickens, Keeping Bees, and Home Dairy) as well as books on home-baked pies, handmade gatherings and parties, and hand-crafted beverages. Her next two books will focus on natural picnics and how to create the “bones” of a Southern foods pantry.

In “Life’s A Peach” in this issue of Smoky Mountain Living, English shares her perspective on homesteading in the mountains—and the learning curve that comes with it.

Learn more at www.smallmeasure.com.

Mark Lynn Ferguson

B

orn in Roanoke, Virginia, writer Mark Lynn Ferguson lives in Washington, D.C., but stays connected to his Blue Ridge roots through his five-year-old blog, The Revivalist: Word from the Appalachian South. Aimed at anyone who “flatfoots, fries sliced potatoes, hikes the Appalachian trail, or eats apple butter by the spoonful,” The Revivalist covers a range of regional topics, from music reviews, traditional crafts, and recipes to race and environmental issues.

“There’s a surge of interest in the Southern Appalachians,” Ferguson says. “You can see our huge

cultural footprint in everything from the music of Mumford & Sons to the growing interest in Appalachian food. Did you know that there are now Appalachian-themed restaurants in both Shanghai and Brooklyn?”

As the name of his blog might suggest, he cheers the region’s newfound cachet: “Some folks see this as appropriation of our culture. I say, ‘Appropriate away!’ After being portrayed as inbred, uneducated, and dirt poor for more than a century, we could use the positive exposure.”

In his first feature for Smoky Mountain Living, “Never Be Boring,” Ferguson shares the story of Joe Wilson, a man who has done more than his part to help spread traditional mountain music around the globe.

Learn more about Ferguson at therevivalist.info.

Bob Plott

A

s his name surely implies, Bob Plott is uniquely suited to tell the story of the Plott hound in the North Carolina mountains. As the great-greatgreat grandson of the hound’s original 18th-century breeder, Plott shares his family’s legacy in “Ain’t Nothing Like a Hound Dog” in this issue of Smoky Mountain Living.

“In many ways, the breed has come full circle over the centuries,” says Plott, whose love for his family dog pervades all parts of his life. He has written four books on the Plott hound and Southern mountain culture. On the speaking roster for the North Carolina Humanities Council’s Road Scholar program, he also conducts programs on the Plott dog and mountain history. Plus, Plott and his family still raise hounds at their Plott Ridge Kennels, and each June they help run Maggie Valley’s PlottFest. “We are happy to be part of such a great event that not only promotes mountain culture and history, but also has raised a ton of money for local charity,” he says.

Learn more at bobplott.com.

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Winning viewpoints

O

ut of more than 1,000 photographs, a panel of judges chose 42 images as ďŹ nalists in the 12th annual Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition, a selection of which we are proud to feature in these pages. A partnership between Appalachian State University’s Outdoor Programs and the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone, N.C., this prestigious competition attracts amateur and professional photographers from across the country. The Turchin Center exhibited selected photographs through June 6. Submissions for the 13th Annual AMPC should be sent in by Nov. 20, 2015. Find rules and submission guidelines at appmtnphotocomp.org.

FACING PAGE, FROM TOP: y “The Table Rock Fire Star Trails” by William Mauney. People’s Choice Award Winner and Special Mention Honors. y “Morning on the Ridge” by Robert H. Clark. y “Mirror Image Cubs” by Drew Senter.

ABOVE: y “Thru the Mist” by Kathryn Greven. Category Winner – Landscape.

BELOW: y “Kayaker” by David Vanderlaan. y “Linville River Flooding from Plunge Basin – MP 316” by Lynn Willis.

T

he August/September 2015 issue of Smoky Mountain Living will feature places in these mountains that teach and preserve crafts, traditions, and practices.

Send pictures showing adventures in Appalachian arts and crafts, cooking, and other mountain skills to editor@smliv.com by June 15; include information on where the photo was taken and by whom.

Reader-submitted photos are unpaid but may be rewarded with publication in our nationally distributed magazine. Connect with us at smliv.com, facebook.com/smliv, and on Twitter and Instagram @SmokyMtnLiving.

FROM TOP: y “Highland Bouldering” by Tommy Penick. y “Coming Down ‘The Lump’ Hill” by Dianne Sherrill. y “Lethal and Leveled” by Lynn Willis.

Category Winner – Our Ecological Footprint.

FROM TOP, CLOCKWISE: y “Merging Seasons” by Daniel Burleson.

Special Mention Honors & Finalist – Landscape. y “Gotta Goat” by Frederica Georgia.

Category Winner – Flora & Fauna. y “Appalachian Storm Surge”

by Catherine Hopkins. y “Floating Wood Frogs” by Kelly Clampitt.

SWEET APPALACHIA COMFORTS FOR THE MOUNTAIN SOUL

THE EYES HAVE IT In this image from 1918, John Walker sits in a split-bottom, high-backed chair that he made himself, holding cherries grown in his own orchards. A resident of Little Greenbrier Cove, Walker prided himself on his family’s self-sufficiency, the father of seven girls known collectively as the “Walker sisters.”

When Caroline Walker married Jim Shelton in 1907, it marked the first and only Walker sister wedding. Mike Aday, the librarian-archivist for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, notes that this photo captures Walker’s “piercing” eyes. “Family legend holds that Caroline was the only daughter to marry because Shelton was the only man with enough courage to break up the family,” Aday says. “It must have taken quite a bit of intestinal fortitude for Shelton to endure that hawk-like gaze.” NPS, GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK PHOTO

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17

THE VIEW FROM HERE Sweet Appalachia

Life’s a Peach

BY ASHLEY ENGLISH

JOHNNY AUTRY PHOTO

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

A ripe peach sets such high expectations, doesn’t it?

The anticipation of both ambrosial flavor and profuse juice is high. There must also be appropriate heft in the hand when lifted, a tender give in its fuzzy skin when pressed, and the emanating aroma of sweetness when gently sniffed. Peach eaters are taskmasters, expecting nothing short of sensory perfection from each specimen. When the demand meets the desire, the result— without any hint of hyperbole—is ecstasy. When it does not, however, the letdown feels profound, the hopes dashed. A mealy peach equals pure sabotage. It also offers a lesson in nonattachment and in learning to let go of predicted outcomes.

I could argue that all I really need to know about homesteading I learned from some mealy peaches I encountered several summers ago. On the surface, everything indicated sheer delight. Tender but not too much so, these peaches smelled like a honeysuckle patch, always a good indicator of ripeness. I saw no brown spots or other visible blemishes. Figuring these peaches and I were good to go, I bit into one, excited about all that was to come. But a mealy texture and a bland, insipid flavor answered my enthusiasm. Presuming this peach was merely an interloper in the pound I’d purchased, I bit into the next, only to go through the same disappointment all over again.

I was bereft, despondent, forlorn, all on account of the great expectations I’d placed on that bit of fruit.

As a homesteader, I have learned the lesson of the mealy peach, so to speak, many times over. While the exterior may appear as though all is well, what lies beneath may be a different story. This is true whether we’re discussing fresh peaches, jars of strawberry jam,

a flock of chickens, a wheel of cheese, or a hive of bees. It is equally true that all may be fine and dandy. The point is that you simply do not know. You followed all of the directions and considered all of the precautions, and yet, your jam jars may not seal, your crop of broccoli transplants could be quickly and devastatingly done asunder by flea beetles, your hive taken out by an early spring frost, or your beloved Barred Rock chicken fall prey to a marauding fox overnight.

Peaches have taught me the value of stating intentions, whether aloud or quietly and privately, inside the hopes and convictions of your heart. Then let go of any attachment to the outcome. While some things remain certain in life—the sun rises, the sun sets—many things do not. Over the years on my homestead, I’ve found that it is wonderful and wise to plan and plot and proceed as though things will turn out according to plan, but in the event they don’t, seek out the lesson. In the process, I will, over time, become a better gardener, a better animal steward, a better cheese maker and canner and bread maker. In the moment, choose another peach— or seek out a mentor older and wiser or particularly gifted at helping with the learning curve.

Ultimately, for me, the homesteading life is rather peachy keen, no matter what happens when I take a bite.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ashley English is profiled on page 11.

Peach and Lavender Butter

W

hile life undoubtedly presents the occasional dud peach (or other home attempt that doesn’t go as planned), come summertime, most offerings found in the Smoky Mountains prove exquisite. Every summer I make several batches of this peach and lavender butter, canning enough to provide for my needs and to give as gifts year-round. The floral hint from the lavender perfectly complements the sweetness of the peaches and sugar.

— This recipe was originally published in Canning & Preserving with Ashley English: All You Need To Know to Make Jams, Jellies, Pickles, Chutneys & More, Lark Books, 2010).

Makes 4-5 half-pints 3 pounds peaches 1/3 cup water 2 tablespoons fresh or dried lavender buds 3 tablespoons bottled lemon juice 1 ½ tablespoons lemon zest 3 cups granulated sugar 1. In a large pot of boiling water, place 45 half-pint canning jars. Bring the water to a boil, turn off the heat, and cover with a lid. In a small pot, place 1-2 inches of water and the lids. Bring the water to a

boil, turn off the heat, and cover with a lid.

2. Put the lavender buds in a small bowl. Bring the water to a boil; pour it over the buds. Cover, and steep for 15 minutes.

3. In a medium-large pot, blanch the peaches for 30-60 seconds. Immediately plunge the peaches into an ice water bath. Once cool enough to handle, peel, pit, and chop roughly.

4. Strain the lavender buds from the water. Set aside the buds; you’ll add them in later. Combine the lavender water, peaches, lemon juice, and lemon zest in a heavy stainless steel saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium high heat. Reduce the WWW.SMLIV.COM

I could argue

that all I really need to know about homesteading I learned from some mealy peaches.

heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Remove from the heat.

5. Once the peach mixture has cooled slightly, press it through a food mill, puree in a high-powered blender, or puree using a food processor or immersion blender.

6. Return the puree to the pan, add the sugar and lavender buds, and bring it up to a gentle boil over medium heat. Stir continuously until the sugar is completely dissolved. Reduce the heat and simmer uncovered for 25 minutes, until the butter holds its shape when mounded up on a spoon.

7. Place the sterilized jars on top of a kitchen cloth on the counter. With the help of a canning funnel, pack peach butter into the jars, reserving 1/2 inch of headspace.

8. Use a nonmetallic spatula to remove any trapped air bubbles, and wipe the rims clean with a damp cloth. Place on the lids and screw bands, tightening only until fingertip-tight.

9. Using a jar lifter, place the jars in the boiling water bath. Process for 10 minutes, adjusting for altitude as necessary.

19

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

TABLE CHATTER

Eat Berries, Be Merry

F

rom black and blue to goose and dew, berries sweeten summer in the mountains. Perhaps most delicious when eaten fresh by the handful, the fruit stars in desserts as well as it does as the secret ingredient in savory surprises. Next time your basket of berries overflows, try these local recipes.

Easy Blueberry Crisp

glass,” says inn owner Susan Murray. “It’s also great with ice cream or on yogurt.”

When talking blueberry recipes, it’s wise to go straight to the source, such as the you-pick bushes at A Blueberry Farm in Whittier, North Carolina. “We freeze several gallons of berries and make blueberry crisp all winter,” says owner John Boaze. His recipe is as easy as can be: Put four cups of fresh blueberries (with 1/4 cup sugar, if you like) in a 9x13inch baking dish, and sprinkle a box of yellow cake mix over the top. Cut one and a half sticks of butter into pats and space out evenly. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes at 350 degrees F, until the crust is golden brown and the fruit bubbles.

Makes 4 to 6 servings

Blackberries in Sweet Basil Syrup In Farmer & Chef Asheville, professional eaters Debby Maugans and Christine Sykes Lowe assemble more than 200 recipes demonstrating the creativity and talents of the progressive Southern farmers and chefs who make their home here. A chapter on “Mountain Mornings” highlights several recipes from local inns, including this blackberry treat from Carolina Bed & Breakfast. “We usually serve this as a first course at breakfast in an antique champagne glass or a martini

For the syrup: 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup water 1/2 cup semi-sweet white wine, such as a German Riesling 1/2 vanilla bean, split, or 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup tightly packed basil leaves Juice of 1 lemon 2 pints fresh blackberries 2 to 3 teaspoons minced candied ginger Combine the sugar, water, and wine in a small saucepan. Add the vanilla bean, if using. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly until the sugar melts. Remove from the heat and stir in the basil, lemon juice, and vanilla extract, if using; press down on the solids to submerge the leaves. Let the mixture cool to room temperature, about two hours.

Strain the cool mixture through a wire mesh sieve into a medium bowl, pressing down on the solids to extract the syrup.

Add the blackberries to the syrup; cover the bowl and refrigerate at least eight hours and up to two days.

To serve, spoon the berries and syrup in stemmed glasses or small bowls; spoon ice cream, yogurt, or mascarpone cream over the berries, and top each serving with a little candied ginger.

—Recipe courtesy of Farmer & Chef Asheville (Farmer and Chef, $29)

Blueberry-Chipotle Barbecue Sauce One of Asheville’s busiest lunch spots, 12 Bones Restaurant serves ribs, pulled pork, brisket, and turkey smoked long and slow

WWW.SMLIV.COM

Sweet Appalachia over hardwood. The new 12 Bones Smokehouse cookbook divulges the secrets behind the restaurant’s recipes, which run the gamut from classic Carolina to unconventional Asheville, such as this unique BBQ sauce.

Makes 5 cups 1 pound fresh or frozen blueberries 2 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce 3/4 cup honey 3 cups 12 Bones Tomato “Q” Sauce (see recipe below) 1 teaspoon ground ginger In a food processor or a blender, puree the berries and the chipotles.

Then transfer the berry mixture to a saucepan, and add the remaining ingredients.

Simmer this mixture over low heat for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Remove the sauce from the heat and cool. The finished and cooled sauce can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to a month.

For the 12 Bones Tomato “Q” Sauce: 3 cups ketchup 2⁄3 cup cider vinegar 1/2 cup blackstrap molasses 6 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce 6 tablespoons dark brown sugar 1 teaspoon granulated garlic 1 teaspoon granulated onion 1 teaspoon dry English mustard 1 teaspoon black pepper 1 teaspoon salt Combine all ingredients in a mediumsize saucepan and simmer on low heat until all the dry ingredients have dissolved, stirring occasionally with a whisk.

—Recipe courtesy Quarto Publishing Group USA

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READING LIST Sweet Appalachia

Two Sides of the Mountains

BY JEFF MINICK

n Annaliese From Off, South Carolina author Lindy Keane Carter tells the story of Annaliese Stregal, a wife and mother from Louisville, Kentucky, whose life changes drastically when her husband demands she live with him at a lumber camp in northern Georgia.

I

Appalachian hell of drugs, broken families, and smashed dreams.

Jacob McNeely, a high school dropout living near Cashiers, North Carolina, faces a boatload of troubles. The father he loved as a child now operates a drug ring, his mother is an addict hovering on the brink of madness and death, and the girl he loves, Maggie, has graduated and is about to leave him to go off to college in the eastern part of the state.

When his father orders him to murder a suspected informant, Jacob arrives at “the camp” to find two of his father’s men torturing the informant, burning him with cigarettes, then splashing him with acid, and finally stabbing him. They drag his body out of the camp on a tarp and pitch it over a cliff.

But they haven’t killed the snitch. He’s still breathing when a man searching for a stray dog finds him.

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2015.

From that point, the violence 260 pages, $26.95. spirals out of control, and Jacob finds himself torn between obeying the dictates of his criminal father and leaving with Maggie in search of a new beginning. In his presentation of this conflict, Joy vividly shows us Jacob’s interior battle as he struggles to break free of his family and follow his dreams. At one point, he tells Maggie, “You’re going to head off to college and make something out of yourself, and what you’re going to become won’t have a reason in the world to ever come back here.” When he speaks these words—and he says them frequently to Maggie—it’s clear that Jacob hopes to escape as well.

Where All Light Tends To Go is a gritty, brutal novel about hope and vision breaking up against harsh realities.

The year is 1900. In this remote region, Annaliese faces an attack by a mountain lion, angry moonshiners, suspicious townspeople, and a host of physical hardships. Her husband’s increasingly erratic behavior only makes these primitive living conditions even harsher.

Carter develops her characters well, particularly Annaliese, her sister-in-law Lucenia, and Ruth, a recently married local woman who is hired to help Annaliese. When the Stregals first arrive Five Points Press, 2014.

After nearly a decade, Jan Karon returns to her popular Mitford in the remote logging 361 pages, $15.99. series in Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good. camp, Annaliese despises In this tenth novel centered on Mitford—an imaginary town in Lucenia for her candid and often cynical comments, but Western North Carolina, said to be modeled after Blowing Rock, where over time the two women become friends in the face of Karon previously lived—Father Tim Kavanagh and his wife, Cynthia, mutual adversity. return home after a trip to Ireland. Retired for five years from his post What is especially fine about this novel are the as the Episcopal priest at Lord’s Chapel, Father Tim finds himself descriptions of everyday life in this region in the early caught up again in the town’s daily life and attendant problems. Here part of the 20th century. Clearly, Carter has taken great are the characters from previous novels: Dooley, the Kavanagh’s pains to research both the area and its people, giving us adopted son struggling to become a country veterinarian; Hope details ranging from woodstove cookery to the gardens Murphy, owner of Happy Endings bookstore, facing the possible loss of of the day. Reading Annaliese From Off imparts a real her unborn child; and all the others familiar to readers of this series. feel for a way of life that has vanished only in the last The Mitford novels are not for everyone. Karon’s great talent lies in presenting us with the details of living and our daily triumphs and hundred years. disasters. It’s this quality—her exploration of day-to-day adventures Meanwhile, Where All Light Tends To Go is as and mishaps in a small town—that has won for her millions of readers. different from Annaliese From Off as that woodstove is (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2014, 511 pages, $27.95) from a microwave. Here North Carolina author David Joy takes readers on a gruesome trip into an

Back Home in Mitford

22

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

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LOCAL LORE Sweet Appalachia

MANDY NEWHAM-COBB ILLUSTRATION

What Dreams May Come

BY ANNETTE SAUNOOKE CLAPSADDLE

A

s with most things good and holy—Velveeta cheese, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee—dream catchers tend to churn my stomach when overconsumed.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the message behind them, that we can filter good dreams from bad. But I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with this particular tradition.

Indigenous or not, dream catchers have become commonplace.

While it is not surprising to see a surplus in native communities such as the Qualla Boundary, their presence has also inundated the “hollers” and dirt roads of Appalachia more generally. As a young girl, I made them at Vacation Bible School, though I certainly can not recount the associated scripture. At present, I rely on their placement inside cars to identify if I am in the correct parking lot of a Cherokee High School away ballgame.

24

According to general consensus, the first recorded use of dream catchers happened among the Anishinabe and Ojibwa, later adopted

by Lakota. Yet this art form has emerged as one of the most generic symbols of pan-Indianism. Dream catchers adorn living-room walls next to their velvet Elvis brothers. They are etched tenderly into youthful biceps during spring-break flashes of courage and dangle from rearview car mirrors like their rosary bead counterparts. It is this specific display, as car decor, that seems the most unsettling to me.

Just as I’d prefer the semi-truck driver beside me didn’t crank up Barry Manilow and spray down his cab with lavender-scented air freshener, I have wondered if all those who hang a dream catcher in their windshields are hoping to employ its power of dream manipulation. If so, do they hope to do this at 60 miles an hour on Interstate 40?

By exploring more deeply why dream catchers became so entrenched in this region, I have learned to better understand the underlying message. I’m also learning to quell personal suspicion of misappropriation. Even among native peoples, specific designs and uses of dream catchers vary, so it should seem natural that the same holds true when embraced by other cultures.

Anthropologist and ethnographer Frances Densmore conducted the most extensive study of early dream catchers, describing them as “wooden hoops about 3 1/2 inches in diameter filled with imitation of a spider’s web. In old times the web was made of nettle-stalk twine and colored red bark with the juice of bloodroot and the inner bark of wild plum.” Modern descriptions include the use of willow bark and sinew. My Bible school masterpiece consisted of thick thread and a plastic ring wrapped with faux leather.

Densmore goes on to explains that for the Pawnee, “the netting symbolized the Spider Woman, a deity who controlled the buffalo”—an animal critical to survival. This translation emphasizes empowerment over one’s environment. Similarly, according to the Lakota belief, the web represents that of Iktomi (trickster and teacher). As Iktomi wove, he explained that different forces and directions can disrupt nature’s balance, and that the web should be used to propel dreams and goals.

In the end, with a symbol so widely commoditized, whether the dream catcher traps a good or a bad dream seems to matter little.

Even so, you can’t deny the positive thoughts that go into the act of hanging one. From the earthly sinew and willow used to fashion them to the stories citing the spider’s weaving of its web, a dream catcher’s “magic” comes from a source that all humanity can appreciate: nature. Those of us from Appalachia revel in nature’s power, beauty, and influence. If we could somehow harness this power to will our own lives toward positive ends? The idea is irresistible. For a people (whether native or Appalachian) known for survival in the face of uncertainty, being able to assert symbolic control is a powerful message of both desire and will.

One cannot put on a headdress and become chief of a Plains tribe or lather one’s face with red paint and become a warrior. But, if before closing our eyes at night, we find comfort in the belief or wish that the orb dangling above our heads will lead only to sweet dreams, well, then mind over matter just might prevail. Some employ lucid dream techniques, some hypnosis. But for the rest of us, perhaps all we really need is a tangible reminder that we retain some control over our lives, even—or maybe especially—while unconscious.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle is the executive director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

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MEALS ON WHEELS “Cycle. Eat. Repeat.” The Cycle-to-Farm slogan explains about all you need to know about this series of group bike rides putting the “tour” in agritourism.

On July 18, some 300 bicyclists will hit the scenic country roads around Black Mountain, North Carolina, crisscrossing the Eastern Continental Divide a grueling three times over the course of the 63-mile route. At designated farm stops every 10 or 15 miles, fuel comes in the form of farm treats like sweet potato muffins, wood-fired pizza topped with fresh cheese, or chocolate fudge made from goat’s milk. It’s like a tailgate market with a valet: Farmers sell everything from cut flowers to bird houses and deliver the goods to the finish line. There, an after party complete with a hearty meal also greets bicyclists. Learn more at cycletofarm.org. LARRY PIERSON, PIERSON IMAGERY

27

OUTLOOKS Mountain Explorer

SPENCER BLACK PHOTO

Flashes of Brilliance B Y H O L LY K AY S

I

f epiphanies tend to come in moments of silent solitude, early June at the Elkmont Campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park may be the last place you’d expect to have such an experience.

As host of the rare natural phenomenon of synchronous fireflies (aka Photinus carolinus), which flash in unison for a couple of weeks each early summer, the place takes on all the fanfare of a Super Bowl halftime.

Around 7 p.m., the first wave of firefly spectators show up, disembarking from a gaudy green, red, and yellow Gatlinburg Transit bus bearing fold-up chairs, cameras, backpacks full of snacks, and—ironically, considering six-legged creatures are the stars of the night—loads of bug spray. Park staff distribute 28

brochures and red cellophane squares to cover flashlights when darkness sets in. (Apparently red light is less offensive to fireflies than white.)

Bus after bus roll in. People walk along the nearby Little River Trail, they sit on picnic blankets and soccer chairs, they gossip with friends and corral toddlers. By the time the last bus drops its load, nearly a thousand firefly seekers convene here.

And for what, exactly? As I embarked on my two-hour drive to Elkmont last June, I harbored a healthy amount of skepticism. I had seen plenty of lightning bugs in my life, spent countless warm evenings watching those lazy-blinking yellow lights announce the beginning of summer. But I’d been told that synchronous fireflies were an entirely different animal. Found only in certain kinds of forest at certain elevations, the synchronous firefly spends most of its life underground, emerging for only three or four weeks of adult life to mate—made public by a light show in which the males all blink in unison—before dying.

This area around Elkmont Campground is “primo” firefly habitat, according to park entomologist Becky Nichols. Increasing visitor traffic forced the park to regulate admission with $1.50 parking tickets, which are exceedingly hard to come by. Tickets sell out within minutes when released in late April. For many, seeing this show is as much a bucket list item as catching any musical hero in concert.

Yet, even as I admired the pretty summer scene as darkness fell— spectators’ silhouettes fading into the woods, green draining to black—I still didn’t get it. What were we all doing here?

Then, just as the darkness reached its climax, a gaggle of preteens behind me began shouting, hushedly: “Look, look!” I whirled around to see the evening’s opening act—a cluster of lights,

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

In that crowded patch of forest, I inexplicably found solitude—alone with the darkness and the fireflies and the silhouettes of leaves and trunks illuminated by bursts of light.

They lit up the night for nearly two hours, until after 11 p.m. I’m sure the crowd would have called for an encore, had they known the words in firefly language. But despite our thundering arrival, we firefly watchers were a reverent bunch. Even those preteens soaked up the silent spirit of the moment.

And in that crowded patch of forest, I inexplicably found solitude—alone with the darkness and the fireflies and the silhouettes of leaves and trunks illuminated by bursts of light.

Occasionally, a child’s voice carried through the air, or the red light of a headlamp cut through the darkness, but no disturbance was strong enough to pull me out of my reverie.

In that moment, I was a pioneer, the only person to have ever marveled at the wonder of this fairy forest. Gone were the crowds, the picnic blankets, the soccer chairs—leaving only the light, the dark, and the transformation of my spirit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Waynesville reporter Holly Kays is a forester’s daughter who is happy to live, write, and hike in the land of many trees.

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so much whiter than the yellow fireflies I was used to, bursting in unison like a frazzled electric current thrown into the hemlock tree across the path.

But the opening act rarely holds a candle to the headliner, you know?

Likewise, the next performers easily eclipsed this little cluster of firefly loverboys. Cohorts of males steadily coalesced into larger and larger choruses of synchronized light, flashing blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink together before resting just long enough to do it again—a whole forest breaking into silent song.

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

FIELD GUIDE

Rhodo Rage

Mountain Explorer

T

ULELI PHOTO

his time of year, the outlook is bright in the mountains. After all, about a dozen Rhododendron species flower throughout the Smokies, painting our higher elevations in shades of pink, purple, scarlet, and white.

(Remember: All azaleas are rhododendrons, but not all rhodos are azaleas.)

PRETTY IN PINK: Endemic to Western North Carolina and discovered by George Vasey in 1878, the pinkshell azalea appears to cling magically to rock faces at high elevations. Grandfather Mountain claims to be home to the world’s largest population of pinkshell, but you can also find them along the Blue Ridge Parkway from Mount Pisgah to Waterrock Knob. How to identify: This deciduous,

PURPLE HAZE: Hot on the heels in the blooming season is the purple-flowered Catawba rhododendron, so named because John Fraser discovered the flower along the Catawba River as he collected plants for the Emperor of Russia in 1809. Dense highelevation stands like Roan Mountain, Newfound Gap in the Smokies, and the Blue Ridge Parkway’s Craggy Gardens (milepost 364) and Woolyback Overlook (milepost 452) create breathtaking seas of purple. Bakersville celebrates the annual spectacle with the Rhododendron Festival (this year on June 19 and 20). How to identify: This evergreen plant features dark green, leathery leaves that measure three to six inches long.

Showy purple flowers sit at the end of the branches like bright purple snow cones.

JERZY OPIOLA PHOTO

BY DON HENDERSHOT

leggy shrub reaches up to 10 feet tall and begins to flower in mid-May before new leaves unfurl. Intermediate between most rhodos and azaleas, the pinkshell features 5 to 7 stamens (most rhodos have 10 and most azaleas have 5) and a short corolla tube more like rhododendrons than most of the tubelike corollas of other azaleas.

FLAME ON: Dizzying arrays of flame azaleas—from lemon yellow to burnt orange to scarlet—will set the summer mountains on fire beginning in mid-June, such as at Gregory Bald in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. From June through August, the rosebay—the most common rhodo in the Smokies— shines white light from the forested shadows.

Roan Mountain, Tennessee.

KEITH CALLAHAN PHOTO

Did you know?

Rhododendrons are known colloquially in Southern Appalachia as “laurel,” a term that inspires local slang like “laurel slick” and “laurel hell” for the dense impenetrable stands of rhodos found throughout our mountain forests.

WWW.SMLIV.COM

31

GO WILD Mountain Explorer

Hit the Trails Running

C

hattanooga runner Brian Costilow prefers a rootsgnarled path in the woods over pavement any day.

“In trail running, you have to pay attention to your surroundings,” he says. “You get to see and feel more than you would otherwise. The longer you run, the more that experience becomes you.”

As a ten-time veteran of the grueling Leadville 100 ultra-marathon in the Colorado mountains, the athlete feels most at home on the endless trails of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau. Years of logging miles have turned him into an expert on these rugged ridges,

which he shares with RootsRated.com, a free Chattanooga-based online resource bent on getting people outside to play. Here Costilow breaks down the basics on trail running in and around the Scenic City:

GET IN GEAR: Trail running is one of the most pure forms of outdoor adventure: It requires next to nothing, other than motivation. All you need is a good pair of trail-running shoes and a water bottle. Shorts with pockets for food and fuel and a synthetic, sweat-wicking T-shirt also come in handy.

BEST BEGINNER TRAILS: An urban trail system in the heart of Chattanooga’s North Shore, Stringer’s Ridge offers quick access and smooth, easy-to-navigate trails on rolling hills. The main 3.2-mile outer loop spins off into a web of interior trails. Raccoon Mountain, a popular mountain biking spot managed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, offers relatively smooth trails on top of the mountain—aka no big climbs or descents to tackle, plus views of Chattanooga and the Tennessee River Gorge.

The smooth trails at Stringer’s Ridge attract Chattanooga runners.

MARK MCKNIGHT PHOTO

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

MORE TRAILS TO TRY: Mullen’s Cove Loop, in Prentice Cooper State Forest, follows the course used for March’s annual Rock/Creek River Gorge Trail Race, a 10.2-loop trail with beautiful Tennessee River Gorge bluff views, flowing streams, waterfalls, lush rhododendron, hemlock, and hardwood forests. The Cumberland Trail is a beautiful, super-technical trail, full of rocks and roots, that provides a complete perspective of the gorges and sandstone walls of the Cumberland Plateau. When completed, the trail will traverse the entire length of the plateau, connecting Signal Point in Chattanooga to Cumberland Gap in Kentucky. Down on Lookout Mountain, a web of trails wrap around Chattanooga’s most prominent landmark, from Sunset Rock at the top to Reflection Riding Arboretum & Nature Center at the base.

Try the Guild Hardy, Big Daddy Loop, or Skyuka Springs for trails that are a bit more forgiving and accessible.

For more information, including driving directions, see rootsrated.com/ chattanooga-tn/trail-running.

Fonta Flora brewer Todd Steven Boera lifts a mug to local ingredients.

FACES & PLACES Mountain Explorer

DONATED PHOTO

grown in North Carolina. Last year’s beers ranged from a stinging nettle saison to a pale ale made from 100 percent North Carolina grain and hops. On tap for this year from Fonta Flora: a dry-hopped saison flavored with wild dandelions.

“We’re really just trying to get funky and creative with what’s possible—not only with local beer but local ingredients,” says Fonta Flora brewer Todd Steven Boera. “You can make some pretty exciting stuff.”

State of Origin will be held from 3 to 7:30 p.m. on June 13. General admission is $40. fontaflora.com

A BLOSSOMING FOOD SCENE

Morganton LOCAL FLAVOR TAKES ON NEW HEIGHTS IN THIS FOOTHILLS TOWN A BEER FEST WITH A WILD CARD

A

nother weekend, another beer festival in Western North Carolina? Predictability is the last thing you’ll find during Fonta Flora Brewery’s second annual State of Origin festival, held June 13 at Morganton’s Courthouse Square.

Not yet two years old, Fonta Flora takes the “drink local” movement to the next level by making beer that’s rooted in Appalachian agriculture and wild flora—whether grains from Asheville’s Riverbend Malt House, beets from Morganton’s Bluebird Farm, or plums or pawpaws plucked in the wild. Late in 2014, Fonta Flora introduced Echoview Estate Ale, the world’s first truly Appalachian beer—brewed only with ingredients from Weaverville’s Echoview Farm In the 19th century, Fonta and with official certification by Flora was an Africanthe Appalachian Sustainable American sharecropping Agriculture Project to prove it. village near present-day Morganton. The 1916 As a way to encourage other damming of Linville River regional craft breweries to work flooded the Burke County with the local bounty, the State town, which now lies submerged below Lake James. of Origin festival only pours beers made from ingredients

Did you know?

W

WWW.SMLIV.COM

JOHN PAYNE PHOTOGRAPHY

Taste of

ith fewer than 17,000 residents, Morganton doesn’t top many culinary lists—at least not yet. Just don’t try to tell that to the diners at Wisteria Southern Gastropub, where creative Southern fare runs the gamut from trout cake benedicts and boiled peanut hummus to “Kentuckyaki” glazed chicken wing lollipops.

Owner and chef Obie Ferguson makes good on his farm-to-table promise with a menu that changes weekly based on what’s in season. “We really try to make vegetables the star during the summer—any chef can cook proteins; it takes extra thought to make vegetables the focus,” Ferguson says. Even so, careful consideration also goes into specialties such as the Bluebird Farms chicken liver mousse and Hoppin’ John veggie burger.

For Ferguson, it was love at first sight in Morganton. “We were on our way to the mountains while living in Cary, North Carolina,” he recalls.

“Looking for a change of scenery, I bought my house right away and moved here a few months later. From the beginning, I wanted Wisteria to be a big part of the community and help our small town thrive.”

Wisteria opened in July of 2012 and has quickly earned its place as a favorite among locals and visitors, sharing the success of downtown Morganton’s other culinary hot spot, Root & Vine, which merges French technique with Southern tradition.

Wisteria is located at 108 East Meeting St., Morganton, N.C., serving lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch.

33

LIVING HISTORY Mountain Explorer

More Pickin’

Mountain Music On Tap

F

or many folks, beer and music go together like banjo and fiddle. All of the above find a warm reception here in Southern Appalachia—often at the same spot.

Many of the region’s craft breweries regularly welcome bluegrass, old-time, and Americana musicians to their stages and tasting rooms. What’s more, some of those breweries host acoustic jams for all comers, convening musicians young and old to form a circle and follow the music, whether an Irish reel or old-time folk tune. Veterans call out chords to newcomers, singers compare lyrics, and instrumentalists trade a mandolin for a fiddle, or a banjo for a guitar. All the while, pitchers of beer are passed around and energy levels stay high. The gatherings listed here all carve out their own niches, but one thing’s a constant: The spirit of the porch jam lives on.

Monday nights at 8 p.m. in West Asheville, Altamont Brewing Company’s stage gets turned over to the John Hardy Party with banjoist Mitch McConnell, who leads a fast-and-loose old-time jam for a next-generation crowd.

Starting at 6 p.m., Mountain Music Mondays take over a corner of the tasting room at Oskar Blues Brewery in Brevard, N.C. All ages are welcome to this genteel old-time jam; many of these musicians have been playing for decades.

Local pubs get in the action, too: Jack of the Wood in downtown Asheville runs two long-running weekly jams: old-time on Wednesdays and bluegrass on Thursdays (both starting around 6 p.m.). Mondays at 7:30 p.m., the Big Deal Band leads a bluegrass session at Black Mountain Ale House in Black Mountain, N.C.

Jamming 101 Informality is the hallmark of any music jam, but the Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina outlines a few rules of etiquette to keep everyone playing in harmony:

FOLLOW CUES: Public jams often have designated tune leaders, an agreedupon speed (slow for beginners, full-speed for experienced players), and customary ways of beginning and ending songs. Whoever starts a tune is responsible for ending it—whether by raising one foot in the air as the end approaches, calling out “one more,” “last time,” or “going out,” or a simple head nod or change in volume or tempo.

KNOW THE HIERARCHY: Beginners are wise to observe the circle for a bit to figure out how a particular jam is structured, whether by round robin, in which each musician takes a turn as the caller, or by ringleaders who choose all the tunes. In old-time music the lead fiddler typically takes charge; in bluegrass jams, a guitarist or mandolin player who also sings may call the shots.

TUNE UP: Some musicians play by ear instead of tuning to standard pitch, so be sure to follow suit. And pay attention to keys, too, even if that means retuning your instrument to play with the group.

KEEP UP: If you lose your place, hang back and play quietly until you catch up.

The rest of the time, play at a similar WWW.SMLIV.COM

Old-time and bluegrass musicians jam pretty much anywhere that will have them. Even fast-food restaurants play a part: An open group has been gathering for almost 15 years at the Hardee’s Red Burrito in Lenoir, N.C., every Wednesday starting around 6 a.m. for “bluegrass and a biscuit.” y Bluegrass jams also take place on Tuesdays at West Asheville’s ISIS Restaurant & Music Hall (a host band starts at 7:30 p.m., followed by an open jam at 9:30 p.m.), Thursdays at 7 p.m. at Zuma Coffee in Marshall, N.C., and Fridays at 6 p.m. at Rocky Branch Community Club in Walland, Tenn. y Both old-time and bluegrass musicians jam on Friday nights at 7 p.m. at the Phipps General Store in Lansing, N.C., while country and bluegrass rule on Monday nights at 6:30 p.m. at the Feed & Seed in Fletcher, N.C. y Old-time jams enliven the Silvermont Mansion in Brevard, N.C., at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, the Jones House Community Center in Boone, N.C., at 7:30 p.m.

Thursdays, Clay’s Corner in Brasstown, N.C., at 7:30 p.m.

Fridays, and the Barber Shop in Drexel, N.C., at 11 a.m. Saturdays.

For more shows and jams, BlueRidgeMusicNC.com offers an extensive calendar for Western North Carolina.

volume to your fellow musicians, taking care not to overpower your neighbors.

KNOW THE CUSTOMS: When playing bluegrass, musicians “take breaks”—aka they improvise a solo for a few bars. (Whoever is leading the song will usually indicate whose turn it is to take a turn.) Old-time musicians, on the other hand, play in unison throughout, with subtle interwoven improvisations.

Learn more at blueridgemusicnc.com.

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DETOURS Mountain Explorer

Family Ties

BY JOSEPH A. ORSER

Descendants of conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker gather at the men’s final resting place, Mount Airy's White Plains Baptist Church cemetery, built on land that once belonged to the Bunkers. SURRY ARTS COUNCIL PHOTO

M

ove over, Andy Griffith. Each July, Chang and Eng Bunker take top billing as the most celebrated former residents of Mount Airy, North Carolina.

On the last full weekend of the month, as they have for more than 25 years, around a hundred descendants of the world’s best-known pair of conjoined twins come together for a family reunion.

Whether or not you can trace your ancestry to the Bunkers, the public event offers a chance to eat fried chicken, renew acquaintances, and celebrate the lives of two extraordinary Americans— the “original Siamese twins.”

The brothers moved to northwestern North Carolina in 1839, seeking somewhere quiet to retire after a decade traveling the country to exhibit their conjoined bodies for all to see, poke, and ridicule.

“They were attracted to this spot by the purity of the air, the salubrity of the climate, and the rich and beautiful mountain scenery,” claimed an 1850 biography. “Amid the silence and solitude of nature, they could enjoy that retirement and tranquillity which is so much desired by them. ... They would there be free from the scrutinizing gaze of the public eye.”

Joined at the chest by a band of flesh and cartilage, the twins were born in 1811 in Siam (Thailand). In 1829, an American sea captain brought them to the United States to capitalize on the country’s fascination with “freaks of nature.” The men cut their bonds to the captain in 1832, achieving great fame and fortune on

36

their own. Ultimately, though, they needed a rest.

Legend holds that the invitation to North Carolina came from Wilkesboro physician James Calloway, who befriended the twins while visiting New York. Learning of their interests in hunting and fishing, Calloway knew just the place. In Wilkes County, the twins hunted and fished—and became U.S. citizens at a time when naturalization was legally limited to whites. They adopted the surname Bunker, a nod to a friend and business acquaintance in New York, and bought 150 acres near Traphill, a village nestled at the base of Stone Mountain, where they built a fine house.

In April 1843, the twins married two sisters, daughters of a local farmer, and ten months later their wives gave birth to girls born within six days of each other. Each family grew steadily; ultimately, Eng fathered eleven children, Chang ten. Two tracts exceeding 650 acres gave the families space for their own farms, located a mileand-a-half apart on rolling countryside about four miles south of Mount Airy. They raised swine, sheep, and cattle and cultivated corn, oats, wheat, and sweet potatoes.

The brothers resumed performing around the country in the 1850s, but Mount Airy remained home for the rest of their lives.

Despite their wealth, the Bunkers presented themselves as enterprising farmers who shingled roofs, chopped wood, and tilled soil.

After working hard, they played hard. They were “among the keenest hunters, fowlers, and fishermen of their district,” one newspaper reported. “In fact, they lived as real country gentlemen, ready to drink a glass, or fight a round, as occasion required.”

Although the brothers portrayed themselves as self-sufficient farmers, in truth they relied on the labor of enslaved blacks, numbering 20 to 30. When Civil War came in 1861, each contributed a son to the Confederate cause, one of whom was wounded, the other taken prisoner.

The end of slavery stripped the brothers of most of their wealth, although they kept their land. In 1870, Chang suffered a stroke that largely confined the brothers to their farms.

On a cold January morning in 1874, Chang died. “Then I am going,” Eng noted. A servant was sent to fetch a doctor; they had planned to surgically separate the twins when one died, an attempt to save the life of the other. But town proved too far from the farm, and Eng followed his brother after 2.5 hours. Eng spoke his last words to his wife: “May the Lord have mercy on my soul!”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph A. Orser is the author of The Lives of Chang and Eng: Siam’s Twins in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press, $28).

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

ADVERTISING SECTION

SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS

GUIDE

T

he Southern Appalachians have a rich artistic history. As long as folks have lived in these majestic landscapes, they’ve been molding, shaping and putting together items that serve not only practical purposes but also aesthetic ones, too. From weavers to potters, painters to metalsmiths, glassblowers to woodcrafters, these artisans reflect generations of heritage and innovation. Promoting and perpetuating this beauty are the galleries that are as unique and varied as the artists themselves.

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AROUND BACK AT ROCKY’S PLACE The Ultimate Folk Art Gallery in the South!

Representing a plethora of self-taught artists. Best selection by artist “Cornbread” in the Universe!

Established 2002.

3631 Hwy. 53 E. at Etowah River Rd. Dawsonville, Ga. • 706.265.6030 aroundbackatrockysplace.com Sat. 11-5; Sun. 1-5 DOGWOOD CRAFTERS Arts and crafts co-op featuring local artisans.

Stained glass, gourd art, handmade soaps, photography, painting, canned goods, metal work and more. Established 1976.

90 Webster St. • Dillsboro, N.C. 828.586.2248 • dogwoodcrafters.com EARTHWORKS ENVIRONMENTAL GALLERY Since opening in 1992, Earthworks has focused on artists who display stewardship of the Earth, whether through design or crafting techniques.

Artisans from a variety of mediums grace the gallery’s collections. Artists, both regional and from around the world, fit together at Earthworks.

21 N. Main St. • Waynesville, N.C. 828.452.9500 • earthworksgalleries.com

Southern Appalachian Galleries

37

FRANK’S CLASSIC KNIVES A Timeless Purveyor of Quality Knives . Frank’s provides a look into times past with a collection of handcrafted pocket knives. What's in your collection?

Waynesville, NC 828.246.1745 • franksclassicknives.com

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MAHOGANY HOUSE ART GALLERY AND STUDIOS, THE The Mahogany House Art Gallery is located in the historic area of Frog Level in downtown Waynesville, N.C. Its brick plaster walls, dark plank wood flooring and embossed tin ceiling tiles lend a timeless appeal and complement the treasures of art displayed within. At present, the artist studios feature an encaustic artist, acrylic and oil artist, a cold wax and assemblage artist and two woodturners.

240 Depot St. • Waynesville, NC themahoganyhouse.com MARK OF THE POTTER The oldest crafts shop in Georgia in the old Grandpa Watts’ Gristmill, celebrating over 45 years in the same location. Mark of the Potter features handcrafted pottery, a potter working weekends, and other crafts. Don’t miss the best view on the Soque River with generations of huge brown and rainbow trout (protected, of course).

706.947.3440 • markofthepotter.com

THE FOLK SCHOOL CHANGES YOU.

Engaging hands and hearts since 1925. Come enjoy making crafts and good friends on 300 natural, scenic acres in western North Carolina.

JOHN C. CAMPBELL FOLK SCHOOL folkschool.org BRASSTOWN

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MUD DABBERS POTTERY Handmade stoneware pottery from a family of potters producing functional and contemporary designs including bowls, mugs, pitchers, dinnerware casserole dishes, sculptures, masks, raku and Brandon Mountain Gnomes.

20767 Great Smoky Mountain Expressway (U.S. 23-74 in Balsam) 828.456.1916 • muddabbers.com ROBERT A. TINO GALLERY Robert Tino is one of the most celebrated artists living in the southeast. He has painted the beauty of Tennessee and North Carolina for over 40 Years. Working in oils, acrylics, or watercolors, each painting is a flourish of color, depth, and texture. Leisurely shop thru the gallery for notecards, art tiles, limited edition prints and custom framing.

381 Main St. • Highlands N.C. 828.526.9333 812 Old Douglas Dam Rd. • Sevierville Tenn.

865.453.6315 www.robertatinogallery.com

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Art tiles Pottery Home Furnishings Specializing In Custom Framing

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Highlands lands Gallery y - 381 Main St St • Highlands NC 28741 287 741 4 • 828-526-9333 Sevierville Sevierville Gallery y - 812 Old Old Douglas D Dam am R Rd d • Se Sevierville vierville TN 3 37876 7876 • 865 865-453-6315 -453-6315 EXPLORE

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SEVEN SISTERS GALLERY Discover something different at Seven Sisters Gallery, a staple in charming, historic Black Mountain since 1981. The gallery has one of the broadest ceramics collections available, plus furniture, original artwork, jewelry, and more. Everything is made in the USA, and much of it is local.

117 Cherry St. • Black Mtn, NC 28711 828.669.5107 • 7sistersgallery.com Mon.-Sat. 10-6; Sun. 12-5 SUSAN MARIE DESIGNS With visionary talent and skills acquired in thirty-three years as an award-winning goldsmith, Susan Marie transforms nature’s most exceptional gemstones, diamonds and pearls into wearable contemporary elegance. As a G.I.A. Graduate Gemologist, she selects the most vibrant and highest quality cut stones to create fine jewelry.

Four Biltmore Ave. • Asheville, N.C. 828.277.1272 TPENNINGTON ART GALLERY Teresa Pennington is a self-taught colored pencil artist who renders, in amazing detail, the scenery and landmarks of western North Carolina and beyond. See her distinctive work at TPennington Art Gallery in downtown Waynesville, N.C. 15 North Main St. • Waynesville, N.C. 828.452.9284 • tpennington.com

First Friday of each Month 6-9 p.m.

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UPTOWN GALLERY (MACON COUNTY ART ASSOCIATION) Uptown Gallery showcases the work of local artists and presents Village Square Arts and Crafts shows in Highlands. Featuring an open studio and monthly presentations. Workshops and classes for adults are available, as well as children’s activities in cooperation with The Bascom, a center for the visual arts.

30 E. Main St. • Franklin, N.C. 828.349.4607 • uptowngalleryoffranklin.com

98 N. MAIN ST. • WAYNESVILLE NC • MON.-SAT.10-5:30 • SUN. 1-4 828.456.1940 • WWW.TWIGSANDLEAVES.COM 40

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TWIGS AND LEAVES GALLERY Stroll down Main Street in Waynesville to find a unique gallery where art dances with nature.

Browse through an unforgettable collection of nature-inspired works by 140 primarily regional artists and crafts persons. Take home a piece of art that echoes the wonder of nature.

98 N. Main St. • Waynesville, N.C. 828.456.1940 • twigsandleaves.com

VISIONS OF CREATION With over 40 years of experience, Roberto creates contemporary and one-of-a-kind fine jewelry in gold and silver. Each hand-crafted piece has its own unique properties. Most are Limited Editions and signed. Roberto is constantly creating, evolving and designing new and innovative pieces.

100 Cherry St. • Black Mountain, NC 828.669.0065 • visionsofcreation.com

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Experience Southern Appalachia as recorded, documented, and collected by the students of Rabun County, GA—and shared with the world through The Foxfire Magazine and The Foxfire Book volumes. Visit the legacy they created in honor of their neighbors and ancestors through 45+ years of work gathering and preserving their unique mountain heritage. Museum gift shop offers regional pottery, crafts, Foxfire & other books.

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15 N. Main St. • Waynesville, NC | 828.452.9284 • tpennington.com

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Hickory, North Carolina has a long tradition of making something of itself and the world around it.

Well Crafted...

Attention to detail, pride in precision, doing a thing well it is all a part of the past that serves and shapes the future.

Southern hospitality, furniture, pottery, Catawba Valley Quilters and more.

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For visitor information, contact us at 828.322.1335 or visit www.HickoryMetro.com

FURNITURE WELL CRAFTED FOR MORE THAN 50 YEARS Visit the place where it all began.

Where generations of craftsmen were born into furniture…

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HOMES

AROUND

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EVENTS That Put Us On The Map

Illustration by Ali Douglass 44

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

NATURAL TREASURES

Playing up our best features

1831 GARY PINHOLSTER PHOTO

Hot Springs heats up

CRASHING TECTONIC PLATES put the Appalachian Mountains in place. But how did this region find its way into the imaginations of the world’s traveling public? From the conquistadors and colonists of centuries past to the Appalachian Trail backpackers and smartphone-toting tourists of today, travelers have always been drawn to Southern Appalachia’s dramatic geography.

“Throughout history, Southern Appalachia has been a place that people passed through—a waypoint,” says Ron Roach, the chair of East Tennessee State University’s Department of Appalachian Studies, pointing to rivers and valleys that allowed easier passage.

But mountains don’t make their name on convenience.

Driven by enterprising locals or a confluence of circumstances, actions big and small have played their parts to help establish tourism as one of this region’s top modern industries. For better and for worse, these 50 events helped set the scene.

Our categories represent the wide spectrum of tourism here—the development of our natural landscape, publications and literature, manmade spectacles, celebration of heritage, sports and recreation, pop culture influences, and, last but not least, inspired marketing gimmicks.

Of course, we couldn’t include everything. Which pivotal tourism events do you think we missed? Email editor@smliv.com or join the conversation at facebook.com/smliv.

WWW.SMLIV.COM

Native Americans first discovered the 100plus-degree mineral waters of present-day Hot Springs, North Carolina. By 1778, colonists had grown hip to its supposed healing properties, sending the sick and lame over the mountains to “take to the waters.”

But it was James Patton who helped the natural wonder’s tourism appeal bubble over.

Just a few years after the completion of the Buncombe Turnpike, Patton bought the springs in 1831, and the Asheville developer built the Warm Springs Hotel. Fronted by 13 tall columns—one for each of the first colonies—the grand hotel was often called Patton’s White House and featured 350 rooms and a dining room that seated 600.

According to an early advertisement, accommodations proved “first-class in every respect” and “vastly superior” to any other summer resort south of the Jersey shore. Two years after the Warm Springs Hotel burned down in 1884, the Mountain Park Hotel debuted in its place with the Southeast’s first organized golf club. Warm Springs officially became Hot Springs after the discovery of a new, hotter spring. These days, the Appalachian Trail runs right through town, and Hot Springs Resort offers a full spa menu as well as soaks in the mineral baths.

1878 Luray Caverns is discovered On August 13, 1878, five men from Luray, Virginia, stumbled upon a tiny hole in a big hill in the Shenandoah Valley. After hours of pushing loose rocks aside, they had cleared an opening large enough to slide a rope down into the unknown. A spectacular world of stalactites and stalagmites awaited below.

Two years later, a team of Smithsonian researchers paid Luray a visit, ultimately reporting that “there is probably no other cave in the world more completely and profusely decorated with stalactitic and stalagmitic ornamentation than that at Luray.” In the

45

HIGH HAMPTON INN — An Inn to Remember Gracious hospitality, excellent cuisine and memories await you. Enjoy golf, tennis, fly-fishing, world-class spa, 35-acre private lake, hiking trails, golf schools, wellness retreats, bridge tournaments, and fun holiday weekends. Stay at the Historic Inn, a Cottage, or a Mountain Rental Home. Call or go online for details about Special Packages and Events. Golfers are welcome to play High Hampton’s George Cobb designed course. Call the Pro Shop at 828-743-2450 for details. High Hampton’s dining room is open for visitors staying in the area. Reservations are recommended.

FOR MORE INFORMATION & RESERVATIONS:

800.334.2551 828.743.2411 1525 Hwy. 107 S. Cashiers, NC

www.HighHamptonInn.com 1794-45

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customerservice@beverly-hanks.com SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

The Blue Ridge Parkway.

NPS PHOTO

among the most rugged in the eastern U.S.—through dense thickets of rhododendron where the Vanderbilts camped with their friends more than a century ago.

Natural Treasures century-plus since, Luray Caverns has emerged among the country’s most-visited caves, nearly on par with Kentucky’s Mammoth and New Mexico’s Carlsbad.

Unlike those national parks, the National Caves Association defines Luray as a “show cave,” aka one developed for profit. More than 400,000 annual visitors pay to plumb its depths, at $24 per adult, and to hear a tune on the Great Stalacpipe Organ.

1915 Pisgah goes public Following the sudden death of George Vanderbilt in 1914, his widow Edith sold some 86,000 acres of the Biltmore Estate to the U.S. government, creating one of the first national forests east of the Mississippi River. As she wrote in a letter to Secretary of Agriculture David Franklin Houston, Edith hoped to perpetuate her late husband’s pioneering work in forest conservation and made only one stipulation: to keep the name her husband had given it, Pisgah Forest.

These days, mountain bikers love Pisgah for its unparalleled singletrack—considered

1933 North Carolina opens its first scenic attraction Long before a “Ripley’s Believe-It-OrNot” cartoon declared Blowing Rock, North Carolina, “the only place in the world where snow falls upside down,” forces of nature shoved the metamorphic cliff out of the mountain over the Johns River Gorge, some 3,000 feet below, creating a wind flume that blasts upward with seemingly supernatural force. The millennia-old geologic phenomenon inspired a Native American legend about a forlorn lover leaping from the rock, only to be blown back into his heart-stricken maiden’s arms.

In 1933, the Blowing Rock opened to the public and became North Carolina’s first official scenic attraction. Its handicapaccessible trail takes in views of Hawksbill Mountain, Table Rock, Grandfather Mountain, and Mount Mitchell.

1930s National parks reshape the Smokies and Shenandoah Without a doubt, the national parks movement changed this region forever. In WWW.SMLIV.COM

1926, President Calvin Coolidge signed the bill that established the “Great” Smokies as a national park straddling the state line of Tennessee and North Carolina, along with Shenandoah in Virginia. (Park boosters had added “Great” to the Smokies as a branding strategy.)

After several years of fundraising, the federal government was eventually able to acquire around 300,000 acres of land from the timber companies decimating the hardwood forests as well as from the thousands of rural people living here. In 1934 Congress officially chartered the park, which “set aside in perpetuity a piece of land that captivates the American imagination,” says Richard Starnes, author of Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina (University of Alabama Press, 2006).

Positioned within driving distance of the majority of the eastern United States, the free park has grown in size to around 500,000 acres and has rarely been more popular, attracting over ten million visitors in 2014—more than double that of any other national park—and generating some $806 million in economic impact in the gateway towns of Tennessee and North Carolina.

Over in Virginia in 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the 166,000acre Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains—after the forceful removal of a couple of thousand residents through eminent domain—and in 1939 the park’s scenic lifeline, Skyline Drive, opened to the public, tracing 105 miles of the ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains down the length of the park. Just 75 miles from the nation’s capital, Shenandoah provides a respite for East Coast urbanites, just as Roosevelt intended.

1936 The Blue Ridge Parkway revs up In the 1930s, as the age of the automobile swept America, Southern Appalachia played its hand wisely. Originally dubbed the “Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway,” the engineering feat known as the Blue Ridge Parkway officially earned the blessing of Congress in 1936. Snaking 469 miles from Virginia to North Carolina, chosen to provide the best mountain views in the eastern U.S., the sculpted motor road has always delighted sightseers seeking “nature through their windshields,” as regional 47

Grandfather Mountain’s Mile High Swinging Bridge, late 1950s. PHOTO BY HUGH MORTON, NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION, WILSON LIBRARY, UNC-CH

tourism expert Richard Starnes puts it. The final piece of the puzzle—construction of the Linn Cove Viaduct at the base of North Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain—was finally completed in 1987. America’s love affair with cars still has wheels. Nearly 14 million visitors drove on the Parkway in 2014, making it the second most visited unit of the national park service, spending nearly $800 million in North Carolina and Virginia.

1952 Hugh Morton inherits Grandfather Mountain From different vantages, Grandfather Mountain is said to reveal different faces of an old man. Many men left their mark on this apex of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Scientists in the late 18th and early 19th centuries waxed poetically about their 48

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

2001 The elk return By the late 1700s, all of North Carolina’s elk had been killed, and Tennessee’s last elk met their demise less than half a century later. Since park rangers at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park first reintroduced

MARK HASKETT PHOTO

Natural Treasures

explorations of rugged Grandfather Mountain. “The highest mountain in all of America” (as French botanist André Michaux incorrectly wrote in 1794) in this “unbroken wilderness” (according to Harvard botanist Asa Gray in 1841) made John Muir “jump about and sing and glory in it all.”

But no man built up tourism here like photographer Hugh MacRae Morton, who became the sole owner of Grandfather Mountain in 1952 and constructed the Mile High Swinging Bridge, a 228-foot span over the 80-foot gorge dividing Linville Peak. Beginning in 1955, Morton publicly fought with the National Park Service over the routing of the Blue Ridge Parkway, arguing that to carve a road through the upper reaches of Grandfather Mountain would be “like taking a switch blade to the Mona Lisa,” with Morton ultimately prevailing.

“A wee bit of the Scottish Highlands” came to Grandfather Mountain with the first annual Highland Games in 1956, popularized by Morton’s photographs of bagpipers on Grandfather’s peaks and clan society tents nestled in its base. Following Morton’s death, North Carolina purchased the majority of Grandfather Mountain’s backcountry in 2009 to develop a state park.

25 elk to Cataloochee Valley in 2001, followed by another 27 animals in 2002, wildlife lovers have herded here to the North Carolina side of the Smokies, especially during rutting season from late summer to mid October. Today the elk herd numbers more than 150. Remember to keep your distance: By federal law, getting within 50 yards can result in fines or arrest.

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WERE WORDS The pen is mighty: Publications that inspired travel

1791 Appalachia gets its first field guide Called America’s first native naturalist, William Bartram forever changed the landscape of Southern Appalachia with the publication of his rather verbosely titled Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; Containing An Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions, Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians.

One scholar of the era touted the book as the most astounding verbal artifact of the young nation. Today, a hiking trail named for Bartram courses from Transylvania into Haywood County and cuts across the Blue Ridge Parkway.

1870s Doctors write a prescription for Asheville Before there were antibiotics, there was Asheville. In 1870, Dr. H. P. Gatchell extolled the healing benefits of its temperate climate with his pamphlet, “Western North Carolina—Its Agricultural Resources, Mineral Wealth, Climate, Salubrity and Scenery.” In 1871 Gatchell opened The Villa—the country’s first sanitarium exclusively for tuberculosis patients—in the area of the city now known as the Kenilworth neighborhood. An 1880s booklet, called “Asheville, Nature’s Sanitarium,” described the city as a mecca for the Southerner “as he flees from the mosquito, heat, and malaria of the southern summer, and the Northerner as he shivers from the blizzards of the North and West.”

By 1930, Asheville was home to 25 sanitariums, with beds for some 900 patients.

1913 Our Southern Highlanders seeks the “back of beyond” Attracted to “an Eden still unpeopled and unspoiled,” Horace Kephart withdrew to the Smoky Mountains in 1904 to escape from an unhappy life in St. Louis. His search of the “back of beyond” brought him to a Hazel Creek cabin, where his writings of mountain people became Our Southern Highlanders.

First published in 1913, the collection of essays became the preeminent study of life and lore in Southern Appalachia, though critics fault Kephart’s focus on moonshining and other backwoodsy portrayals. Kephart became friends with George Masa, an Asheville bellhop turned photographer who was born in Osaka, Japan. Kephart’s words and Masa’s pictures helped turn the tide in favor of the Smokies national park

farming camps along the ridges of Appalachia to serve as a refuge from an increasingly industrialized society. Hikers took up his cause, with the roughly 2,180mile footpath from Georgia to Maine finally completed in 1937. Eleven years later, Earl V. Shaffer reported walking the entire trail— the first documented thru-hiker—and an American rite of passage took root.

1929 Thomas Wolfe looks homeward On a trip to Europe in 1926, Asheville native Thomas Wolfe filled 17 ledgers of largely autobiographical writing from his childhood spent in his mother’s boarding house—merely the start of his magnum opus, Look Homeward, Angel. When the novel published in 1929, filled with often

Horace Kephart in his Hazel Creek cabin, circa 1906.

campaign. John D. Rockefeller Jr., for one, donated $5 million to the effort after seeing Masa’s photographs. Today, park visitors and Appalachian Trail hikers can pay their respects to the dynamic duo at the 6,217-foot Mount Kephart and 5,685-foot Masa Knob.

1921 The Appalachian Trail is born on paper Don’t be fooled by the pragmatic title: Benton MacKeye’s essay, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” exemplifies the philosophical tone of early 20th-century American utopianism. More significantly, the article gave birth to the dream of the Appalachian Trail. In the October 1921 edition of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, the former forester from New England proposed a trail connecting a series of work, study, and WWW.SMLIV.COM

Thomas Wolfe.

unflattering sketches of his hometown’s colorful characters, The Asheville Times called the book a “story told with bitterness and without compassion.” Wolfe became deeply unpopular and stayed away from the city for nearly eight years. However, after the success of his second novel, he returned home a hero in 1937, having increased tourism to Asheville during the Great Depression. Wolfe continues to inspire literary tourism to the region, and today visitors can walk through the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse (dubbed Dixieland in Look Homeward, Angel), at 48 Spruce Street in downtown Asheville.

1979 Guidebooks blaze trails By the age of 5, Allen de Hart began hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains; at 10, 49

In The Beginning, There Were Words he learned about the Appalachian Trail while bringing water to Civilian Conservation Corps workers as they built the Blue Ridge Parkway. In 1979, he published the first of his 11 meticulously researched trail guides covering Southern Appalachia. All told, 29 editions of his popular guides have led decades of hikers through the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, and Florida.

Offering a similar gift to mountain bikers in 1992, Jim Parham launched a pioneering trail guide series, called Off the Beaten Track, which covers more than 2,000 miles of mountain bike trails in the Southeast, including Pisgah, the Smokies, northern Georgia, and eastern Tennessee.

1997 Cold Mountain rises in profile Asheville-born writer Charles Frazier immortalized Western North Carolina’s Cold Mountain with the 1997 publication of his debut novel, a Civil War epic by the same name. The novel made publishing history, topping the New York Times best-seller list for a record 61 weeks and receiving the 1997 National Book Award for Fiction. In 2000, Asheville’s Highland Brewing Company renamed its winter ale Cold Mountain, a cult favorite released each November, complete with a Twitter account dedicated to tracking its limited release (@ColdMountainTracker). In 2003, a boxoffice hit starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law brought the world to the mountains of Western North Carolina—at least in spirit.

The movie Cold Mountain was actually filmed in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains.

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The Biltmore House.

THE BILTMORE COMPANY PHOTO

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME Modern marvels and gathering places

1827 The Buncombe Turnpike opens up for business Completed in 1827, the Buncombe Turnpike connected a 75-mile stretch from the Tennessee border along the French Broad River to Asheville and down to South Carolina through the Saluda Gap. At the time, it was considered North Carolina’s finest road and brought prosperity to the land it traversed. “The Buncombe Turnpike tied the low-country planters to their summer retreats in Western North Carolina and made the area more accessible during fever season,” explains tourism expert Richard Starnes. “That led to the seasonal migration of planters and families to places such as Flat Rock and, later, Cashiers.” Following the Civil War, the Western North Carolina Railroad took over as the region’s primary mode of transportation, following much of the same route, and further propelled tourism in the region.

1886 Asheville gets on track As vice president of the Western North Carolina Railroad, Col. Franklin Coxe SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

exerted his influence to route the track through his adopted hometown. The expansion was completed in 1886, the same year that Coxe opened the elegant Battery Park Hotel on the site where the Grove Arcade now stands (not far from Coxe Avenue). Daily orchestra music, ballroom dancing, fine cuisine, and elevators at the hotel helped solidify Asheville’s reputation as a city of leisure among high society.

George Vanderbilt stayed at the Battery Park in 1888; local legend holds that he resolved to make his home here after first setting eyes on the surrounding peaks and lands from the porch of this hotel.

1895 Biltmore Estate puts out the welcome mat The grandson of industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, George Vanderbilt enriched the fortunes of Asheville when he chose the city’s surroundings as the site for his “country home,” Biltmore House, a 250room French Renaissance chateau set amid forests and gardens designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Biltmore Estate opened to friends and family with a roaring party on Christmas Eve, 1895, following six years of construction that brought hundreds of the world’s premier artisans, craftsmen, and architects to the mountains of Western North Carolina, some of whom stuck around and set to work beautifying Asheville and other nearby cities.

Biltmore validated Asheville’s status as a leisure destination for the elite. By 1930, the Great Depression was taking its toll on

1897 Religious assemblies congregate Since the days of the Second Great Awakening (circa 1800-1830s), the mountains of Southern Appalachia have drawn religious pilgrims. The 1890s dawned the advent of religious retreat centers and meeting grounds here, bringing thousands of followers to Western North Carolina. In 1897, a group of ecumenical church leaders, led by Congregational minister John C. Collins, bought land near Black Mountain, North Carolina, for a Christian settlement. They named it Montreat—short for “mountain retreat”—and hosted their first Christian

assembly that July, with some 400 attendees sleeping in tents. Ten years later, Montreat hosted its first Presbyterian conference. Elsewhere, Baptists set up camp at Ridgecrest, east of Black Mountain, followed by the Methodist resort of Lake Junaluska, outside Waynesville. And in 1945, celebrity evangelist Billy Graham and his family moved to Montreat, their home becoming a tourist magnet for church groups who gathered on their front lawn to take pictures.

MARGARET HESTER PHOTO

Asheville, and “America’s largest home” opened to the public to help increase tourism.

Today Biltmore stands among North Carolina’s top attractions, with more than one million annual visitors who tour the home and gardens, dine in six restaurants, shop in more than a dozen stores, sample wine from its prolific winery, explore trails, and more.

1902 Chimney Rock inspires a lofty plan Like many tuberculosis patients around the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Lucius B. Morse sought the healthful climate of Western North Carolina’s Hickory Nut Gorge and often rode horseback to admire Chimney Rock, once paying a local man 25 cents to guide him by donkey to the top.

There, legend has it, he dreamed both of

establishing the area as a park and of creating a year-round resort on a mountain lake. In 1902, he and his brothers purchased 64 acres of Chimney Rock Mountain, including the giant monolith and cliffs; 25 years later the impounding of the Rocky Broad River created Lake Lure. The 1929 stock market crash made him abandon his own plans, but both Chimney Rock and Lake Lure have taken on a life of their own in pop culture, appearing as backdrops to movies such as The Last of the Mohicans in 1992 and Dirty Dancing in 1987. August 1415 will bring the sixth annual Dirty Dancing Festival to Lake Lure.

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What got tourists to Elkmont?

The Elkmont community offered a chance to get out of the noise, congestion, and heat of Knoxville and other big cities during the summertime and relax in a beautiful mountain community. Oftentimes, a cabin owner’s wife and children would spend much of the summer in Elkmont between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The husbands might only stay there on weekends and/or part of the week if it was essential that they be at their business establishments or offices most of the week. They would ride back and forth on the excursion cars pulled by the Little River Railroad Company trains.

Who came?

Appalachian Club or Wonderland Club members were a who’s who of the business people, civic leaders, college professors, and notables of Knoxville, Chattanooga, Nashville, and other big cities who had the financial means to afford a second home in the mountains. One account claims that the legendary playwright Tennessee Williams learned to swim while visiting Elkmont. There is also a long list of actors, writers, celebrities, and other notables who spent time in Elkmont.

Elkmont makes an early tourism splash in Gatlinburg

How did they entertain themselves?

Kids enjoyed playing in the swimming hole—a dammed-up portion of the Little River—in the Millionaire’s Row section of Elkmont. They also hiked, played with neighboring children, and explored the nearby forests and waterways. The adults also liked to swim in the swimming hole as well as kick back, read, play cards, hike, explore the mountains, drink, and socialize. While researching my book one January day, I was surprised to discover a whole hillside in the ravine next to the Daisy Town section of Elkmont that was heavily littered with whiskey and other bottles now buried under a thick weave of tangled vines. It seemed likely

Q&A WITH DANIEL L. PAULIN n his new book Lost Elkmont (Arcadia Publishing, $22), writer Daniel L. Paulin reveals secrets of this Smokies logging camp turned exclusive resort. Here Paulin shares more insight on the early days.

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How did Elkmont happen?

At the turn of the 20th century, Col. Wilson B. Townsend’s Little River Lumber Company began logging the watersheds of the Little River in Tennessee’s Blount and Sevier Counties. In 1908 Townsend established the logging town of Elkmont and started offering excursions on a special observation car attached to his logging train for a group of Knoxville Elks Club members who had previously hunted and fished here. After mostly clear-cutting Elkmont by 1910, Townsend sold 50 acres to the Appalachian Club and gave them management over wildlife and fishing rights. In 1912, the Wonderland Park Hotel opened to the public. It proved very popular, with visitors paying fares for their passage on Townsend’s Little River Railroad to reach the hotel. The hotel was sold in 1915 to a group of Knoxvillians who had been earlier rebuffed in their efforts to join the Appalachian Club. They changed the name to the Wonderland Club Hotel, and it became the second privately owned club in Elkmont.

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Photos reprinted with permission from Lost Elkmont, by Daniel L. Paulin.

Available online at www.arcadiapublishing.com or by calling 888.313.2665.

to me that as soon as the bottles were emptied, they were tossed over the hillside and possibly a new one opened.

Moonshine was also a frequent commodity to be found in the summer communities, especially during Prohibition. The mountain families who lived locally probably kept the summer community inhabitants well supplied. Parties and social events were frequently held in the Appalachian Club’s Clubhouse in Daisy Town, and the saying “Elkmont will shine tonight” was often the catchphrase used when spreading word about the night’s well-orchestrated party. This phrase may have referred as much to the moonshine consumption as it did the raucous good time to be had and the light given off by the moon and stars.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

If You Build It, They Will Come

1903 The Switzerland of America takes shape A few years after some Pittsburgh businessmen formed the Toxaway Company, they embarked on their boldest mission: to dam the Toxaway River and create Appalachia’s largest manmade lake. Soon after the dam’s completion in 1903, the five-story Toxaway Inn opened on the new lake’s shores with luxuries such as longdistance telephones, private indoor plumbing, a billiard parlor, bowling alley, and dinners prepared by French chefs and served on fine linens. For the next 14 years, until the massive flood of 1916 devastated the dam, the inn became a celebrity haunt, with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, and others arriving by private railroad car.

Combined with the development of Lake Fairfield and the Fairfield Inn, Lake Sapphire and the Sapphire Inn, and the Franklin Hotel, the resorts of Sapphire Valley became romanticized as the “Switzerland of America.”

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The sun rises on the Grove Park Inn Before he became known as the “father of modern Asheville,” Edwin Wiley Grove was a poor farm boy from Tennessee with a silver bullet: Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic, a quinine product that promised to prevent and treat malaria, which plagued the South in the 19th century. By the late 1890s, his tonic outsold Coca-Cola and had become a household staple—and his rags-to-riches story had come true.

Afflicted with respiratory problems, Grove followed his doctor to the clean mountain air of Asheville, making his home here in 1898. In 1913, less than one year after breaking ground on

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Asheville’s Grove Park Inn. THE OMNI GROVE PARK INN

Sunset Mountain, the Grove Park Inn opened to much fanfare. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan gave remarks to some 400 Southern gentlemen. In the 1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald spent two summers here, attempting to rest from tuberculosis and write while his wife, Zelda, lived across the valley at a psychiatric hospital. The Omni Grove Park Inn, as it is called today, remains one of Asheville’s top attractions, but Grove’s influence extends beyond the hotel’s sunset view.

Appalachian tourism author Richard Starnes notes that Grove marked the transition between health and leisure tourism. In addition to building his inn, he also purchased a number of sanitariums in town and burned them down, making the point that “you can’t be a playground for the leisure class if you’re also a place where people come to die.”

1916 Summer camps spring up Since the 1910s, the hills around Brevard, North Carolina, have been the stomping grounds for summer camps and the kids who flock here from around the country.

The oldest operating private summer camp in the Southeast, Keystone Camp opened in 1916 by Florence Ellis and Fannie Holt, featuring tents on raised platforms. Today, 54

Knoxville’s Sunsphere.

VISIT KNOXVILLE

1982 Knoxville hosts the world If You Build It, They Will Come Holt’s fourth-generation niece runs the allgirls camp. As Keystone approaches its 100th birthday, it counts among several Transylvania County camps to predate the Great Depression. An alumnae weekend for adults is in the works.

1960 Hickory begins its shopping spree Thanks to freight trains that rumbled through Western North Carolina carrying Southern hardwood lumber, Hickory began fashioning itself into a furniture hub in the early 20th century. By mid-century, the Catawba Valley had emerged as the nation’s capital of furniture manufacturing. In 1960, Hickory furniture makers began displaying their wares for retail buyers, paving the way for the 1985 opening of the massive Hickory Furniture Mart, which now welcomes more than half a million shoppers each year, helped in part by national press exposure including “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

“You got to be there” proclaimed ads for the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. And from May through October, some 11 million visitors heeded their call, including President Ronald Reagan, comedian Bob Hope, and Jordanian Prince Hassan bin Talal. Themed “Energy Turns the World” and formally called the Knoxville International Energy Exposition, the fair introduced the world’s first touch-screen computer displays, Cherry Coke, and the Sunsphere, a 26-story steel tower capped with a giant bronze globe. The structure endures as a city icon (the globe accessible by elevator). Though some critics panned the event as a flop—the New York Times wrote of its “desolate legacy” two years later, and in fact the profits added up to just $57— Knoxville is widely credited with hosting America’s last successful world’s fair.

1986 Dollywood makes Pigeon Forge’s dreams come true Dolly Parton may be the single biggest force in Smokies tourism, and nowhere is her allure stronger than at Dollywood. In 1986, the Tennessee singer brought her star

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power home to Sevier County, with a rebranded theme park on the site of Pigeon Forge’s Silver Dollar City (where Rebel Railroad and Goldrush Junction had previously stood). Dollywood became an instant success, drawing 1.3 million visitors in its first year. Today said to be Tennessee’s most popular ticketed attraction, Dollywood spurred a commercial boom on the Parkway in Pigeon Forge, from the Titanic—“the world’s largest museum attraction”—to

Dollywood’s own growing family of attractions, including Splash Country water park. When the 300-room DreamMore Resort opens this summer, Dollywood properties will employ more than 3,000 people. To celebrate the 30th season, Dollywood has announced the return of the Showcase of Stars concert, including Parton herself onstage, this August.

1992 The Tennessee Aquarium makes waves During construction of the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, some locals derided it as “Jack’s fish tank,” in reference to Jack Lupton, the local philanthropist driving the project. When it opened in 1992 as the world’s largest freshwater aquarium, then Mayor Gene Roberts called the aquarium a “cathedral of conservation.”

Whatever you call it, the riverfront attraction has transformed Chattanooga, returning focus to the city’s lifeblood, the snaking Tennessee River; leading to some $2 billion in new downtown investment; and making its own $77 million annual economic impact.

The aquarium takes visitors on a freshwater journey from mountains to sea, starting with the Appalachian Cove Forest, where otters

frolic in streams and waterfalls, birds chirp overhead, and reptiles lurk in hollow logs.

1994 Asheville cheers its beer culture Officially, “for love of beer and mountains” is a partnership between Asheville’s Highland Brewing Company and the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Yet the phrase could also be considered a motto for Western North Carolina. It all started when Highland opened in 1994, helping to spark a craft beer revolution. Western North Carolina is now home to some 40 breweries, around half of those in Asheville alone, earning it the title “Beer City, USA” for several years.

National craft breweries Sierra Nevada, Oskar Blues, and (under-construction) New Belgium have followed the buzz and opened Eastern outposts here. NPR recently called Asheville the “Napa Valley of beer.” Indeed, tourists can attend countless beer festivals, book a “brews cruise” (with a designated driver), and even take a yoga class in a taproom followed by a beer tasting.

SPOTLIGHT ON CULTURE Selling folk traditions & high culture

1912 Pi Beta Phi Fraternity for Women sets up shop With its founding of a one-room settlement school in Gatlinburg in 1912, the Pi Beta Phi Fraternity for Women brought education and the first medical clinic to this then remote part of the Smokies. In gratitude, students brought wood carvings, weavings, baskets, and other gifts made by

2010 Moonshine goes legit White lightning. Mountain dew. An abomination. People have used a lot of words to describe moonshine over the years, but “mainstream” might be the least expected. Yet today the heritage spirit packs a potent economic punch, especially in Tennessee following its legalization in 2010.

Ole Smoky Moonshine Distillery opened in Gatlinburg that same year and in its first five years has become America’s most visited distillery, offering countless free tastings of flavors like apple pie and lemon drop, adding an outpost in Pigeon Forge, and quadrupling its bottling capacity. At least 16 other moonshine makers have opened since, including several in Sevier County, such as Old Forge Distillery, which creates smallbatch spirits with freshly ground grain from the Old Mill, a 19th-century gristmill.

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Weaver Lizzie Reagan at work.

ARROWMONT SCHOOL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS

their parents. In 1926 the women opened Arrowcraft Shop to sell such handcrafted wares to tourists and others passing through along the new Highway 71. Building on the success of this cottage craft movement, summer craft workshops debuted in 1945.

By 1967 those workshops had grown into the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts.

The year-round destination for creative learning remains a driving force of arts and crafts in the Smokies, as well as “a source of universal pride,” as Sevier County newspaper editor Stan Voit wrote in the Mountain Press a couple of years ago. Fine regional crafts still attract travelers to Arrowcraft Shop, now operated by the Southern Highland Craft Guild.

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1928 at Penland and brainstormed the idea for the Southern Highlands Craft Guild, which was officially chartered in 1930. Today the selective Guild represents nearly 1,000 craftspeople in 293 counties of 9 southeastern states. Operating six shops including the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway (milepost 294), the Guild also holds the juried Craft Fair of the Southern Highlands (established 1948) each July and October at the U.S. Cellular Center in downtown Asheville. Now as in the past, the Guild runs on tourism as well as encourages it.

The Carter Family.

FROM THE JOHN EDWARDS MEMORIAL FOUNDATION RECORDS, #20001, SOUTHERN FOLKLIFE COLLECTION, WILSON LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

1933 Black Mountain College shakes up art history

1928 Asheville holds the first-ever folk festival Spotlight on Culture

1927 Bristol sings a new tune In July of 1927, the local newspaper in Bristol, Tennessee, ran a small ad about the Victor Talking Machine Company bringing its recording machine to town.

For a dozen days, talent scout Ralph Peer recorded the Appalachian folk musicians who traveled to the Taylor-Christian Hat Company. Widely considered the “big bang of modern country music,” the recordings produced the world’s first country superstars, such as Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family; Johnny Cash famously called the Bristol sessions “the single most important event in the history of country music.” In 2014, the Birthplace of Country Music opened on the Virginia side of downtown Bristol. This May, the Smithsonian-affiliated museum released Orthophonic Joy: The 1927 Bristol Sessions Revisited. The tribute album breathes new life into those recordings thanks to top-ofthe-line equipment and the voices of modern stars including Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Marty Stuart, Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers, and Ashley Monroe.

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In 1928, the Asheville Chamber of Commerce recruited folk historian and musician Bascom Lamar Lunsford to bring Appalachian music and dance out of the mountains and coves and onto the stage of the annual Rhododendron Festival. Ballad singers, fiddlers, banjo pickers, and string bands entertained some 5,000 people at Pack Square. By 1930 the event had grown into the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival—the first ever folk festival in the United States.

Still held the first weekend of August, “along about sundown,” Lunsford’s festival remains a summer fixture in downtown Asheville.

Black Mountain College only lasted 24 years—“gone before America even knew it existed,” as Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina’s poet laureate, once wrote. Yet its legacy will outlive us all. Founded in 1933 with a spirit of experimentalism and free thinking outside Black Mountain, North Carolina, this small unaccredited arts college “soon became known as a kind of Shangri-La for avant-garde art,” according to critic Carol Kino in the New York Times. European

1928 The Southern Highland Craft Guild forms In the 1890s, the simple gift of a handmade coverlet from a neighbor changed the life of Frances Goodrich, a religious missionary in Western North Carolina. In her words: “Here was a fine craft, dying out and desirable to revive.” Goodrich helped launch Southern Appalachia’s craft cottage revival of the early 20th century, along with women such as Lucy Morgan, the founder of Penland School of Crafts, and Marguerite Butler and Olive Dame Campbell, who started the John C. Campbell Folk School. Their shops and schools catered to tourists, with the profits helping to improve the lives of mountain people. Together they and others gathered in SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

Buckminster Fuller in his geodesic dome, 1949.

COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF HAZEL LARSEN ARCHER AND THE BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE MUSEUM + ARTS CENTER

artists and intellectuals found sanctuary here amid the rise of Adolf Hitler, including Josef Albers and his textile-artist wife, Anni, who came here after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus School. Young artists and thinkers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly added to its mystique. The summer of 1948 stands out among Black Mountain College’s legendary summer sessions: Buckminster Fuller built his first geodesic dome, and John Cage emerged a controversial musical

1936

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mastermind who, a few years later, staged the world’s first “happening” here in these mountains. But Black Mountain lives on beyond its reputation: Downtown Asheville’s Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center presents newly expanded exhibition space and archival material and hosts the (Re)Happening each spring, an explosion of art and ideas at Lake Eden, on the site of the college’s final campus.

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“Unto These Hills.” PHOTO BY HUGH MORTON, NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION, WILSON LIBRARY, UNC-CH

1950 Cherokee culture takes center stage Since “Unto These Hills” debuted in 1950, Cherokee legends and stories have lit up the stage in a swirl of dramatic pageantry at the outdoor Mountainside Theater. Tourism expert Richard Starnes notes historical issues with “Unto These Hills”—the drama was not particularly WWW.SMLIV.COM

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Spotlight on Culture accurate—but credits its spotlight on Cherokee culture as laying the foundation for initiatives such as the creation of the Oconaluftee Indian Village. Its popularity also encouraged other outdoor dramas, including Boone’s “Horn in the West” in 1952 and Virginia’s “Trail of Lonesome Pine,” which began in 1964.

1965 Bluegrass rocks its first multi-day festival During warm months, Southern Appalachia hosts more bluegrass festivals than you can shake a banjo at, perhaps none with a wider draw than MerleFest. Held in late April on the campus of North Carolina’s Wilkes Community College, the four-day festival features more than 90 artists on 14 stages and some 80,000 attendees; along with the hit songs, it’s an economic chart topper to the tune of $10 million. But before flatpicking hero Doc Watson founded the festival in 1988 in memory of his late son, Eddy Merle Watson, Carlton Haney laid down the foundation by introducing the First Annual Roanoke Bluegrass Festival— aka the world’s inaugural multi-day outdoor bluegrass festival, held in 1965 on a horse farm in Fincastle, Virginia.

1973 The plot thickens in Jonesborough Like any good yarn, things began simply enough—and made people hanker for more.

In October 1973, some 60 folks sat around hay bales and wagons in Jonesborough, Tennessee, to hear some old Appalachian tales. Out of that early festival grew the International Storytelling Center, which has helped propel a nationwide revival in this time-honored tradition. These days, some 10,000 listeners pull up a chair each October for the National Storytelling Festival, which USA Today has called “the leading event of its kind in America.”

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This photo from a vintage racing program shows Walter Ball in his #7 Chevy at the Sportsman Speedway in Johnson City, Tenn.

SPORTS & THRILLS Getting your kicks, from the slots to the streams

1948 Car racing wins a bigger prize Car racing runs deep in Appalachia. The sport’s early days often involved a devilmay-care bootlegger with a tricked-out car and a moonshine tank on these twisty mountain roads. Stock car tracks grew in popularity following World War II, which drove the 1948 founding of the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR). Guys like Junior Johnson of North Carolina made the transition from the stills to the tracks, winning 50 NASCAR wins in his 14-year driving career and becoming one of five inaugural Hall of Fame inductees. In 1961, the half-mile oval at Bristol Motor Speedway opened and hosted its first NASCAR Sprint Cup event. Today more than a million fans come to Bristol each year, with crowds of 200,000 at the March and August NASCAR races. Guided tours take visitors on a lap around the track to experience its high-banked turns.

1974 The University of Tennessee scores a slam dunk When a 22-year-old Pat Summitt became head coach of women’s basketball at the University of Tennessee in 1974, nobody SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

could have predicted just what a slam-dunk play it would prove for Knoxville. As steelyeyed Summitt helmed the Lady Vols’ rise to elite status, UT broke attendance records— first setting the world record for spectators at a women’s basketball game versus Texas in 1987, most recently topping that record with 25,653 people in a 2006 game against Connecticut. Some seven million spectators have cheered for (or against) Summitt during the past 30 years. In April 2012 she concluded her tenure—becoming head coach emeritus—with a record of 1,098 wins and 208 losses, making her the winningest coach in Division I history.

1996 Olympic-class whitewater rafting comes to the Ocoee As the world’s gaze turned to Atlanta, Georgia, for the 1996 Summer Olympics, water lovers looked to the Ocoee River Gorge across the state line in Tennessee, marking the first-ever Olympic whitewater event on a natural river. Built as the host of the canoe, kayak, and slalom races, the Ocoee Whitewater Center now welcomes visitors to play in this section of the river that was carefully modified to enhance its rapids. The Ocoee has surged in popularity and has become, according to 2014 data by the American Outdoors Association, the nation’s most visited whitewater river.

1997 Harrah’s Cherokee Casino gambles big Some $93 million and endless controversy built the shiny Vegas outpost in

Laws of Attraction We all get by with a little help from our friends. Over the years, key federal legislation has set the groundwork for major tourism gains. y The Weeks Act of 1911, which authorized the U.S. government to buy up land on the eastern seaboard for conservation and public use, eventually led to Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests as well as Great Smoky Mountains National Park. y On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act establishing the National Park Service. y In 1933, Congress established the Tennessee Valley Authority in order to control flooding, introduce electricity, and spur economic development in the Tennessee Valley. The Civilian Conservation Corps, another New Deal agency formed that year, was sent in to help. More than just a bright idea, electrifying the mountains transformed the region, and the resulting lakes proved a boon for tourism. y In the 1960s, one of every three Appalachians lived in poverty.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy formed the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission, intended to fast-track legislation aimed at sending federal dollars to Appalachia. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Appalachian Regional Development Act into law in 1965, just over a year after he famously declared “war” on poverty. y Signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 set a precedent that allowed the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to leverage gambling for tribal and regional economic development.

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LIFE IMITATES ART 1954

tail. In the 1958 movie Thunder Road, the cars are the ones breathing fire as a moonshine runner outraces revenuers along this winding pass through the mountains of Tennessee. The cult classic helped popularize the Tail of the Dragon, as US 129 is commonly known, and today roars with motorcyclists and other adrenaline junkies.

Davy Crockett brings the frontier to the Smokies

1972

Truth is stranger than fiction Sports & Thrills

the Smokies known as Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort, which the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation opened in 1997 on the Qualla Boundary in Western North Carolina. With 1,100 hotel rooms, 190,000 square feet of gaming, 3,800 slot machines, and more than 100 tables for blackjack and other games, it all adds up to North Carolina’s largest tourist attraction, with more than 3.5 million visitors spending roughly $156.6 million each year in Cherokee. Next up: Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River Casino & Hotel is set to open this summer near Murphy, North Carolina.

Growing up in the 1950s meant one near absolute: gunning for Davy Crockett.

Filmed in color at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1954, Disneyland’s miniseries proved a smash hit, drawing an estimated 40 million viewers and throwing fuel in the fire for midcentury America’s love for all things frontier. In 1957, the Tweetsie Railroad theme park opened near Blowing Rock, a year later building on the craze with its addition of a frontier town and Wild West theme. The park’s success convinced owner Grover Robbins. Jr. to build Rebel Railroad in Pigeon Forge. In 1961, Maggie Valley’s Ghost Town In the Sky got in the spirit. In its prime, the theme park brought in more than 600,000 annual visitors.

1958 Thunder Road rolls through the Tail of the Dragon With 318 curves in 11 miles, US 129 seems to mimic the twists of a dragon’s

2011 Cherokee lands a big one In 2011, the U.S. National Fly Fishing Championship came to the pristine streams of Cherokee’s Tribal Waters, marking the first time the national event was held in the Southeast.

Now more than ever before, anglers are taking the bait. Each year, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Fisheries and Wildlife Management stocks its 30 miles of freestone streams with some 400,000 trout and hosts several annual tagged tournaments for amateurs and professionals, including the elite Rumble in the Rhododendron each fall.

The new Fly Fishing Museum of the Southern Appalachians in Cherokee also hopes to hook more fans.

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Deliverance delivers more than lame punchlines With its hillbilly portrayals and brutal violence, the 1972 movie Deliverance dealt a serious blow to the reputation of the people of Appalachia, especially in the mountains of northern Georgia where filming took place. But for all the cheap shots fired by Hollywood, the final laugh goes to the whitewater rafting industry of Southern Appalachia. Movie scenes along the scenic Chattooga River helped create a $20 million outdoor sports industry based on these rapids, attracting a quarter of a million rafters each year and sending out ripple effects throughout the Southeast.

Also in 1972, as whitewater rafting began to hit the mainstream, the Nantahala Outdoor Center opened in Bryson City, with Class III and IV rapids.

Below: Tourism promotion, circa the early 1980s. PHOTO BY HUGH MORTON, NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION, WILSON LIBRARY, UNC-CH

Barn painter Clark Byers with his handiwork. ROCK CITY

THE POWER OF A STUNT What’s the big idea?

1886 Tallulah Falls walks the line If maintaining tourism success is like walking a tightrope, nowhere is that truer than in northeastern Georgia. With its six cascades and countless smaller falls, the dramatic Tallulah Gorge became known as the Niagara of the South and as a playground for 19th-century travelers here at the railroad’s northern terminus. During its heyday, local businessman W. D. Young put the “stunt” in publicity stunt when he hired an aerialist who went by the name of Professor Leon to cross the gorge and bring attention to his new hotel. More than 5,000 curious onlookers showed up to witness the feat, but, in the years to follow, the bottom fell out from under Tallulah’s tourism industry. In 1970, things started looking up—literally. Local tourism officials recruited Carl Wallenda of the infamous Flying Wallenda family to give the gorge another go. Some 35,000 spectators lined the rim to watch Wallenda’s daring feat, which he later called the most dangerous thing he’d ever done, as well as the most beautiful.

Tallulah Gorge. GEORGIA STATE PARKS & HISTORIC SITES

From June 19 to 28, Tallulah Gorge, now a state park, will celebrate the 45th anniversary of Wallenda’s “skywalk” with ten days of concerts and other festivities.

Texas, along the “snowbird’s route” to Florida. The marketing campaign worked; today more than half a million visitors see Rock City.

1932

1968

Rock City kicks off a barnstorming tour

Bavaria pops up in Georgia

In an 1823 diary entry, missionary Daniel S. Butrick wrote of a “citadel of rocks” and boulders atop northwestern Georgia’s Lookout Mountain, arranged in such a way “as to afford streets and lanes.” Nineteenthcentury sightseers that followed nicknamed the unique rock formations “Rock City.”

But Garnet and Frieda Carter are the enterprising duo who made the place a household name. After four years of Frieda blazing paths through the wilderness, trailing a string behind her and positioning her beloved German gnomes along the way, Rock City Gardens opened to the public in 1932. Considering the mountain outside Chattanooga was far from a roadside attraction, things got off to a slow start. In one of the 20th century’s most inspired marketing moves, Garnet Carter commissioned a painter, Clark Byers, to crisscross the country’s highways and offer to paint farmers’ barns if he could emblazon the roof with a simple message: “See Rock City.” Over the course of the next three decades, Byers and his crew painted nearly 900 barns, scattered from Michigan to

Striking gold once is lucky enough, but twice? The northern Georgia town of Helen sprang up amid the 1829 gold rush, but, by the middle of the 20th century, its fortunes

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had long since run out. Desperate for a new start in 1968, town members hatched an idea to raise Helen out of obscurity. Inspired by time he had spent stationed in the Bavarian Alps, local artist John Kollack presented watercolor sketches that reimagined the town as an alpine village. The rest, as they say, is history. Helen’s Bavarian face-lift attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors here along the Chattahoochee River.

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Never Be Boring HOW A SELF-EDUCATED MOUNTAIN MAN BECAME A LIVING LEGEND STORY & PHOTOS B Y M A R K LY N N F E R G U S O N

Joe Wilson in his element: listening to live music along southwest Virginia’s Crooked Road.

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J

oe Wilson sure wasn’t running on sleep when he climbed into a car to be driven to the far side of Thailand at 6 a.m.

The prop plane that flew him and a bevy of roots stars—John Jackson, Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, and Buck White—wobbled to the ground in Bangkok just four hours before. The others enjoyed a three-day break from their globe-hopping tour, one that had already taken them from Honolulu to Hong Kong. But Wilson, then the executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, was on a mission of mercy.

Bouncing along pitted roads, he tried to catch some shut-eye.

The ride was too rough, though, and the views too extraordinary— temples resting on stilts, beautiful lakes, and logging camps where elephants moved the logs. Each scene reminded Wilson that he was far from home, leaving him to wonder how he’d know if the Cambodian dancers he’d been sent to find were, in fact, the real deal. In his words, he “knew about as much about ancient Asian ballet and music as a hog does about Sunday.”

Still, upon learning that Wilson was touring the region, the U.S. State Department had tapped him to visit a group claiming to be Cambodia’s Royal Ballet. These were court performers, sponsored by royalty since the ninth century. Now Cambodia’s royalty was deposed, and the dancers were on the run. It was 1980, and a brutal

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regime, the Khmer Rouge, was assassinating Cambodia’s intellectuals and artists.

When he rolled into Khao-I-Dang, a sprawling refugee camp on Thailand’s border with Cambodia, this country boy—who had read plenty but didn’t hold a single degree—may have been the world’s least likely emissary. He faced a sea of oxen carts and hungry faces, an overwhelming sight, but stuck to his guns, weaving around blue tarp shelters until he found the dancers.

Despite fleeing their home country and living in abject poverty, they had not give up their art. In a bamboo space with a dirt floor, these performers donned elaborate costumes representing traditional characters—the woman, the man, the giant, and the monkey—and began a stylized routine of tightly disciplined motion, poised legs and elaborate hand gestures refined over 11,000 years.

“This was a scene to test your heart,” Wilson told me, remembering their brilliant show 35 years later. “A big expert from Washington,” he added, sarcastically. “I signed, attesting to their quality.”

But that was just the start of what Wilson did for the gifted refugees. The National Council for the Traditional Arts became the dancers’ U.S. sponsor, raising funds to support them as they established lives here and booking tours to introduce their breathtaking art form to American audiences.

While the court performers sometimes struggled to make ends meet, relying on charity, they wowed everyone who saw them and, in the end, built international appreciation for what had nearly become a lost art. Even as the Khmer Rouge began to lose control in Cambodia, many of the dancers remained in the States.

“Now,” Wilson said, “their children are fine Americans.”

I HIT THE GRAVEL LOT at County Line Café with my wheels hot and shocks bouncing. After reading a half dozen articles on Wilson’s unusual life, I wasn’t about to be late.

Leaving my Jeep in a half-space at the lot’s far end—all that was available at dinnertime in Galax, Virginia—I hustled inside.

Some dozen heads turned, locals looking up from their green beans and country-fried steak to see who tore through the door.

Upon spotting me, a winded stranger in a blue blazer and loafers—looking more like the D.C. transplant I’d become than the Appalachian native I was—all eyes returned to their plates.

All except one.

By the cashier stand, a diminutive older gent smiled wide.

“Joe?” I asked, and he started my way with one arm extended.

I’d seen pictures of him online, but they didn’t do justice to his welcoming gait and the mischievous glint in his eyes.

“Mark Lynn, glad as hell you could make it,” he said, shaking my hand and then motioning me toward a good table.

Few things excite me more than home cooking, but Joe Wilson happened to be one of them. Before our menus were even cleared, I started shooting off questions.

He told me about the time he was in Kiev, Russia, with bluegrass-country star Alison Krauss. After the show, a woman approached the stage in tears, insisting they come to her home for dinner. It wasn’t until Wilson and Krauss arrived that they learned their hostess was, in fact, the first violinist in the Kiev Symphony.

He told me how Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall would stop by the New York office where Wilson once worked, the office of a civil rights fundraiser. The justice would show up later in the day, when he was tired of running around the city.

“Sometimes you’d go in,” Wilson recalled, “and receptionist would say, ‘Shhh, Thurgood’s asleep in there.’”

He told me how he worked for country star Marty Robbins, and how Marty’s bouncer Lee Emerson, “the best street fighter there ever was,” got involved with the wrong groupie, a girl with a jealous boyfriend who shot poor Emerson dead right between the eyes.

He told me about hugging Rosa Parks—“steel in a cotton print dress” he called her—and how his civil rights work parlayed into fundraising, which eventually merged with his love of music, building him a new career. He told me about literally writing the book on the Crooked Road, Virginia’s heritage music trail; about leading the Blue Ridge Music Center; and about his semi-retirement in 2003, which brought him back to the mountains to Fries, Virginia, just a few miles from where we sat.

He told me enough stories to fill four books, and that was before we even got to dessert. By the time we each dug into a heap of blackberry cobbler, I was chewing dumbstruck, watching the man across from me. He was no taller than a sprite, stooped from age, in plaid flannel and sensible shoes, looking like any other septuagenarian in Galax.

But God Almighty, what kind of crazy life had he led?

I marveled at this man who’s

been declared a Living Legend by the Smithsonian yet doesn’t hold a single degree. How does all that come together? What’s the common thread?

COVERING CAR SEATS wasn’t the work Wilson had in mind when he went to Nashville. Unable to finish college because his family didn’t have the $1,500 he needed for tuition, he packed up some books, his most prized possessions, and thumbed his way to Music City. “I’d always listened to the Grand Ole Opry and had always heard all this music from there,” he said. “Wanted to see some of it, see if there was anything I could do.”

The Opry didn’t fling its doors open for Wilson, but two other institutions did—Rayco Racing Division, where he landed a job, and the local Unitarian Church. At the latter, Wilson found himself surrounded by Southern progressives and their Northern counterparts—fired-up students such as Diane Nash, a former Chicago beauty queen who led the movement to integrate Nashville’s lunch counters and who would emerge as one of that era’s great community organizers.

“Beautiful and voluble” is how Wilson describes Nash, and when she invited him to attend a planning meeting, he couldn’t resist. He was quiet at first, saying that that he was “a mite shy

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Steve Lewis (right) and Scott Freeman play the Front Porch Gallery and Frame Shop in Woodlawn, Virginia.

then,” but by the end, Wilson was part of a gang, five or six white boys who would go to the lunch counter at Harvey’s, a downtown Nashville department store. This unassuming crew established themselves as regulars in advance of the city’s first sit-in.

“They had a contest for apple pie—million-dollar apple pie,” Wilson recalled, so that’s what he ordered. Day after day, for weeks on end, he saddled up to the long, chrome-lined counter and quietly ordered. Reminiscing, Wilson laughed, admitting that he still can’t eat apple pie.

When the day of the sit-in came, Wilson and the other whites took their places just before the African-American students showed up. Waiting on his meal, he watched Harvey’s refuse his new friends service, the police called simply because they tried to order sandwiches. Normally meek, Wilson’s voice rose up. As the manager shut the store down, he called out in an unmistakable Tennessee mountain drawl, “Hey, we want to eat!”

Though the police told him and the other protestors to leave, they had accomplished their goal. Harvey’s was a test-run, the precursor to weeks of civil disobedience. Within three months, blacks had the right to dine wherever they liked in Nashville, and soon after, Wilson headed to Birmingham, ready to make his voice heard in a new town. There, he used his good-old-boy charm to infiltrate Ku Klux Klan meetings, publishing articles in the national magazine The Progressive, naming names and bringing that group’s nefarious activities into the light.

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BY THE TIME Wilson and I finished our dinner and reached the Front Porch Gallery and Frame Shop, the place was hopping. It is the one spot in southwest Virginia—maybe the world—where you can buy local art, get it custom-framed, and listen to live mountain music under one roof. Twenty-plus locals had packed into the place, all on folding chairs softened by rough-cut foam wedges. The night’s headliner, local picker Steve Lewis, looked the part of a backwoods professor, complete with glasses that dangled from his neck and a camouflage cap. As he fiddled with his guitar, Lewis told corny jokes (“Why don’t you ever see hippopotamuses hiding in trees? Because they’re really good at it!”).

The crowd howled until the music started, and then everyone leaned in, bobbing their heads along to expertly wrought oldtime and bluegrass tunes. Over the next two hours, the musicians led the kind of give and take that only works in a small space, bantering with audience members and welcoming playful jabs from the crowd mid-show.

I scuttled around the room taking photos, while my companion for the night sat in his folding chair, smiling ear to ear and tapping his toes. Wilson was the one who suggested this place, a stop along the Crooked Road, the music trail he helped found 12 years ago—a fact that didn’t escape Steve Lewis.

After one rowdy tune, all the musicians paused, creating a hush, which Lewis filled by saying, “We have someone special

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with us tonight.” He then rattled off Wilson’s many contributions to local culture—how he put mountain music on the map with more than 70 music tours and festivals; how he brought the world to Galax’s doorstep, first with the Blue Ridge Music Center, a performance space and museum committed to the region’s signature style, and then by developing the Crooked Road, which weaves across 19 Virginia counties and generates around $13 million in annual economic impact.

As Lewis talked, heads nodded, and when he finished, the applause was more than polite. Enthusiastic and loud, it was interspersed with whistles and one shout of appreciation. “Thank you, Joe!” someone called behind me, and I realized that people in this room already knew my tour guide for the night. They knew he was instrumental in reviving bluegrass and old-time music, in giving our culture a new life.

They knew what I was just figuring out, that this old man whose eyes now faced the floor as he blushed is, in fact, Appalachian royalty.

1938, TRADE, TENNESSEE: Wilson was born in a two-room house, in the center of a county that some 60 years before had sided with the Union during the Civil War. I asked how racism struck him then, being raised in a place where there wasn’t much of it, how he came to know it existed. Wilson rested his spoon and told me about his good-hearted mother, a woman who married at 16 and made up for what she couldn’t provide in material wealth with a strong moral compass.

“We were building a barn,” Wilson explained, saying he couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old at the time. A white man from another town, Mountain City, Tennessee, had come to help lay the concrete foundation, bringing with him three black hired hands.

Partway through the morning, the white man asked Wilson ’s mother, “Well, when it comes to eating, what are we doing?”

She said, “Well, we’ll all eat together.”

“No. No,” the man told her, as if she’d suggested the impossible. “Can’t eat together!”

Without missing a beat, Wilson ’s

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mother motioned toward the black workers: “Well, that’s the hardest work there is to be done, so if they’re going to eat separate, I’ll feed them first.â€? “That struck me,â€? Wilson said, shaking his head at this early encounter with racism. His mother’s simple solution—to let the black workers eat ďŹ rst—showed him that mountain folks could teach the world a thing or two about fairness. “We ended up all eating together,â€? Wilson added, lifting his spoon and digging back into his cobbler. “And it was just ďŹ ne.â€?

By the time we each dug into a heap of blackberry cobbler, I was chewing dumbstruck, watching the man across from me.

DAYS AFTER MY NIGHT IN GALAX, I was still puzzling over Joe Wilson—civil rights activist, tour organizer, record producer, and folklorist who brought everything from mountain music to Cambodian dance to the forefront. I marveled at this man who’s been declared a Living Legend by the Smithsonian yet doesn’t hold a single degree.

How does all that come together? What’s the common thread?

I jotted off an email, peppering Wilson with follow-up questions, hoping one would

reveal some unifying theme. He replied the same day with answers both thorough and patient. I scanned them, but his reminiscences, long paragraphs full of beautiful memories, only deepened the enigma. Maybe some lives are just like that, I began to think: disjointed and wild.

Then, just about to shut my laptop, I spotted Wilson’s simple closing: “Life is short for all of us, Mark Lynn, but it should never be boring.�

That was it; this one sentence brought everything into focus. Wilson left his mountain home, looking for adventure, a way to break into country music. He ended up traveling the world, helping the oppressed and not just landing a job in the music industry but reshaping it. He sat at the juncture of two great movements—one for civil rights, the other for traditional arts—and he did it all without a college diploma, without anyone’s permission. His path has been unpredictable, inspired, and sometimes chaotic, but not once, not for a minute, has Joe Wilson’s life been boring.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mark Lynn Ferguson is proďŹ led on page 11.

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Von Plott hunting on the Carolina coast.

PHOTOS COURTESY PLOTT FAMILY COLLECTIONS

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Ain’t Nothing Like a Hound Dog Bob Plott tells how his family dog became a mountain man’s best friend

“They first developed the dogs in Germany. I don’t know what their name for the Plott dog was in German or exactly what they came from. I wasn’t there. But when the old man brought them here, they named them after him—they called them Plotts.”

— Henry “Von” Plott

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“Our dogs have it bred in them. It’s instinct. They pretty much train themselves. The first bear he smells, he’ll take after it!”

— Henry “Von” Plott

’ve always preferred the company of dogs—and the old timers they tend to hang around. As a child, I loved hearing my Uncle Cecil Plott recall his days bear hunting in the Great Smokies with the legendary Mark Cathey, and how Cathey’s loyal Plott hounds would not leave their master’s side, even after his death.

Hundred-year-old Granville Calhoun shared tales of his days fishing and hunting on Hazel Creek. His stories of the colorful bear-hunting moonshiner, Quill Rose, and his incredible Plott dogs—which were so well trained they did not require leashes—never ceased to amaze me.

The chance to go to Plott Creek and visit with family members Henry “Von” Plott and his renowned Plott dogs, or over to Maggie Valley to see Herbert “Hub” Plott and his legendary hounds, felt like a trip to Disneyland. Even today, more than 40 years later, their stories (and those dogs of theirs) remain vivid in my memory.

I still laugh at the folksy wisdom of Von

Plott in describing his dog-training techniques and the proper age to begin hunting a dog on big game: “Our dogs have it bred in them. It’s instinct.

They pretty much train themselves. The first bear he smells, he’ll take after it! He’ll know what to do when he is big enough. You just have to help them along, put them in the right place at the right time—but not too early. Let me ask you something, son. You wouldn’t send a boy your age out to fight a full grown man, would you? Hell, no. You ain’t a man yet, you ain’t ready. It’s the same with a dog—he needs to be at least a year old before I put him on a bear.”

I remember Hub Plott gently warning me to avoid petting one of his dogs, Leroy, who was bad to bite. Or as Hub put it: “Old Leroy is a one-man dog. No one can handle him but me, and he will not let anyone else touch me or anything I own. Leroy will take the fight to a bear or hog!”

Uncle Cecil Plott valued the breed’s intelligence, saying, “Plott hounds are just plain smart. These dogs have a head full of sense.”

What boy wouldn’t want one of these dogs? Even better than the stories was actually getting to lead my uncle’s own Plott dogs on childhood hunts, and later owning and breeding my own hunting dogs whose lineage can be traced back to the original family stock.

Von Plott (left) and Jake Nichols (right) with their Plott hounds on a 1940s mountain bear hunt.

Traits of a Leader The American Kennel Club describes the Plott hound as a “hunting hound of striking color that traditionally brings big game to bay or tree,” noting that “the powerful, well-muscled, streamlined Plott combines courage with athletic ability.”

Personality: Intelligent, alert, confident.

Noted for: Stamina, endurance, agility, determination, and aggressiveness when hunting.

Size: Males weigh about 55 to 65 pounds; females 55 pounds.

Looks like: Ears are rounder and set higher on the head than a traditional hound, with hazel or brown eyes. Athletic in build without the droopy ears or folds of loose skin often associated with bloodhounds, the Plott hound is renowned for its glossy, brindle-colored coat, which in some cases gives the dog an almost tiger-striped appearance.

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EVEN AS A CHILD, I understood that the Plott hound originated with our family. It was our dog from the start. The tale of the breed’s Germanic origins and 18th-century migration to the North Carolina frontier is a story like no other. Here in the Great Smoky Mountains, the Plott hound established its reputation as a multipurpose dog.

The Plott hound has been the official state dog of North Carolina since 1989, and for decades all the major kennel clubs have recognized the breed. Yet this unique canine remains somewhat of an obscurity even among avid dog lovers. Plott dog enthusiasts debate the exact origins of the animal and the correct breed standard.

The story I was raised on—the one that has been passed down in the Plott family for almost three centuries—is also the version most widely accepted by breed historians. My third-great grandfather, clan patriarch (Johannes) George Plott, arrived in North Carolina from Germany sometime around 1750 with five of his father’s prized hunting dogs. George’s son, Henry Plott, first brought the dogs to the Great Smoky Mountains region when he settled in Haywood County about 1800.

Subsequent generations of Plott family members, friends, and supporters have continually raised and hunted with the dogs in and beyond the Old North state ever since.

Breed icon and Plott family member Henry “Von” Plott (1896-1979) briefly explained the origins of the dog like this in 1976: “They (the Plott family) first developed the dogs in Germany. I don’t know what their name for the Plott dog was in German or exactly what they came from. I wasn’t there. But when the old man (Johannes George Plott) brought them here, they named them after him—they called them Plotts.

They used the dogs to hunt big game over there. So these dogs have been here more than 200 years. But the old man surely had some idea of what he had. He figured they’d be worth something to him—and they sure as hell have been worth something to him, and us too!”

Some historians, however, adamantly argue that the Plott family brought no dogs with them at all to America, and instead used their superb WWW.SMLIV.COM

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Dog’s Best Friend: An Oral History hunted often with Von Plott, Gola Ferguson, and Taylor Crockett. Lyon has raised and hunted Plott hounds for more than half a century. Fierce tenacity is what makes the dogs special, in his words: “One thing you could always count on with a Von Plott–bred Plott hound, was that it would strike a bear trail and stay on it. And stay and stay and stay. There was just no quit in his dogs.”

Taylor Crockett with his famous Plott , Grey Boy.

After returning home from World War II, Taylor Crockett (1908-1996) devoted his life to breeding Plott hounds and biggame hunting in Western North Carolina.

Crockett, also a respected breed historian, recalled that the early mountain settlers valued their dogs as herders, hunters, trackers, and ferocious family protectors.

Stories abound of these heroic hounds defending the lives of their frontier masters. Crockett shared a tale of his own: “When my brother was just a toddler I had an old Plott female that would take care of him. We lived on this farm and had big old turkey gobblers and geese and chickens running around, and big old sow or bull might get out too. You had to really watch kids, you know? My brother would get out of sight, but I didn’t have to worry, because that old Plott female would stay right with him. And if a chicken, bull, man, or anything else got near him, why, she’d put it in high gear!”

Graham County native Dewey Sharp (1909-2008) hunted bear with Plott hounds in Western North Carolina for 80 years. Here’s how he described his tenacious Plott dogs: “The Plotts were aggressive; there was no back-up in them. They were real bad to fight a bear to the death and they would not stop until either the dog or the bear was dead. Yet they were gentle with kids, protective of them, and as loyal as the day is long. Back then we had fences to keep livestock out of fields. You used dogs to herd animals back home from free-range grazing. They could do it all.”

John Jackson has raised and hunted

C.E. "Bud" Lyon with Plott pup.

It takes an equal amount of grit to hunt bear or big game of any kind, and according to “Big” George Plott, the Plott dog and their owners had no shortage of that: “Our dogs had to stay with the bear at the tree. This breed of dog won’t quit, he may get clawed and chewed but he will be back next week. It is one with plenty of guts. The man who isn’t game isn’t fit to have him.”

Modern-day hunter and dog breeder C.E “Bud” Lyon was close friends and

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Plotts originating from the Taylor Crockett kennels for over 25 years. Like many experts, Jackson believes that the dog’s keen intellect is their primary advantage: “The most impressive quality of these outstanding dogs however, was not their ability to readily and fiercely mix it up with large and dangerous animals, but rather their intelligence. The dogs seemed to have an innate ability to bond with their owners and seemed to possess the unusual capability of knowing what the hunter was thinking or needed. There was a unique bond between these dogs and their masters that few other breeds had.”

Jake Waldroop was another notable bear hunter and Plott dog man who lived in Nantahala, North Carolina. His family obtained their first Plott hounds in the late 1800s. He summarized the multifaceted talents of the old-time Plott dog: “They was good for hunting just about anything. If there wasn’t no bear for them to go after, why, they’d curl up a coon.

They’d run wildcats some and they could find right where a wolf was. Them Plott hounds was just jacks of all trades!”

more than two centuries later.

The next generation of mountaineer Plott enthusiasts seem equally committed to carrying on the breed’s heritage. In the words of Ira Jones of Whittier, North Carolina: “We inherited something very special. Something ASHLEY T. EVANS PHOTO

hunting and animal husbandry skills to originate and develop the breed entirely on the American frontier after their arrival.

But there is one thing on which all Plott enthusiasts can agree: The Plott bear hound was an integral part of survival on the early American frontier. These remarkably athletic, brindle-colored hounds quickly proved themselves invaluable to their owners.

Hunter, herder, protector and—the Plott hound did it all.

Led by contemporary breeders such as Ira Jones, Gerald Jones, Mike Mehaffey, Floyd West, Andy Blankenship, Doug West, Roy Clark, Spanky Holt, Clydeth Brown, Jerry Gosnell, and others, the Plott hound still reigns as the world’s premier big-game hunting dog.

Since 2007 at least five books have been published about, or related to, the Plott hound, and the story of the dog is now included as part of the fourth-grade curriculum in North Carolina’s public schools. In 2009 the Plott hound received a state historical marker in Haywood County— only the second marker devoted to an animal in the 75-year history of the monuments. That same year the History Channel featured the hound on a nationally televised show.

The breed also claims a nationally recognized festival, held each June at the festival grounds in Maggie Valley, North Carolina (see “Dog Days of Summer,” at right). PlottFest has grown leaps and bounds since its launch in 2012 and has raised nearly $50,000 for a local charity over the past two years alone. The Southeastern Tourism Association recognized the 2014 festival as one of the region’s top 20 events in June.

The 2015 Plott hound is a service dog, a trained police canine, a search-and-rescue animal, and an award-winning purebred that competes at the prestigious Westminster Dog Show. All the while the Plott hound perpetuates its global standing as a hunter, including at nationally sanctioned hunting competitions and bench shows held regularly across the country. Western North Carolina claims an AKC agility champion Plott hound, owned by Landen Gailey of Hendersonville. Plott dogs recently appeared in the movie The World Made Straight based on the novel by Ron Rash.

Never in their wildest dreams could my ancestors have imagined that their family dogs would achieve the worldwide fame that the Plott breed enjoys today. I think they would be proud of that acclaim—but prouder still that their dogs, and their family legacy, remain synonymous with these mountains

nearly perfect in every way. We don’t need to change it. Our responsibility is to carry it forward into the future and not mess it up. If it’s not broken, there is no need to fix it.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bob Plott is profiled on page 11.

Dog Days of Summer The voice of the Plott hound will ring in harmony with one the region’s most celebrated bluegrass bands, Balsam Range, at PlottFest in Western North Carolina. Held June 20-21 at the Maggie Valley festival grounds, the event promises juried crafts, trout fishing, fine food, great music, and even greater dogs. Festival goers can watch officially sanctioned dog shows and a hound agility demonstration, learn about the rescue organization Wayward Plotts, and meet this article’s author, Bob Plott, who will be on hand signing books and sharing Plott history.

Day passes available; $25 for both days. www.plottfest.org

Actor Noah Wylie and a Plott hound on the movie set of The World Made Straight.

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The Lodge at Buckberry Creek is a blend of stunning views with rustic elegance above Gatlinburg. Buckberry Lodge offers luxury suites with fireplaces, private decks, walk-in showers & soaking tubs; plus features stunning views of Mt. LeConte and the National Park, unique outdoor spaces, and a renowned restaurant. Not your ordinary venue, this AAA 4-Diamond hotel is akin to the Great Camps of the Adirondacks and National Park lodges of the west.

The Lodge at Buckberry Creek 961 Campbell Lead Rd, Gatlinburg, TN 37738 | (865) 430-8030 SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

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STORIES Community

Double Date, Double Trouble

BY LEWIS GARNETT

A

lovers’ moon hung low and stars shimmered between the Appalachian crests. But for us, the ambience was wasted.

MANDY NEWHAM-COBB ILLUSTRATION

Her father sat behind the wheel, with her 12-year-old sister on the passenger side. In the back seat she sat in the middle, with me on the left and her other boyfriend on the right.

We were at the Park Drive-in Theater in Marion, Virginia. This was my first car date and—as one might surmise from the guest list—not only was it a disaster, it was war.

I’d known Peggy all my life. We’d shared most of the same classrooms from first grade well into high school. We also lived in the same neighborhood, so I’d seen her knee-skinned and muddy and rained on and all the other ways kids grow up.

But lately I’d begun to see her differently. She was getting pretty and I was getting interested. We’d been out twice before, both times to the only walk-in movie in town. My father had driven us.

Enter Charles, who was a year older and already had his driver’s license. So when Peggy got her license a few months before me, I tried to counter his advantage and escape the parentmobile by suggesting that she and I go to a drive-in movie.

The next morning before school, she told me her father wasn’t ready to turn her loose with the car, but he would be glad to take us that Saturday night. Unsure quite what to say—at least my dad dropped us at the door—I stupidly put off giving her an answer.

Then a few minutes later I saw her talking to Charles. Not to be out-maneuvered, I puffed up my scrawny carcass as best I could, square-shouldered over to the two of them, and told her I’d be glad to go.

She said, “Great,” then invited him, too.

When they picked me up on Saturday, Peggy was driving and Charles was in the front seat. I climbed into the back with her dad and little sister. Advantage Charles.

At the drive-in we pulled up beside a speaker and everyone but me changed places, with Peggy coquettishly positioning herself to keep Charles and me equally close and distant. Advantage Peggy.

The movie was Father Goose, a wartime comedy about an

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unlikely romance. It was also our situation precisely because war was imminent, given the proximity of the combatants, and romance unlikely, given the presence of forward observers.

Nevertheless, Charles and I quickly began jousting for her affection. At first we each held a hand, unless she wanted a sip of her drink or some popcorn.

As we became more bold, one of us would put his arm around her on the back of the seat, which would last until numbness set in. Then it was the other’s turn.

I must confess that after one’s arm has turned into a dish rag, retrieving it does not demonstrate much manliness or stamina or whatever it is 15-year-old women are looking for. I was just glad her daddy could afford a car wide enough that I could lean to the side, slide my arm away, and catch it without slapping her in back of the head.

Of course, if either of us thought the other’s arm had overstayed its welcome, we would exchange glares over the package rack.

The movie was funny and we all laughed a lot. But as I sat there beside Peggy with Charles’ arm around her, I would have run screaming off into the night could I have done so without leaving her alone with him.

Her dad drove us home, me first. I issued a polite “Had a good time” and “See you Monday,” then beat a welcome retreat. She and Charles soon became an item and I practiced making a fool of myself with other girls.

A few years later, Charles and I found ourselves at the same college, where he majored in industrial arts and had access to the auto shop. So to keep our respective clunk-mobiles on the road, we became buddies and got greasy together a lot.

Peggy went to school somewhere else and became a lawyer. She and Charles got married and moved to Florida, where she set up a bankruptcy practice and he restored vintage automobiles.

Years passed. The Park Drive-in fell dark as the low-tech allure of automobile theaters slowly succumbed to cable TV and video games. For much too long, its monolithic wooden screen towered rather pathetically over the tents and tables of a weekend flea market.

But out goes the bad air.

In 2000, the renamed and rebuilt Park Place Drive-in recaptured its theater roots, incorporating an ice cream parlor and miniature golf.

Likewise, decades after our date, I reconnected with Charles and Peggy. No sooner had we said our hellos than—to the delight of their children—we began belly-laughing through the tale of our zany love triangle and the war we waged in a single foxhole dug into the upholstery of her daddy’s backseat.

Charles and I decided that ours was the only skirmish in history whose combatants suffered from dish-rag arm.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lewis Garnett was raised in the mountains of southwestern Virginia, where he was weaned on pinto beans, molasses, and a small town full of colorful personalities. Nowadays, when not driving charter buses, he writes and tells stories about these eclectic influences. Some of his stories have been featured on National Public Radio. Find him at www.storiesbylew.com.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 3

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