Western North Carolina

Front matter

WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA

Its Mountains and Its People to 1880

Ora Blackmun with a foreword by

Table Of Contents

Author’s Preface

Introduction by Cratis Williams Stagecoach Days at Sherrill’s Inn The Land of Mountains

Along the Trading Paths

Introduction

People, whether of a nation or a region, in order to understand their customs and institutions must know how the present forms came to be. One way to gain this knowledge is through the study of history. The history of a region, like its customs and institutions, is constantly being added to; sources of information not available to earlier writers come to light; understandings of past events are seen from new points of view; and the interpretation of the meanings of past events changes. Thus there is a continuing need for historians to study and evaluate and interpret the history of their nation or their region.

John Preston Arthur’s History of Western North Carolina ended with 1913. Dr. Foster Alexander Sondley’s Western North Carolina was published in 1930, but it treated mainly the early settlement of the French Broad River Valley. Thus the two most authoritative works dealing with the history of the mountain people of Western North Carolina were published well over a generation ago and one of them was somewhat narrow of scope. This Highland Region needed its history brought up to date. It needed treatment both broad and deep.

The companion volume to this work, Western North Carolina Since the Civil War by Dr. Ina Woestermeyer Van Noppen and her husband, the late Dr. John J. Van Noppen, came out in 1973. The Van Noppen book was the end result of twenty years of effort by the Western North Carolina Historical Association, an effort that involved the labor and planning of Dean W. E. Bird of Western Carolina University, Dean Daniel J. Whitener of Appalachian State University, and George Myers Stephens of Asheville. Dean Whitener had planned to write a history of Western North Carolina after his retirement, but, before his untimely death, he had interested the Van Noppens xiii in undertaking the task. President William H. Plemmons at Appalachian State University worked out released faculty time for them and Weldon Williamson of Asheville and Dean Bird were successful in obtaining substantial contributions to an author expense fund for research and travel. When the fund was exhausted, the Van Noppens continued at their own expense to complete the work they had begun nearly ten years prior to its publication.

While the Van Noppens were working on their book, Ora Blackmun arrived from Arkansas to make Asheville her home. Miss Blackmun had recently retired from the English faculty of the University of Central Arkansas. Sometime earlier she spent a year as a researcher for the State Historian of Minnesota, where her forebears had settled during Indian times. She grew up in the Ozark Mountains at Fayetteville, Arkansas, and she spent much time investigating the history of that region. Such a background led her naturally to explore the riches of the Sondley Reference Collection in the Pack Library. Her amazing energy and keen mind took her through much of this source material. She soon found herself writing a voluminous history of this mountain region from early geologic times “for my own satisfaction.”

By good fortune, George Myers Stephens, then chairman of the Western North Carolina Historical Association’s committee to obtain a new history of the region, learned of Miss Blackmun’s manuscript. The manuscript was brought to the attention of F. A. Ketterson, Jr., historian for the Blue Ridge Parkway and chairman of the Publications Committee of the Appalachian Consortium. The Board of Directors of the Consortium, after receiving reports of high praise for the authenticity and artistry of the work, quickly realized that Miss Blackmun’s book was the ideal companion to the Van Noppen volume.

Owners of both volumes will note a few years of overlap between the end of the Civil War and the coming of the railroad. Because the earlier and the later periods called for different treatments this overlap served history well. In the recent period life became so varied that such aspects as public education and folklore demanded that the history of several decades be treated in one chapter.

By contrast, the earlier history is clearer for treatments in periods of time. What it meant for the Cherokees to live in an

XIV unspoiled land, for pioneers to live in a land of do-without— these are parts of good history writing.

Above all was the meaning of a changed way of life after the railroads came to the mountains. With her gift for taking the long view of an era, Miss Blackmun’s final chapter looks forward to what the railroads would do to change. life in these landlocked valleys. Landmarks of history are best used as points for charting the future. Ora Blackmun writes with her mind on the future as she did in her history of Asheville’s First Presbyterian Church in A Spire in the Mountains: The Story of 176 Years of a Church and a Town Growing Together, 1794-1969, which was published in 1970. With the publication of Western North Carolina: Its Mountains and Its People to 1880, the people of the Carolina Highlands have a history that will serve the present generation well and will be a guidepost to future generations of historians.

Cratis Williams

Appalachian State University Boone, North Carolina

XV

Stagecoach Days at Sherrill’s Inn

The pictures in this set are from wall paintings in the old Sherrill Inn at Hickory Nut Gap. They are the work of Mrs. Elizabeth Cramer McClure, an accomplished artist. After she and her husband, James G. K. McClure, purchased and then restored the hostelry, she began an extensive research of its background and of the history of the region. She was thus able to depict life as it ebbed and flowed about the popular inn during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Mr. and Mrs. Janies McClure Clarke, present owners of the building and grounds, together with Dr. Reuben A. Holden, President of Warren Wilson College, and the French Broad River chapter of the Garden Club of America, made possible the color section reproducing these pictures for this volume. Mrs. Clarke is the daughter of Mrs. Elizabeth McClure.

This is the view of Sherrill’s Inn seen by travelers approaching it from Asheville. At the foot of the long hill the coachman blows his horn to indicate the number of guests so that the Sherrill family might prepare accordingly. Two elegant city guests attempt to kill a rattlesnake while their mountain guide stands ready with a stick in case the gun misses fire. The native wild flowers in the foreground appear in several of the panels.

Small bands of Cherokees sometimes hunted in the Fairview Valley, once a part of their far-flung domain. For protection, white settlers entering the region before 1800 built a small blockhouse, complete with gun ports. This log building still stands beside the Sherrill Inn.

The coach is stuck fast. The feeble attempts made by two young dandies to loosen the wheel are rendered futile by the determination to keep their white breeches unspotted. An elderly gentleman stands aloof to read his paper. A lady and her little girl stroll among the wild flowers. The coachman and his wife on the box await the outcome. This scene must often have been repeated in this red mud country.

Farmers drove their livestock many miles to eastern markets. The passing droves of hogs were offered a choice of chestnuts or acorns at Sherrill’s Inn. Applejack was standard for the men. Farmers bringing produce from Polk County to Asheville camped with their covered wagons along the highway just below the Inn.

These people with their scant belongings are moving to some hillside farm. The hardships of life in the mountains are reflected in the strong but pinched face of the mother and in the indomitable spirit of the grandparents trudging by the side of the wagon. The husband looks toward the future with the hope of a better life for his children.

At the arrival of the stagecoach, Mrs. Sherrill descends the steps to greet the travelers. Her husband, Bedford, offers the guests a tray of applejack. A young man at the Inn ignores the coach and its passengers as he introduces a friend to the belle of the hostelry, who is standing near the bee skepts. A neighbor youngster is momentarily absorbed in chasing a chicken. A recent wall crack shows in this picture.

In the stone-paved courtyard back of the Inn a coach could be kept over night. In this yard, too, was the spring house and nearby stood the old fort. In the Inn cooking was done for the guests and the family over an open fire. It was said that at times the ghost of a young lady with long curls and a “sweeptail” skirt could be seen melting into the fireplace chimney. Her face was always averted.

A detachment of soldiers from Stoneman’s forces, coming through Hickory Nut Gap, stopped at the Inn. Sherrill descendants tell of the captain riding his horse onto the porch, demanding a night’s lodging. The family had hidden the supply of hams behind the wall boards of the original log room at the end of the house. They had covered the signs of recent carpentry by hanging Mrs. Sherrill’s hoop skirts on the wall.

Chapter One

Western North Carolina is far more than the sum of the state’s most westerly counties that make up its area. The Southern Appalachian Mountains extend in lofty and rambling fashion throughout its north-south length and reaching their greatest height, spread themselves in range after range throughout its east-west width. They have set the pattern for all human activity taking place in North Carolina’s valleys and on its mountain slopes. Geographically, Western North Carolina differs sharply from the piedmont section of the state to the east and even more sharply from the sand hill and low coastal area that stretches to the Atlantic Ocean. Both geographically and culturally it has been indeed a region set apart, expressing itself in ways peculiarly its own.

From the time a band of wandering, primitive people reached its boundary to the present day, this land of mountains and valleys has been many things to many people. To these first inhabitants it was doubtless a land of refuge from their ever-pursuing enemies. To the Cherokees it has been for many centuries a beloved homeland, worth defending against other Indian invaders and against the constantly encroaching white man. To the adventurous Englishmen it was a challenge, a fair land to be won and occupied. To the botanist it has been a veritable Garden of Eden, offering a wealth of vegetation beyond his fondest dreams. The geologist has found it an open book from which to read the story

JUNE GLENN, JR. PHOTO, ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES COMPANY

This majestic view of Western North Carolina mountains can be seen from the tower on Mt. Mitchell.

CARL McINTOSH PHOTO

The exposed rocks of Grandfather Mountain in Avery County give evidence that this is undoubtedly the world’s oldest mountain.

of nature’s gargantuan upheavals since the world was young. To the historian it has been the tale of the struggle of men and mountains, the slow and costly experiment of building a way of life suited to the ruggedness that isolates one community from another. And to the engineer it has been the stimulus to prodigious efforts in transportation—the spanning of broad rivers and the tunneling through mountain barriers, the removal of hills and the filling of gorges.

To the industrialist it has been a region of forests and raw material, a land of pure water and abundant man power; and for the mineralogist it has been an area of delight, rich in treasures of mica and feldspar, of pliable clays, of copper and talc, of precious and semi-precious stones. To the hunter and angler it has been a paradise of undergrowth and streams, where deer and bear still follow the ancient water trails and where the clear, cold water, foaming over rocky beds, still yields the finest of nature’s game fish.

To the vacationist it has meant relaxation in invigorating air and sunshine, often restored health and vitality, and always the beauty and inspiration of cloud-tipped mountains against a blue sky and of broad, green-clad valleys rimmed in by the hills. To the

APPLACHIAN NATIONAL PARKS ASSOCIATION COLLECTION, N. C. DEPARTMENT

OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY Rivers, some older than the mountains themselves, have played a role in determining the contour of this land of mountains. Cutting ravines and deepening them into gorges and chasms, the busy rivers have worn down boulders and continue to nibble at the rocks in their beds.

artist it has been a land of cascading waterfalls, of ‘‘balds”’ crowned with the exotic blooms of rhododendron, of range after range fading into a distant blue that defies any brush to capture. And to those who live here by right of pioneer ancestry and to those who have chosen it for their abiding place it is Home, with all of the sacredness that the word implies.

The mountains that dominate Western North Carolina are a part of the great Alleghany chain that stretches from Georgia northeastward through Maine and into eastern Canada, finally hurling themselves into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the Gaspe Peninsula. In this great chain the ranges from Virginia to Georgia are known as the Appalachians or Southern Highlands. In Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee these massive Highlands achieve their greatest width, varying from about a hundred miles to a hundred and twenty-five, and here they rear their loftiest peaks. Mt. Mitchell, at 6,684 feet, lifts its head above them all, but within the boundaries of North Carolina forty-three

E. DOUGLAS DE PEW PHOTO

The land of mountains is also the land of waterfalls. Whitewater Falls send their spray down the steep mountainside near Sapphire.

mountains have an altitude of more than 6,000 feet and eighty-two others surpass 5,000 feet.! Hundreds of lesser peaks rise more than 4,000 feet above sea level. In the Tennessee section of the Great Smokies many additional mountains belong in one of these altitude ranges.

The Blue Ridge Mountain range, a long granite formation which rises abruptly from the Piedmont Plateau in Virginia and terminates in Georgia, marks the eastern boundary of the entire Southern Highlands area. Early unknown English explorers gave these mountains their appropriate name, for a nebulous blue haze surrounds them, deepening late in the day to the soft, dark blue of the night. In addition to their castle-like contours, their everchanging blue overtones have made them justly extolled in story and song. The western rim of the Southern Highlands is more broken and is formed by the Unaka, the Stone, and the Unicoi ranges. These also form the boundary between Tennessee and North Carolina. It is the Unaka range that rises in the majesty of the Great Smoky Mountains, so named from the grey-blue haze that often surrounds their summits.

In order for readers to visualize this lofty section, writers have repeatedly likened the ranges to a gigantic ladder, with the Blue Ridge as its eastern support and the roughly paralleling Unaka, Stone, and Unicoi ranges as its western support. In the intervening plateau, cross ranges serve as rungs of the ladder. The Balsams, the Snowbird Mountains, the Nantahala Range, the Cowee—all lofty in their own right—are some of these cross bars. Out from both the supports and the rungs shorter mountain spurs extend. The most famous of these is the Black Mountain range in which Mt. Mitchell is the highest of twelve peaks above 6,000 feet above sea level.?2 Between the cross ranges are valleys of varying length and width, each with its own river system.

Man, with his less than pin-point of time, writes and speaks of the “eternal hills.” But the expression is, in truth, merely poetic license, for restless nature is unceasingly making and wearing away, remaking and again effacing the contours of this planet man calls the earth. Sometimes the method is one of slow, bit by bit erosion, quietly carried on through eons of time. Again it is one of violence in which cataclysmic forces pummel earth’s elements, spew them in liquid form from white-hot craters, or compress and fold and crack them into towering, jagged heights. Western North Carolina over the span of millions upon millions of man-

CARL McINTOSH PHOTO

For untold centuries Table Rock, shown here, has been exposed to the snows of winter and the pelting rains of summer. Yet its granite strength has continued to defy them all.

years has witnessed all of nature’s moods and has undergone all of the methods used to alter the earth’s surface.

In the cliffs and crags the story of the constant changes that have taken place in the region has been left to be interpreted by those who have the eyes to see. The record, unfolded, explains many mysteries of the present form of the land and the action of its . rivers. It makes clear why the Blue Ridge rather than the generally higher Smokies constitutes the divide or watershed between rivers flowing into the Atlantic Ocean and those flowing into the great Mississippi system and through it into the Gulf of Mexico. It explains, too, the wealth of minerals and clays and stones and gems found in the area, and it throws light on the unsurpassed richness of its vegetation.

The underlying rock formations throughout most of the mountain area indicate an antiquity that baffles the imagination of man. More than five hundred million years ago some of the base rocks now visible on mountain sides were originally beds of sand, some in shallow water, some in deep water, but all laid down by long vanished rivers. Some of the base rocks were once flows of steaming lava shot into the air by the force of raging volcanoes. Others were layers of volcanic rock debris carried by the busy streams into the sea.

The sedimentary rocks and the volcanic formations made

CARL McINTOSH PHOTO

The winter storms and the summer rains, aided by the winds that swirl around mountain heights, have battered and split this granite rock on Grandfather Mountain.

from these deposits were later subjected to such tremendous pressure and to such extreme heat during the violent activities of the young world that their very characters were changed or metamorphosed. In their outcroppings today it is not always possible to determine their original natures. Where the distinction between the types is clear cut, the metamorphosed soil sediments of the long ago have given the present mountains their gneisses, schists, and slates, ranging in color from light through dark grey and from greenish grey to black, depending upon other elements embedded in their depths.4 The volcanic deposits of that ancient geological age, compressed and changed, have produced the granites of the region, predominating in the Blue Ridge range and in the northern half of the plateau stretching from these mountains to the Smokies. They also furnish the family of peridotites that lie in a narrow belt from Clay and Macon to Ashe and Alleghany Counties. This group of igneous formation gives the region its vermiculite, soapstone, olivine, and asbestos.5 The rock formations of this most ancient of geological times, changed as they were in character, do not appear in today’s outcroppings in either original horizontal strata or solidly in their metamorphosed structures, for the Appalachian region is one of nature’s oldest and most complex geological creations. Writhing in the throes of gigantic disturbances, these rocks were upheaved and in the process were bent and twisted and tilted. Into the crevices and fissures thus formed newer deposits were lodged, brought from the soil of distant uplands by the gnawing rivers.

APPLACHIAN NATIONAL PARKS ASSOCIATION COLLECTION, N. C. DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY

Where the gnawing rivers have been powerless to wear down resisting granite walls, mighty

cliffs like this one in Hickory Nut Gorge stand as sentinels over the valleys below.

New deposits of lava from spewing volcanoes crept into depressions and cracks, while fragments and powder of igneous rocks were transported by the untiring streams to find resting places in the niches and cuts of the older formations.

This part of the process of enriching the mineral resources of the region nature carried on in what scientists have named the pre-Cambrian period of earth’s history. It was a period before living creatures appeared upon the planet or when life forms were too soft in structure to withstand the fierce forces at work in the area. Since these ancient rocks form so large a part of the present Appalachian Mountains, Western North Carolina is noticeably lacking in fossils. Later formations, made during the early

Cambrian period, are found in the Smoky Mountain area and around Grandfather Mountain. They, too, have been metamorphosed, but by a less violent process than was the case with the older rocks. These Cambrian deposits, sedimentary in their original character, furnish shale, sandstone and limestone, together with slate, schist, marble, and quartzite.®

Then over the very ancient rocks of the present Western North Carolina crept the waters of a long, narrow sea. Into it flowed the rivers from the east, for a great folding and uplifting of the earth’s surface had formed a towering mountain region over the present Piedmont area, a high region that extended beyond the present shore line of the Atlantic Ocean. The busy, tumbling streams of that area nibbled and chiseled the lofty mountains and plateaus in their efforts to wear them down. They deposited their loads of sediment from mountain sides and their fragments of rock and lava from the active volcanoes into the narrow sea. In time that sea was partly or wholly filled with these layers of deposits, and the waters began receding.

Then in the section today called Western North Carolina extreme activity gripped the earth’s surface in a terrific shrinking movement. With power beyond human thought, this movement pulled the base rocks of the mountains and land in the southeast, the present Piedmont, forcing them, through a long series of rumbling earthquakes, to push and crowd and slide northwestward.’ At the same time, land to the northwest was stable or was more gently pulled toward the oncoming mass from the east. The narrow, filled sea was thus squeezed between wedging forces. It became the scene of cataclysmic events. With a force and power in comparison with which man made explosions are mere pop-gun efforts, the pre-Cambrian rock bed of the sea, overlaid with newer deposits, was thrust upward and pushed from both sides. It was crumbled and folded like paper, the ridge at the top creaking and cracking and breaking into countless weird, sharp shapes.

At last the earth attained ease from its internal turmoil and nature lessened its strenuous activities, for jagged and towering, the first Appalachian Mountains had been born. Life had definitely come upon the earth by this time, and the lowly crablike creatures and snails were leaving their shells in the mud that, becoming rock, would entomb these frail houses of earth’s early inhabitants. But in the Appalachian region they are rarely found in the rocks of this period, for the violence of folding and tilting and the sliding of the mountain masses ground the tiny shells to powder.®

In these new Appalachian Mountains that reared their massive heads to Alpine heights, rivers began cutting ravines and deepening them into gorges and chasms. The sun and the wind and the rain combined their efforts in eroding the lofty peaks, and the intense cold surrounding their summits aided with its ice and snow. As eon after eon slipped into the past, the slow work of erosion went on until the once noble Appalachians were no more. The land where they had stood was a plain, broken only by low hills where now stand the Unaka and Great Smokies.’ So level did the floor of the plain become that the once swift rivers grew lazy and meandering, wandering in leisurely fashion through their shallow valleys. During the long geological age, there were several periods of more or less gradual uplift, followed by periods of erosion before the region achieved the monotonous level of a plain.

But nature had not yet completed the task of creation in this area, and again the region was greatly uplifted, but this time without folding or twisting or tilting. The result would have been a high plateau except for the work of the rivers. The sluggish streams took on new life and vigor as their decline to sea level increased. So, as the area was elevated, the rivers kept pace with the process, eroding the land at about the same rate as the uplift took place. The river beds straightened and a few rivers, because of new sloping directions, reversed their water flow. Instead of traveling south or east to the sea, they came to follow their old beds north to join rivers that flowed west and, in turn, joined still other streams flowing south and thus into the Gulf of Mexico. Some, joining stronger streams, gave up their waters once and for all, leaving their unused beds to dry and sear in the sun.” Still others that were mere rivulets or brooks at the beginning of the uplift grew in length and size as they strenuously worked to cut gorges through the rising mountains to reach lower levels on their way to the sea. The region, then, during the chiseling of the present Appalachian Mountains, saw a general rearrangement of the existing river systems.

Because these streams are older than the present mountain ranges at the western border of North Carolina, those ranges are not a divide, although their general altitude exceeds that of the Blue Ridge. With its hard, granite walls, the Blue Ridge was more impenetrable than the western ranges, and prevented the rivers that developed from cutting passages southeastward through it. The Blue Ridge is, therefore, a true divide, the streams rising to the west of it flowing into the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the streams rising to the east of it flowing into the Atlantic. In Watauga County, near Grandfather Mountain, four rivers have their source, two of which finally empty their waters into the Gulf and two of which empty their waters into the Atlantic. Thus the mountains as they are today in Western North Carolina are largely the result of the neverresting streams gashing through the uplifted plains and forming gorges, wearing down the softer of the formations and leaving the harder rocks to rear their heads in majestic mountains and peaks."

Much erosion has taken place since those long ago days of uplift, for the Appalachians are old mountains, some scholars think they are the world’s oldest mountains. In comparison with them, the Rockies are still in an adolescent age. The peaks that once rivaled or possibly surpassed any in the present Rockies have been nibbled away through the thousands of centuries until not a one of them today is above timberline. Many have acquired a rounded, softened appearance, and all have been overlaid with a generous blanket of soil which has become the home of a rich and varied vegetation.

Asa result of the many phases of creation employed by nature in these mountains, the Appalachians abound in minerals and rocks, both metallic and non-metallic. Some three hundred kinds of minerals and rocks are accredited to North Carolina,!2 and most of them are to be found in its western counties. Of the non-metallic group, the mountains for untold eons have held their precious loads of mica and feldspar, of clays and sand and gravel, of granite and slate and limestone and marble, of precious and semi-precious stones. These stones are surprisingly diverse and include rubies, sapphires, amethysts, garnets, quartz, emeralds, zircons, even diamonds—all the products of the pressure and heat, the filling in of crevices and fissures in older rocks. In short, they testify to the tremendous processes of nature in its violent activities in Western North Carolina. In 1756, a German engineer by the name of John William Gerard de Brahm, coming into the region to build a fort, wrote more truly than he could know when he recorded in his Journal: “This country seems longing for the hand of industry to receive its hidden treasures, which nature has been collecting and toiling since the beginning ready to deliver them up.’

Metals in varying amounts have also been among the hidden treasures of the mountains. Gold, silver, and copper the Indians mined and used as ornaments. The gold-greedy soldiers of De Soto

CARL McINTOSH PHOTO

Hoot Owl, an underground mine, yields its treasure of feldspar, one of nature’s most useful minerals.

CARL McINTOSH PHOTO Chalk Mountain mine is one of several open feldspar mines.

prospected for the same metals. For more than a century their sporadic mining attempts probably returned small amounts of gold and silver, for both appear in many places, although for modern purposes, in commercially unprofitable quantities. The gold deposits that gave the state its early title of the “Golden State” and that produced many millions worth of bullion are on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge. Copper, however, is in greater amounts in the mountains, principally in Ashe, Jackson, Haywood, and Swain Counties. Also locked in the hidden recesses of the hills is iron, of all minerals the most useful to man, along with lead, zinc, manganese, nickel, titanium (rich in its promise of future uses), and tungsten.

As plant life developed upon the face of the earth, Western North Carolina became the home of those forms adapted to its climate and altitude. In periods of uplift, plant forms requiring warm, humid climates died or gradually moved out of the region to homes more to their liking. Others, thriving in cool, dry climates, moved in. Many such changes and reversals took place over the ageless lapses of time that elevated and wore down and elevated again this little section of the globe. In these changes a few plants were able to adapt themselves to the gradually shifting conditions of altitude and moisture and, in slightly modified forms, stayed in the region.