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Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains An
Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern
America 1st Edition Timothy Silver Digital Instant
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Author(s): Timothy Silver
ISBN(s): 9780807863145, 0807863149
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 7.78 MB
Year: 2003
Language: english
Mount Mitchell and
the Black Mountains
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
An Environmental History of the
Highest Peaks in Eastern America
The University of
North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill and London
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
© 2003 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
cloth 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1
paper 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
For those who matter most:
Cathia, Julianna, Mom, and Dad
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
contents
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xix
Notes 271
Index 309
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
illustrations and maps
illustrations
View of the eastern flank of the Black Mountains 5
Hernando de Soto 50
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Elisha Mitchell 81
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
Hikers near the summit of Mount Mitchell, ca. 1916 129
x i llustrations an d maps
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
Modern entrance to Mount Mitchell State Park from
the Blue Ridge Parkway 213
maps
Black Mountains of Western North Carolina 4
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
i llustrations an d maps xi
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
preface
‘‘Write what you know.’’ It is an author’s truism and one that I took to
heart in writing this book. I cannot remember a time when I did not
know something about North Carolina’s Black Mountains. As a toddler I
spent a restless night bundled in blankets on the backseat of a 1953 Ford
sedan, camping (as we called it then) with my family at Carolina Hem-
locks, a U.S. Forest Service campground along the eastern flank of the
range. Family lore has it that I awoke before daylight and demanded that
my sleepy parents take me to see the South Toe River that flowed nearby.
On that or some other such outing, my parents probably told me that
Mount Mitchell, one of the peaks looming over the campground, was the
highest mountain east of the Mississippi River. If they said that, I have no
recollection of it. My earliest Black Mountain memories are of summer
afternoons spent wading in the South Toe, the distinctive crackle of camp-
fires at twilight, and the not-quite-musty smell of our gray-green canvas
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
tent.
For my family a summer trip to Carolina Hemlocks also constituted
a homecoming of sorts. Our German ancestors (who first went by the
name Silber) migrated into western North Carolina from Pennsylvania
and settled near Kona, a tiny community ten miles or so downriver from
the campground. The clan gained statewide notoriety—some might say
infamy—in the early 1830s when one of the in-laws, Frankie Stewart Sil-
ver, brutally murdered her drunken, philandering husband, Charlie. After
splitting his skull with an axe, she dismembered his body, burned the re-
mains in a fireplace, and hid the ashes beneath the floor of their Toe River
cabin. Convicted of the crime in 1832, she was executed a year later, one
of the first white women hanged in North Carolina.
Although I grew up hearing my grandparents tell that story and visited
the Black Mountains often as a child, it was as a college student in my
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
twenties that I really began to explore the region. By then I had given up
car camping and river watching in favor of backpacking and trout fish-
ing, two activities well suited to the area’s steep trails and swift-flowing
waters. In later years, when I ventured off to graduate school to study en-
vironmental history, my visits to the mountains became more sporadic,
but I still returned at every opportunity, lured back again and again by
the prospect of watching a sunrise from a secluded campsite or taking an
eastern brook trout from a high mountain stream.
Considering my family background and abiding interest in the out-
doors, one might conclude that a book like this was inevitable. Perhaps
so. For a long time, however, I hesitated to take on what now seems an
almost made-to-order topic. As a professor at a university where Appa-
lachian studies is among the most visible graduate programs, I was well
aware of the impressive body of work produced by Appalachian histori-
ans. I also knew that the Black Mountains had attracted attention from
several writers, some of whom had already investigated the region’s past.1
Could a new book add anything significant to our understanding of the
region? More to the point, would anyone not familiar with this particular
landscape care about what another regional history might reveal?
After nosing around in the sources (at the time as much from personal
as professional interest) I answered ‘‘yes’’ to both questions, not because
what I discovered was completely new, but because my initial research
suggested that as an environmental historian I might use the Black Moun-
tains to offer a fresh perspective on the Appalachian past. Environmental
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
xiv prefac e
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
of the attention. When it comes to writing the history of North America’s
oldest mountains, nature has been little more than a supporting actor in a
distinctly human drama. The more I learned about the Black Mountains,
the more I became convinced that we need a different and, I think, more
true-to-life chronicle of the southern Appalachians, one in which nature
gets equal time with people.
This book is an attempt to write such a history of a single Appalachian
range. Technically the story begins nearly a billion years ago, with the for-
mation of rocks that now lie buried deep beneath the Black Mountains.
But my primary focus is the relatively short period during which people
have lived on the land, starting some 10,000 years ago and concluding
in the present. I devote much of my attention to the last 100 years, dur-
ing which these peaks, like the Appalachians in general, underwent rapid
development and change.
My thesis is simple. I argue that human perceptions of nature—how
people thought about the natural world and envisioned themselves in it—
dictated most of their activities in the region. However, even as humans
confidently went about their business, nature moved to its own peculiar
rhythms, sometimes changing the land in ways that people never imag-
ined and often could not fathom, thereby helping to create the Black
Mountains that we know today. Because neither people nor mountain
ranges exist in isolation, I have tried throughout to show how events on
this single landscape also reflected broader trends in North Carolina, Ap-
palachia, the South, and the nation as a whole.
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
For me, though, this was always more than a scholarly work, not only
because of my genealogy, but also because I, like many people in North
Carolina, find the Black Mountains interesting enough in their own right.
Their summits, including the preeminent Mount Mitchell, comprise some
of the most unusual natural environments in the American South, habitats
that at first glance seem more like those of southern Canada and northern
New England. Like most North Carolinians I take unabashed pride in that
particularity. On more than one occasion I have explained to misguided
visitors that we—not our parvenu neighbors in Tennessee or Virginia and
not the genteel citizens of New Hampshire, Vermont, or Maine—hold
clear title to the highest ground in the East.
But that is not the only thing about this landscape that piques our curi-
osity. In 1857 Elisha Mitchell, the University of North Carolina professor
for whom the tallest mountain is named, fell to his death while attempt-
ing to measure the summit. That tragedy, which claimed the life of one
prefac e xv
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
of the state’s eminent men, imbues the land with mystery, danger, and a
sense of intrigue that only heightens its distinctiveness. North Carolina
acknowledged as much in 1915 when it chose Mount Mitchell as the site
for its first state park. In recent years the Black Mountains have become
famous for another reason. Over the last two decades the region’s dying
spruce-fir forests have spawned an intense debate about the effects of air
pollution in the southern Appalachians. Indeed, some environmentalists
believe that these mountains have been the victim of another, far more
serious tragedy: our complacency about the toxins that spew from our
power plants and automobiles. According to some clean-air advocates, we
are now destroying one of the natural and cultural landmarks we hold
most dear.
Though I, perhaps as much as any North Carolinian, think of the Black
Mountains as a special place and worry about their future, I initially tried
to write about them as if I were a stranger to the region. When I first
put my fingers to the keyboard, I adopted the voice of an unobtrusive
expert, a scholarly narrator carefully laying out my research without re-
vealing much of myself in the process. But after several ponderous drafts
of an early chapter ended up in the recycling bin, I determined that to
continue in that vein would be not only counterproductive but also dis-
honest. Whether I said so openly or not, my affinity for the region and my
experiences there would inevitably influence my research and writing. It
would be better, I decided, to let those connections show, to draw on them
openly, and in essence, make my experiences part of the region’s history.
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Having come of age intellectually in the 1980s, I knew that such notions
had sparked endless debate among historians and their postmodern crit-
ics over the proper relationship between writers and their subjects. But
truth be told, I did not delve deeply into the abstract world of literary
theory. I was simply looking for a way to breathe life into the story that I
was trying to tell.
Taking a cue from environmental historian Donald Worster, who once
urged his colleagues to buy ‘‘a good set of walking shoes’’ and get ‘‘some
mud on them,’’ I put aside my note cards and half-finished outlines, got
up from the computer, and went back to the Black Mountains.4 I visited
often and at all seasons, hiking, camping, fishing, and rambling through
the state park and Forest Service lands—in short, doing all the things that
attracted me to the area in the first place—and recorded my observations
in a loosely organized journal. I kept similar notes when research took me
to Asheville, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and other pertinent sites.
xvi prefac e
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
In time what began as a rather haphazard travelogue became an in-
tegral part of the finished book, a book that is—at least for a profes-
sional historian—somewhat unconventional in its organization and nar-
rative style. Every major chapter revolves around four expanded entries
from that original journal. I have arranged the entries according to the
seasons so that each chapter takes readers through a calendar year in the
Black Mountains, allowing them to experience the natural world as I saw
it and to understand that now, as in times past, nature remains an active,
turbulent, and occasionally violent agent of change. As I traveled in the
region, I also tried to sense what earlier visitors might have experienced.
More important, I sought to use the modern landscape as a text, to read
it in much the same way as my printed sources, constantly searching for
patterns, distinguishing features, or anything else that offered clues about
the past. I now regard those observations as crucial empirical evidence,
as vital to this history as any document uncovered in a state archive or
university library.
The narrative that follows, then, can be read in two ways. Scholars may
wish to think of it as local environmental history, a case study of people
and nature in the southern Appalachians. As such, it adheres closely to
one of the guiding principles of regional and local studies, namely, that
the story of one small place can contribute to our understanding of the
wider world. More general readers interested in the Black Mountains for
their own sake—including those who have hiked the same trails, slept in
the same woods, and fished the same streams as I—may wish to think of
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
the book simply as the story of a unique and wonderful place, one that is,
regrettably, very much at risk. As a writer with one foot planted firmly in
both camps, I ask each for a measure of forbearance. Academic experts,
accustomed to more orthodox histories, will need to accept (or at least tol-
erate) my presence in the narrative. Likewise, nonprofessionals will have
to live with a scholar’s idiosyncrasies, including my conventional com-
mitment to documentation and lengthy endnotes. With those and other
minor indulgences, I trust, all readers will join me in recognizing that the
Black Mountains have much to teach us, not only about nature and his-
tory, but also about ourselves.
prefac e xvii
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
Copyright © 2003. The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains : An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America, The
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