University of North Carolina at Asheville
D. Hiden Ramsey Library
Special Collections/University Archives

Oral History Register
for

George Myers Stephens, 1904-1978

Southern Highlands Research Center  Oral History Collection
D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville, 28804

Title

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Subject

Subject

Keyword:
Asheville Citizen|
Depression
Cordelia Camp
Flat Rock, NC
Southern Packet
Leaves from the Sondley
Bascom Lamar Lunsford
John Christoph Blucher Ehringhaus
Terry Sanford
New Garden Meeting
Levi Stephens
Addison Stephens
James Gore King McClure, Jr.
Elizabeth Skinner Cramer McClure
Weeks Act of 1911
Reuben B. Robertson
Champion Paper
Frank Porter Graham
Willis D. Weatherford
Horace Kephart
Vernon Rhoades
Thomas Wolfe
Howard Washington Odum
Zebulon Baird Vance
Robert E. Bunnelle
Richard B. Wynne
Donald  Elias
Albert S. McLean
Mary Ulmer Chiltosky
Fred Seely
Dr. Edwin Wiley Grove
Weldon Weir
Jesse James Bailey

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D. H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville, NC, 28804

Contributor

Date

Electronic Record Issued: 2001-07-25

Type

Text ; Sound

Format

Identifier

Source

Louis D. Silveri Oral History Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville 28804

Language

English

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Donor number: 23 ;  Date of acquisition: August, 1977

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Biography

Tape I, Side 1

Silveri: I'd like to start with the date and the place of your birth.

Stephens: I was born July 19, 1904, which is therefore 72 years, lacking one week.

Silveri: And where?

Stephens: On the south edge of Charlotte, North Carolina. It might be interesting just to have a little of my immediate background. I had a charming Chapel Hill professor who got up to open a course called... he called it Human Geography. He grasped the rostrum as though it were a pulpit and said, "I'll speak from a text, gentlemen. We're all what we are largely because we're where we are. On the other hand, each of us is an omnibus on which all of our ancestors ride." I have believed in the merging of both of those ideas, and for that reason, if you'd like, I'll can give you a little of the immediate ancestor framework, which might give you a little on a key of things.

The father came from a rural Quaker community, largely Quaker, where present-day Guilford College is. The Quakers had moved out of the Philadelphia area during the fighting in the American Revolutionary War. They wanted no part of the fighting. I suspect the British were raiding their barns and granaries, so they moved during the Revolutionary War to [New Garden Meeting], a community we know now as Guilford College or Summerfield, a few miles northwest of Greensboro, North Carolina.

There they lived for several generations. Parts of the record there are clear and part not, but at least this is clear: my grandfather Stephens was what might be known as a country businessman. He ran a tanyard, as they called it, which is a tannery. I've been back and looked at the pits in the old Stephens homestead. If you'll look right over there to the window, you'll see the front door lock to his house, which I was lucky enough to get.

Anyway, Levi Stephens, and many of the names, came directly out of the Bible. Levi was what, the high priest, Levi?  Levi was a highly regarded man in the community and often served as guardian or trustee. He was completely wiped out by the holocaust of the Civil War.  His son was named Addison. I believe that there was admiration for some of the early writers, like Joseph Addison, and that he was named for the essayist.

My father [later corrected to be grandfather] was a teenager when the Civil War broke out, and he enlisted, I have heard, at 16.  He was a splendid horseman, and I think perhaps he was a courier attached to a headquarters brigade or something like that. But, the hardships of the Army life resulted in very poor health and his death as a young man. So, my father was probably reared only by his mother in this substantial rural community, with good family secure family background, out in the country there.

The other side of the family has an English name, Lambeth, which, as you may know, is still prominent in the London area. I can show you, perhaps before you go, a book which is an account of the Lambeth family part which settled in the coastal North Carolina area, and then moved up into the Piedmont where the health made perhaps more vigorous careers for people. That book, which was edited by my sister and in which I did have a humble part -- the design of it -- has over 12,000 entries in the index which shows how those families multiplied by a geometrical factor.

Silveri: About what date did the original Lambeths come to this country?

Stephens: They probably settled like most of the early settlers in the late 1700's in the New Jersey area, I believe it was, and then moved to what we know as Coastal Plains, North Carolina, and much of it swampy. They got there rather late and got into an area where it was difficult to make a living. I believe it was called Flat Swamp. There were two Lambeth brothers, both of whom married sisters named Loftin, which is an old English name too. These families migrated to the almost exact middle of North Carolina, near the present day town of Salisbury, which is about the geographical and population center of the state. Evidently, they were reasonably energetic because there are furniture factories in that area with the Lambeth name attached to them.  By and large, of those 12, 000 entries in the index, my sister says very few of them are really distinguished. Perhaps a scientist or two, and a professor or two. They've just gone along and have been good average people.

Silveri: Was the name Stephens always spelled S-t-e-p-h-e-n-s ?

Stephens: My information, and we don't have complete unbroken records, is that the name brought over was Apstephen from Wales, and that Ap meaning, of course, "the son of, out of," and Stephen simply the first name as they used it in the Middle Ages in most places. In a small community, they didn't need a surname, but then the Apstephen came over and then became "Stephens."  I believe that was the origin of that part.

The Quaker records show at the New Garden Meeting which is the community where my family grew up, that George Stephens, about 1840, was waited on by a committee to ask him if he did not regret his thoughtless action by marrying out of unity. Now I'm not sure that this is an ancestor, but it could have been. This George Stephens replied that he was already married to one he considered a quite worthwhile young woman. He replied that he thought it was not a cause for regret at all, where upon the Meeting dismissed him. I believe, like many people in that area dismissed from Meeting for marrying out of unity, they joined the Methodist Church, and this Lambeth connection has even Bishops in it, I believe, which was their main following thereafter.

Silveri:  When you say "married out of unity, " you mean married someone of another faith?

Stephens:  Right. That was the Quaker term, as you probably know. We have highly respected the Quakers, however, to the extent of sending our children to a Quaker school in the Pennsylvania area which did them a great deal of good, and made them work hard the way the Yankees work. (Chuckle.) So, all in all, that was a happy connection.

The mother's family in my case has a fairly typical background.  They were part of the tide of migration southward which came in through the port of Philadelphia, down the great back valley of Virginia because the threat of the Indian massacre after the defeat of General Braddock on the Pennsylvania frontier kept them from going on to Pittsburgh where they were headed. So, they turned south and finally ended up in the upcountry on the border of North and South Carolina, possibly just south of Charlotte near Lancaster. Along with the Scotch-Irish part... as you know, they are northern transplanted Scots who lived in Ireland, in Ulster, and they were called the Ulster Scots. Apparently they were of such troublesome nature that the King moved them over there out of the south of Scotland.  They were probably the sheep stealers and raiders into the northern part of England, so he moved them over to Ulster which was a little farther away. Then they passed laws which prevented their wool business from thriving, the Parliament did, and so they had to migrate to make a living. They migrated through the port of Philadelphia where William Penn welcomed them. Then they went down this great valley and poured over out of the Roanoke area, poured over into what we call the Piedmont. We got the name from pied monte, from your folks. [pied: foot; monte: mountain]  They had to work hard. They were probably very contentious people, very troublesome, but they worked hard and, of course, got thrown for a loss by the faulty leadership in plunging us in the Civil War between the north and the south. So, they lost 100 years, but they are now getting underway, and you know some of their successes.

For instance, one family that come down with the Scotch-lrish was named Springsteen, came off of Long Island. The Springsteen dropped the part of "teen" so that it became "Springs. " They married into the Scotch-lrish, but the Springs were enterprising people, and they built a cotton mill which you know as a whole chain. The Springs Mills. Springmaid fabrics, you see advertised. I mention that not just altogether personal reasons, but for the pattern of life.

Then the part of that pattern was to take their early earnings from growing cotton in 1830's and 40's and to invest in railroads, small beginning industries.  The Southern Railway now is part, for instance, out of the investments of the slave owners' profits.

Silveri:  On that point of the Civil War, you mention slavery and so on, were any slaves owned by either side of your family?

Stephens:  Well, I had an idea that the South Carolina border parts of the family did own considerable in slaves , and prospered and even some of them went into the Mexican War, you may remember, as volunteers, and were paid in land in Texas when the U. S. took over Texas. So they even prospered further from cotton lands and even moving some slaves, I believe, to Texas. Fortunately, my family stayed out of that, I believe it is fortunate, and they were largely farmers around Charlotte.

The other part of the mother's family was named Myers and came from what I consider still the oldest, unchanged part of the state, and it is near the geographical center, and is called Anson County. I don't think it has any town in it over 5,000 population. It apparently had some quite good stock; I've watched other Anson County people make good in professions. This Myers part moved to Charlotte and married the planter background, Springs part. So you have then on one side very modest upcountry Quaker and English Lambeth background, and on the other side a fairly typical cotton planting
background, so they merged in the Charlotte community. Then my own father had an invitation by the newspaper to move up here, and I was trained for newspaper work and moved to Asheville in 1919.

At this point, I'll go back to my earliest recollection. This was perhaps just a picture that might be useful of not an untypical background of middle North Carolina.

Silveri: If we can hold off on that and go back again to some questions.

Stephens: All right.

Silveri: Roughly, chronological. You mentioned before about families investing in beginning industries and railroads and so forth through profits, raising cotton, I guess.

Stephens: Yes, that's right.  There are those who say that there wasn't much money around. In other words, the people who owned slaves had their money, had their capital in slaves, and there wasn't very much capital around in the south to invest.
Well, fortunately, one member of our family connection went back and looked up the Springs papers, and I have a compilation by a daughter-in-law who married into the family who is quite systematic, citing the facts more or less on what I have stated to you. So they do have documentary foundation. I don't pose as a professional expert, by my sister who was a psychological research person and editor of the Lambeth book. Well, another turn aside from documentary and undisputed evidence, I believe that you ought to turn up leads through personal recollections and then verify with documentary and official
records.

Silveri: Yes, that's right.

Stephens: I think you can turn up more when you do it that way. It's just like a good doctor who won't just look at the symptoms alone, he will talk, feel around and listen, and you turn up more that way. (Chuckle. ) Again, let's stay with the Civil War period.  fight in that war. And incidentally, It was my grandfather, excuse me.

Oh, your grandfather, at 16 ?

Stephens: Yes.

Silveri: I think you said your father, when you.

Stephens: Did I ? I intended to. ..

Silveri: You mentioned your father did...  It was your grandfather.

Stephens: Grandfather Addison Stephens. My father's name was George Stephens.

Silveri: Okay. And Addison died at a relatively young age?

Stephens: About 28 or something like that.

Silveri: When the war broke out, the Stephens family were living in Charlotte?

Stephens: When the war broke out, they were living in that Quaker community but they were Methodist and therefore, did not, as the Quakers did, refuse to fight.

Silveri: So they very much supported the southern cause during the war?

Stephens: There was no choice. I don't know whether you've heard the words of Zeb Vance up here that he was the Governor of North Carolina, but an early political leader. Have you run across Zeb Vance? He said, "My hand was raised in the meeting at Marshall, making an impassioned plea for the union of my fathers. When the telegram arrived saying that Lincoln had ordered out the troops to invade the south, my hand sadly fell by the side of the cessationist."  That was the crucial point for a long time.  And in practice, there was virtually no choice. It was either do that or leave for Canada. Some did.

Silveri: Well, at the outbreak of the war, what do you know of the circumstances of, I guess it would be your great-grandfather, Addison's father?

Stephens: Well, he was probably too old to fight in the Civil War, and he stayed home and watched his thriving local business go to ruin and, of course, there was rampant inflation which ruined the Confederate currency.  Virtually, everything was drained off, and the family actually made a living by going back up in the foothills, which are not far from where they lived, and buying horses, work horses, from the mountain people, taking them down more or less what we know as the Cape Fear River Valley to the farming area around Fayetteville and selling them. Their local business was destroyed virtually, and that's how they made a living. They all became splendid horseman, I believe.  Then, as you say, Addison at the age of 16 volunteered.   Yes, as most young men did, I guess.

Silveri: Do you recall anything beyond what you have already said about his experience during the war itself?

Stephens: There is very little record. I believe the only records my sister was able to find were that on quite a few occasions he was hospitalized, if that's the word you can use when they almost had no hospitals, from dysentery troubles related to meager military sanitation. And that probably laid the foundation for his early death.

Silveri: All right.  1873.

Stephens: 1873?

Silveri: When was your father born?

Stephens: Yes. In that Quaker community in Summerfield in a Lambeth home, I believe.

Silveri: So, if your grandfather died around 28 years of age, then your father has very little recollection of him.

Stephens: Very little. My grandfather's widow lived past her 70's and at times would sit down and talk to my father about some of her early recollections of that period.

Silveri: Do you remember her?

Stephens: Quite vividly, yes. Her name was Lydia Lambeth Stephens, and perhaps I might relate one matter. I saw my folks talking about old times, and I asked what was going on. They sort of discouraged my sitting around. What they were saying was that the end of the Civil War again brought a great deal of havoc in their home community. There was a Confederate supplies depot at Greensboro, and after the surrender just east of there of General Johnstons troops I believe around Burlington, in that area, the local commander just told the people to come in and help themselves to the supplies because they were all in need.  And they did come in, including my great-grandfather Lambeth, I guess, whose name I cannot remember, I could look it up but, in any event, he took a great many hams and other army food supplies. I suspect that before that the Federal troops had taken all their animals and slaughtered them so there was very little meat, so they took this food home. Apparently some other Confederate soldiers in the troops which had just surrendered and were on their way home to Texas or somewhere, stopped at the Lambeth house, and were there when still another group of soldiers rode up into the yard and said, "We want you to surrender that food you took from the Confederate Commissary."  Whereupon these first soldiers who were these first soldiers who were there said, "Well, you'll have to come and get it, " and when they did start in the house, they were shot down in the front yard by other Confederate troops, and it was known as the Lambeth tragedy and actually was tried in court, and my grandmother, who then was a girl of I should guess, 18, was a witness in the trial. Those were the kinds of things that happened to people in the days surrounding and following the Civil War.

Silveri: What kind of attitude did your grandmother have about those experiences?

Silveri: Well, she was just matter of fact about it. She was not a person of any long carried emotions, as I remember it. She was a very practical person. Loved the, basically, the farming life. I believe the only thing I remember hearing was that her husband, before he died, made her promise to give their son a good education. She was quite clever and capable of doing it, because off of that he went to a country academy run by some of their cousins which is still running, called Oak Ridge Academy, near western Greensboro. And, there he turned out to be a prodigious left-handed ball pitcher. So prodigious, that, even though they didn't have athletic scholarships in those days, the alumnae of Chapel Hill sent the President up there to watch him pitch. (Chuckle. ) The story is that afterwards he said, "Young man, I would like for you to plan to come to Chapel Hill, but I have no way of offering you a scholarship. But, if you will, at your own expense, will go to Springfield, Massachusetts, to the school of Physical Education, we will employ you and you can earn your way through college, but you will have to pay for your education at Springfield somewhere else. So he borrowed the money -- maybe his widowed mother loaned him some of it -- and he went to Springfield and then went to Chapel Hill, and never missed a chance to make an honest dollar or to make friends, and as a result he became an outstanding success in Chapel Hill. The young lady whom he had been courting inferred that most of her people had been bankers, so he thought the thing to do to increase his prospects was to start a bank which he did (chuckle) and moved to Charlotte. He started what is now the North Carolina National Bank which, I believe, is the largest in the southeast now with the consolidation. But it just shows what little spur and coincidence will make a person go a certain direction and what circumstances might make that possible to go on to that kind of success.

Silveri: That's fascinating. Your father was the only child in the family?

Stephens: He was the only child, yes.

Silveri: When he went to Springfield, how long did he spend there?

Stephens: My guess is less than a year, but he had a great capacity for making friends, and he made friends in the north even right then, who stood him in good stead later.

Silveri: Okay. And then he came to Chapel Hill, and we're talking about the 1890's when he was in Chapel Hill.

Stephens: Right.  From '92 to '96 is my guess; he graduated in '96.

Silveri: Those happen to coincide with the national Depression that was taking place in this country in the 90's.

Stephens: That's right.

Silveri: And there he was employed by the University.

Stephens: As physical education teacher, director.  While he was getting his own degree.

Silveri What did he major in?

Stephens: Well, I suspect it's what we would call the Liberal Arts now. It may have been about all that Chapel Hill offered, although there were some good scientists there.  This President that I mentioned, was named Francis Preston Venable, and he was the discoverer of the process for making acetylene gas. Two of his students, John Motley Morehead and one other whose name is William Rand Keenan, I believe, both were great successes in business in the North, and then returned properly Dr. Venable's results in his efforts and of their own in the form of probably two of the largest educational foundations in the South (except for Duke): the Keenan Foundation and the Morehead Foundation are quite widely known I guess and have been very practical and useful.

Silveri: You have endowments, I guess, at Chapel Hill?

Stephens: Yes, and a very much coveted scholarship program called the Morehead Scholarship Program. There again, it's interesting to know the humble beginnings and circumstances in the hands of responsible, good people, have turned out to be a blessing to a wide number of people. There, again, I believe that the middle section of North Carolina, where that Quaker and in general the British Isles stock, and I'm not partial to it necessarily, but in that case, Carolina got a most valuable core of leadership which has turned out again and again. Some of it is north European, like the Moravian. The Fries family in Winston-Salem started Wachovia Bank and many industries, but the upper tier of middle North Carolina counties have the climate and enough opportunity to enable people to be a great blessing to the place they settle.

Silveri: I do want to talk to you about race relations, as we go along, and I'm wondering that within that context of post-Civil War America, what do you remember about what was told to you -- well, you weren't born until 1904 -- but what was told to you by relatives about race relations after the Civil War in the South?

Stephens: Well, I do have some carryover in that my major in college was history and government, and I was lucky enough to have an outstanding man who became later the Archivist of the United States, Robert Digges Wimberly Connor.  And as a result of his forthright Irish way of saying things, why a good deal useful filtered in. For one thing, there was chaos in most of the middle Atlantic states on the race and politics question until around 1900. In the case of North Carolina, at that time a man came in who could fit together all of the needs of the state to the extent of saying, what we really need is education, and we can forget about the race part as a matter to fight over, and his name was Charles Brantley Aycock.  He started the public school system, although it had begun earlier in a way. He really got it rolling. And from then on, as you may know, North Carolina's progress has been quite steady because they rightly thought of education as the foundation for progress.

Silveri: Yes. Later on I want to talk to you about how some money was raised when Terry Sanford was Governor.

Stephens: That's right. I was fairly close to him, and his activities in this part of the state. Race, as such, did not figure in a chaotic way in 20th Century North Carolina, and we were very fortunate in that, and other states have had real handicaps that they are now just now getting over -- say the states even north, but many south of us.

Silveri: Okay, now, you said when your father was going to Chapel Hill he was of a particular nature that he worked hard, was able to make friends, and so when he graduated, you say he married while he was at Chapel Hill?

Stephens: No, he was courting while he was there.

Silveri: What did he do when he graduated?

Stephens: He moved to Charlotte because his roommate -- circumstances always play a part in things -- had a family engaging in the insurance business. So there was a place for him. The insurance business is always flexible -- room for one more. So he quickly in Charlotte got in the insurance business, and he was a hard worker and made friends in an unbelievable way. He just loved people, and understood them, had the "inwit," as the Quakers call it, so that he knew what was going on.

Silveri: Charlotte was booming, I imagine, at that time.

Stephens: Well, Charlotte was a good practical Scotch-Irish community in which I have often laughed when I realize when we have this great blessed wealth of Jewish people here, and you see it in Georgia and South Carolina and notably in New Orleans, that Jews could not make a living among the Scotch-Irish in Charlotte.  It has only been in the recent 30 or 40 years that they have come into Charlotte and made a go of it. So the Scotch-Irish were hard to live with. Anyway, he went into Charlotte, I guess with his banking idea in mind, and he found a wealthy man of northern background who was willing to join him in starting a bank called The Southern States Trust Company, and the result was that he'd got off as you suggest, Charlotte was at least growing in a promising way if not really booming. He quickly saw that they didn't know the banking business, so he got his boyfriend from up near where he grew up who was then working for Colonel Fries in the Wachovia Bank, Word H. Wood, to join him in the bank with a change of name, which then became the American Trust Company and which went on for, oh, 50 years, I guess, under that name and then began to merge and is now North Carolina National. But Word H. Wood was a genius as a banker, and as a result of that, my father did not have to sit with his feet under a desk, and it was not long until he went back to his real love which was the natural out-of-doors and preserving and using and improving land.  He took his father-in-law's 1,000-acre cotton plantation and developed it into Myers Park which is perhaps one of the early successful residence areas in the south. That is partly due to the friends he made in the north earlier, perhaps in the Springfield days, I don't know. But he brought in John Nolen, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was surely one of the outstanding city planners of the country. The result of that was that the whole plan of Myers Park has stood up so well since 1910, that it's just had no trouble. It has been an outstanding success.

Silveri: Myers Park is a residential community?

Stephens: It is a residential community, which is almost wholly the cotton farm of John Springs Myers, my grandfather. So there again, it is fortunate circumstances that help people.

Silveri: I know. Do you recall the date of the marriage of your mother and father?

Stephens: Yes, I believe it was perhaps 1902.

Silveri: 1902, thank you. When he did this with Myers Park was approximately when?

Stephens: About 1910, I believe.

Silveri: Okay. By that time, he was, as you said, able to move his feet from under the desk to the top of the desk.

Stephens: That's right. Now, he continued as president of the bank, I believe, until about the time we moved to Asheville. His partner Word Wood was a very generous, fine man. He didn't push to become president of the bank, and he just let things roll along, and ran the bank well. I think at that time my grandfather gave me 10 shares in that little bank, and I still have them. I believe they number now 3,500 shares.  That doesn't mean they're worth that much more in money, but it's interesting how banks have grown.

Silveri: You mentioned that once the bank was on the way your father turned to other pursuits. How did he get interested in these other pursuits?

Stephens: My sister pointed out that he always loved the land and loved to preserve and make things better, and he, I believe, was early the organizer of what they call the Park and Tree Commission in Charlotte which was to preserve places for neighborhood children to be able to play and preserve trees in general. Perhaps you see that I have inherited some of that. That natural love carried out of what I consider a very decent rural background in the Quaker community, surely contributed to the direction his activities took. I don't think that the Myers Park venture greatly rewarded him. I have an idea that others have reaped where he sowed.

Silveri: Then you were born in 1904?

Stephens: Yes.

Silveri: And then the family moved to Asheville when?

Stephens: 1919.

Silveri: 1919. Well, before the move you attended school in Charlotte, right?

Stephens: Yes. Some public. Largely whatever private schools which, at that time, of course, had a real advantage in resources over public schools. I went to oh, I think there was a school department in a little college right near my neighborhood, and then later I went to a military school, one of the old-time military schools which was perhaps the most prosperous kind of private education in the south in the early 1900's. I went to Homer Military School, which was then having a hard time, however.  Then when I came to Asheville I went to what turned out to be a quite worthwhile school called Asheville School for Boys, which was founded by some Cleveland men, I believe, and is still going strong since 1900.

Silveri: Why did your family moved to Asheville?

Stephens: A businessman here named Charles A. Webb had an opportunity to buy the Asheville morning paper, The Citizen, and he wanted someone with some newspaper experience to go in with him. My father had been a part owner of Charlotte's paper, The Observer, which is a very large prosperous paper, and so the partnership of these two as co-publishers was a natural outcome of Mr. Webb's opportunity to buy the morning paper. So, as I grew up, from high school age on, I thought I would be going into the newspaper field and was educated in subjects that would be useful to me, including journalism at Chapel Hill. 

Silveri: Let's go back again to your father's involvement with the Charlotte Observer.  Was he part owner mainly as a business venture or was he just a newspaper man?

Stephens: I believe a business venture in that case. He had already the bank and a little later Myers Park, so it just had to be a business venture mainly.

Silveri: All right. But he did become acquainted with the publishing of a newspaper?

Stephens: Oh, yes. And his own civic interests which were very strong made it natural for him to support a good newspaper.

Silveri: Incidentally, how many children were eventually born to your father and mother?

Stephens: I was born in 1904 and my sister about 1913, I believe. I was virtually an only child for a long time.

Silveri: When the move came in 1919, was your mother happy about it?  Or was she...

Stephens: To move to Asheville? I think so; I think she got along here about as well as anywhere.

Silveri: Okay. So your father moved here in 1919 as co-owner of the Asheville Citizen?

Stephens: Yes. They called it co-publisher for some reason, but it was co-owner.

Silveri: What kind of newspaper was the Ashevi1le Citizen then? Was it a small circulation?

Stephens: Well, Asheville had not over 28,000 people. I doubt if its circulation was over 10,000. It served the immediate mountain region around it. So it was a modest sized paper, but it began a rapid growth then because there was a rapid development of Asheville which turned into a disastrous real estate boom and deflation.

Silveri: We'll get to that in a minute. I just see here that when you came to Asheville, it was after the first World War, and I was just wondering what effect the first World War had on your family, on your father?

Stephens: Well, the deflation in 1919 -- I believe the armistice was 1918 -- caused cotton prices to drop, and I believe in the South that dragged down other prices, so it was a time when real estate was having hard going. People didn't have the money to invest in homes, so probably it was a good time to seize a new opportunity which was offered here in Asheville, and fortunately it turned out well.

Silveri: Yes, yes. I see, so that the move did have some relationship to the war and the economy that resulted from the war.

Stephens: I should think he might not have moved, but then again it all fitted in together.

Silveri: He must have known Mr. Webb?

Stephens: I suspect that he did. The University at Chapel Hill was the meeting place for many of the promising men of the state, particularly those who were likely to be leaders, because that was the one place to get the outstanding education, and it continued so until the coming of Duke and other endowed universities later, and then of the improvement in the whole state public university system. So Chapel Hill was where you made your friends all over the state.

Silveri:   So, it was a kind of network of relationships.

Stephens: Exactly. And particularly for one who liked people as much as my father did, it provided the network in his early banking success. He brought the new accounts into the American Trust Company while Mr. Wood ran a good bank inside. So all the way around, his love of people in this connection arising from Chapel Hill, stood him in good stead.

Silveri: If we can pause at 1919 and talk about your father's politics. What party did he belong to and how active was he in political life?

Stephens: Not very active. I guess his views and mine happen to be the same: that a moderate part in politics enables you to carry out your own worthy civic ambition. And that therefore you should have some part. You shouldn't stay out of them all together. In general, the men who became Governor were his good friends, largely through that Chapel Hill background.  I think I have about 40 or 50 years of pictures of Governors who were his personal friends.  During the 1900's I think the Democrats were virtually the only party.

Silveri: Was Holshouser the only Republican Governor since reconstruction?

Stephens: I believe they were virtually unchallenged during 50 years, at least.  Even so, the Republicans don't always have the luck to always be able to stick together.  Which they ought to know by now, if they read their lessons of history, is a first step to success. The Democrats have not had to because they were dominant in numbers.

Silveri: All right. Awhile back you said that it might be interesting for you to recollect some of your earliest memories about Asheville, and Charlotte.

Tape I, Side 2

Stephens: Yes, Charlotte was a hot place in summer, and people went away, oh, if they could, for weeks on end, and it happened that after my father began to do fairly well in business, he was able to help his mother take her savings and buy a country place which was part farm and part of the Flat Rock summer resort type, the westernmost part of the noted Flat Rock community of largely summer homes, but this one was actually used as a year-around home, and had been there quite awhile. She moved there before 1900. My recollections of it are very pleasant and some images stand out right now.  Today's community knows it as the Kanuga area because it had an early successful summer resort right near her home. And it is now the Episcopal Conference Grounds. In any event, when I was a small boy, while the farm was in the family, I was allowed to go there, oh, I was told at the age of six weeks first, but by the time I was 2, 3 or 4 years old, I was just left up there with my grandmother. And I can remember the very pleasant waking up in the morning, the chickens cackling and clucking, under my window in the yard, dogs and people happily going around below, and I guess one of the early recollections is of a nice pair of  mountain women who lived in a house in the yard.  One of them served as a sort of cook and part housekeeper.   And Miss Nancy Shepherd would pay some attention to me; I remember hearing the thunder rolling across the sky as a youngster, and I said, "What is that?"  She said, "Why the old folks say that's the corn wagon rolling across the sky, that tells you we're going to have good crops."  I believe that's about the earliest recollection that I have.  This farm was carried on on a hill top where there was no spring flowing, and therefore they had to keep their milk and butter cooled by digging a cellar and going down in the basement under the house where the temperature more nearly resembled the year-round average temperature, I guess it was 50 degrees down there.  And I was allowed to go in and out as they took the milk and butter in and out of that.  Then another recollection is that the side door had a hole in it about breast high or a little lower, that was an inch or more across, and I asked what was that, how did that come, and they said, "Why, the bushwackers did that, shot that." Apparently, the bushwackers were the renegades and deserters who wouldn't fight in either Army. There were a good many Federal union sympathizers who fought in the Union Army, and some in the Confederate, but some were just outlyers, as they were called, or bushwackers. They came around to rob the house.  With the men gone off to war, they could frighten the women. And I'm not sure but what an older man was in the house so the story is that they knocked on this side door, and when he answered he stood not right in front of the door, but to one side. So when the bushwackers shot through it, they did not kill him.  So that's the story I heard later.  But the old mountain women just said, the bushwackers shot through that door. (Chuckle.)  The farming life went on.  They raised corn, and my grandmother loved to keep chickens.  She had several hundred chickens, so I was allowed to go out and scatter corn for them, and go out in the vegetable garden and help gather strawberries or raspberries, just do the various farm chores.  At some point I can stop and give you a piece of cornbread made just the way we ate it then, if you would like. I made some this morning early.

Silveri: I would like some, yes. I forgot to ask you what influence the church played in your family up to the time you came to Asheville.  What church did your family belong to?

Stephens: The part involving my mother's family, I believe, had become Episcopalians perhaps in the 80's or 90's. The Episcopal Church as you may know, nearly died out a hundred years earlier because of its connection with England, and although there was a chapel at what we know now as Chapel Hill -- New Hope Chapel -- it fell into disrepair and was not, was just a ruined building when the university was started, I believe, but it was right at the crossroads of two major routes where the Carolina Inn stands now at Chapel Hill. But the Episcopal Church was just barely getting going again.  I think it was fairly strong in the Tidewater, eastern part of North Carolina all along. But the upcountry, they were Scotch-Irish, Presbyterians and Methodists, and it seems to me I saw somewhere a note that my great-grandfather Myers had changed over from oh, perhaps the Methodist Church and helped to organize I guess the first Episcopal congregation in Charlotte, called St. Peters, which is the oldest and largest there now. As you may know, the Episcopalians are not necessarily the best because there are splendid Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists in that region, and, of course, Moravians and others. But they very often attracted the more, well fixed financially, and often the better educated, although not by any means all of the educated.

Silveri: Why do you think that was the case?

Stephens: I don't know whether the nature of the church ritual or the tradition or just what. I see it here in our own community now. Of course there are great changes in churches. I have watched with interest and amazement changes in the Roman Catholic church in my time, and maybe it's all to the good. It's certainly realistic. Perhaps the un-changing that I've observed are the Presbyterians. They've hewed to the line of what their early founders in Scotland have said that we must rely on education in our clergy if we are to succeed, and I suspect that is the whole history of the Presbyterian church, and there are almost always good colleges wherever they settled, such as Davidson.

Silveri: What about your father's side? You've been talking about the Myers side haven't you?

Stephens: Yes, now the father's side were Methodist which was, that with the Baptist, was the religion of the great part of upcountry North Carolinians, and even some Tidewater. At that time there were scarcely many people in the mountains, and they tended to Baptist and Methodist.

Silveri: In 1919 when you came to Asheville, you were 15 years old. What did you see when you came to Asheville? Where did you first live in Asheville when you came in 1919?

Stephens: I lived a mile and a half south of Asheville, what was known then as the, and still is, the Manor Grounds.  There was an inn there built by a Georgia family to which perhaps 20 houses around it were added. Some of them as sort of annexes for more guest rooms and some as permanent residences- dwellings, and we lived in one of those for about a year and then moved about a half a mile to another residential group which, there again is interesting, was built out of the earnings of a lumber man, and he knew how to build quite nice houses, comfortable, well-designed, decent houses. So we lived out two miles south of Asheville up until my marriage in which case I moved to this side. I married into a family with a Biltmore Village background, my wife's family, and it seemed quite natural to settle in this area.

Silveri: When you say two miles south of Asheville, that's pretty far out.

Stephens: Mid-city.

Silveri: Mid-city? In the city limits?

Stephens: Two miles south of mid-city. I reckon the way the highway department does is one point is the point of reference for distances, and in that case, Pack Square at Asheville.

Silveri: Okay, so when you're driving on the highway, 50 miles from here, and it says 50 miles from Asheville...

Stephens: That's to center city.

Silveri: That's to center city, not the city limits?

Stephens: That's right. That's the highway designation system, distance designation. It's the only way to avoid confusion. Being a map designer, I have to stick to a workable way.

Silveri: Okay, so when you came in 1919, you were 15 years old.  So you were old enough to notice what was going on around you and what the city looked like.  Do you remember what your impressions were when you first came here?

Stephens: Yes, the imprint of Asheville at that time was two or three elements.  Immediately north of me was the small, but well done subdivision by the inventor of the Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic, and this was called Grove Park.  And it was, still is one of the better residential areas because it was designed well, with good, wise, protective restrictions in the deeds. And then another north of Asheville which was what we know as Montford Avenue and Cumberland Avenue, had the families who came in and prospered after the coming of the railroads in the 80's, and that was one of the genteel places to live for Asheville's first 50 years really. It still has some fine old homes in it, although they are rather crowded in. They didn't have the protective restrictions that Grove Park and Biltmore Forest.

Silveri: Did you ever have any Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic?

Stephens: No.  I roomed with the grandson of Dr. Grove; the "doctor" is the old country title for pharmacist, as you know.

Silveri: Yes.

Stephens: Many places it still persists.  He started in middle Tennessee in a small town called Paris, and it was called the Paris Medicine Company. Then he moved to St. Louis, and much better manufacturing and distributing points. This partly comes out of John Seely... Seely being the builder of the Grove Park Inn -- John Seely's father  [Fred Seely] -- who married Dr. Grove's only daughter. So Dr. Grove had made a tremendous amount of money, and he evidently found this son-in-law satisfactory and promising, and one thing he did was to back him in the building of the Grove Park Inn, which this former newspaper man, self-educated, designed and carried through on his own.

Silveri: Seely did this, on his own?

Stephens: Yes, that's right.

Silveri: Do you suspect that Mr. Grove's tonic was pretty much useless as a medicine?

Stephens: During the days of malaria, it was a specific for malaria, quinine is.

Silveri: Oh, is that what it was, quinine?

Stephens: Yes.

Silveri: Oh.

Stephens: And see, quinine was so unpleasant and bitter that the Tasteless Chill Tonic made a great success .

Silveri: Interesting. Do you happen to know how Grove got interested in Asheville?  How he happened to come here in the first place?

Stephens: No, except that after the coming of the railroads, there was a surprising amount of publicity in magazines like Harpers, and Leslies, which are in our public library here and are worth your turning through sometime because there are numerous accounts of this quaint, unspoiled, mountain region, with its quaint, unspoiled people.

Silveri: Yes, as a matter of fact, I went through some copies of those articles and even some pictures in the U. S. Forest Service file. Someone there made copies of those.

Stephens: Yes.  So, the North Carolina room of the public library here will be well worth your time when you can look through it.

Silveri: You mentioned that you went to Asheville Boys School.

Stephens: Asheville School for Boys, as it was called.

Silveri: Located where?

Stephens: About 5 miles west of Asheville.  At that time, so far from good roads that the little west-bound Murphy train was the way you got there and back. Well, they were just beginning to have paved roads. You may know all of, or soon sense, that the quite successful highway system of North Carolina began with a good-roads governor in the 1920's and that before that the good roads were rare. And so North Carolina's emergence, and especially the mountain region, came with the coming of good roads.

Silveri: Was the Asheville School for Boys an elementary school only?

Stephens: It covered the 4 usual high school years, I believe, or 5, maybe.

Silveri: So you graduated from there, huh?

Stephens: I graduated from there, with a quite strict standard of work, and you could just coast on through after that. They gave us college entrance board examinations every day in the spring of our junior and senior year just for the exercise.

Silveri: Were they teaching Greek and Latin in those days?

Stephens: They were teaching Latin. Greek had been passed up by then. There was a man in Asheville, I might call your attention, who taught Tom Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe, the local author, not the contemporary Thomas Wolfe, with a Greek background, and he found Tom so bright that he just coached him I believe four years, he told me, in Greek before he went to Chapel Hill. He went there with four years of Greek already, so he could just gallop through the classics, and you could feel the rhythm of some of the classics in Tom Wolfe's writing.

Silveri: Was this the school Tom Wolfe himself attended?

Stephens: Well, this was called, I believe, something like the Asheville Fitting School, which was a modest, in- the- city school run by a man named, Roberts -- J. M. Roberts, whom I knew for a good many years here.  [1915 Asheville City Directory: North State Fitting School, John and Margaret E. Roberts, 157 Church Street]

Silveri: You graduated from the school then in what year? From high school?

Stephens: That would be 1922.

Silveri: 1922.

Stephens: And straight on to Chapel Hill.

Silveri: Straight on that year?

Stephens: Yes.

Silveri: Before we get into that, what did you do ? Did you work during the summertime or after school while you were going to high school? Did you have any experience with the newspaper?

Stephens: I was not given the work experience that I might well have, though I guess my family the same way took no chances on being well prepared. We call it running scared these days. I was coached and prepared for Asheville School, so I galloped through that, not any virtue for my ability, but I just was ready for it. And then Chapel Hill, the same way.

Silveri: Okay, there was no question that you were going to go to Chapel Hill to college?

Stephens: Hardly, with my father's very happy experience there.

Silveri: Did you know before you went to Chapel Hill what your major interest would be in college? What particular subject?

Stephens: Well, I suspect I was just headed for what they called a liberal education, but it turned out that I enjoyed especially the history courses that they had, and they were starting a number of good new departments, like -- it came a little later --  the Institute of Government, but they had a good department even already, good faculty and staff in the science of government as a part of history, and then later, a quite later famous man came there during my time -- maybe he got there just ahead of me -- anyway his name was Howard Washington Odum. He came from a Georgia community and started the Institute for Research in Social Science, which is one of the big successes in academics in the south, as you probably know, as you know many who are graduates probably.

Silveri: Yes, and I'd like to ask you later on some questions about Howard Odum, about what he did.

Stephens: Yes, in his later years, I was fortunate in getting to know him pretty well. Yes, I went to see him in the hospital, from which he never returned, but over the years ahead of that I saw him, and I may have a memento or two I can save for you.

Silveri: Fine. Okay, 1922. Chapel Hill must have looked quite different in '22 than it looks now.

Stephens: The building program was just beginning; in fact, they had just finished the first of four modern looking, but still Georgian type dormitories. They were sensible enough to stick largely to Georgian, which was proved by time to be well adapted to the south climate, so I lived in one of those newer buildings. And then, was lucky enough to move into the -- after it had been completely gutted and remodeled and made new inside -- into Old East, the earliest state university building in the country. And that was quite a nice experience.

Silveri: Do you remember what the tuition was in 1922?

Stephens: Well, tuitions were very low. It seems to me that for each of the three parts of the year, they had the quarter system, and I believe it was about $120 which was surely not half of the cost.

Silveri: Yes.

Stephens: The University was just beginning to get substantial support. They brought a president from New York City, I believe, named Harry Woodburn Chase, who, though he wasn't gifted with a southern accent, he knew surely how to reach the legislators, and he got a number of these fine programs, like the Odum program started. They brought another man named Eugene Cunningham Branson, also from Georgia, who started the study of what they call rural social economics, which was what North Carolina needed to relate economics to its rural structure, and to  its economy, and to its society.  So, all of these very fortunate events took place in the time that I was able to remember and in some places to share them.

Silveri: Okay, you mentioned that you found the history courses particularly interesting. Was that due to any one particular professor?

Stephens: Well, just about everyone I listened to I thought was good. And maybe I was lucky. Even those who were considered a bit dry, if you already had some interest in history, why, it meant something to you. The man who did so much
later in collecting and started the Southern Historical Collection -- he got several years running start on any other university.  Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton, was not a thrilling teacher, but knew what he was doing, and you could for, I believe, middle period, perhaps what we call reconstruction, was an outstanding man, and he along with Boyd [William Kenneth Boyd] over at Duke and Connor -- R. D. W. Connor, I mentioned -- wrote a Connor- Boyd- Hamilton History of North Carolina, which is one of the best. It had to be financed by the mug method of a whole big biographical section.  But still, the historical text which these three men wrote was a real milestone. There have been others since then which are good.

Silveri: I was going to ask you about taking a course in North Carolina history.  And whether they did.

Stephens: Connor taught that. Now, nothing mattered in those days but the Piedmont because there's where the progress was, but the control of the state was still firmly in the hands of the Tidewater, and the history, even through the Lefler History, spent most of their time on the Tidewater, but the effect of the Tidewater, as I see it, largely played out 100 years ago.

Silveri: Certainly the industries that got located on the Piedmont and those who ran that industry became prominent in state politics and economic life?

Stephens: Well, they were novices at controlling the legislative work, and only in the past immediate few years is control passing away from those gifted politicians of the east. They just knew how to do it, and they can still hold the gun to a western legislator's head and say, you want to do so and so or else my committees just won't find time to consider the legislation you want to introduce. They are extremely likable and extremely clever.

Silveri: Well, we'll talk about that more as we go along. I want to talk some more about some of these other professors you had at Chapel Hill. Did you have courses dealing with the history of the south?

Stephens: We didn't ride the south. We were looking ahead. We were taking a hindsight look ahead. No point in... well, there are lessons, but not so much for middle south because the middle south history is not the history of the deep south. Once you get into the large farming area, area of large farms, why, then that's a different history.

Silveri: So the history that you had was North Carolina history? National history?

Stephens: Ancient history. And general American history.

Silveri: Did you run into what, even in those days, may have been called radical teachers, iconoclasts, notorious individuals who may have been in trouble with the administration or Board of Trustees for their views?

Stephens: Not that I realized. That has come about only in the recent years where they were under a cross fire between the conservative, prosperous Piedmont businessmen and the conservative reactionary easterners.

Silveri: You don't mention the mountaineers, the mountain counties, in this matrix that you're talking about. About political life.

Stephens: Well, they counted, with a few exceptions, counted very little in the political leadership of the state. Of course, the exception, and you can find ways of getting it, although I could tell you a good deal, is Zebulon Vance.

Silveri: Yes, was it because so many mountaineers were Republicans, or was it because of the lack of economic base?

Stephens: Both.

Silveri: Well, your four years at Chapel Hill must have been very interesting ones because you had come in contact with a wide variety of... well, I don't know... it was a wide variety geographically, of people in North Carolina, but not necessarily coming in contact with people of limited means.

Stephens: More than you might believe. There were a great many who were working themselves through college by waiting on dining room tables. Not all, by any means, but a substantial number of worthwhile young men did come there in my time.

Silveri: All right, 1926 was the year that you graduated, and what happened then?

Stephens: Things were booming here, and my family probably had more spare money than they ever had, and so they let me take an on-your-own trip with a boyhood friend through southern and western Europe. Then the family went back later.  Do those look familiar to you? I think it's the [?] or something like that.

Silveri: Yes.

Stephens: That's, of course, looking out a window in Florence.

Silveri: Is this you?

Stephens: No, that's the boyhood friend.  So then that trip was followed by a family trip, largely Mediterranean. So, got some useful smattering of what had been going on in the world.

Silveri: It must have been exciting for you.

Stephens: Yes, I see a lot that I have not yet covered that I would like to.  I've been back since then to learn more about map design and went to useful places like Austria and Switzerland... Germany.

Silveri: When did your father die?

Stephens: My recollection is 1945.

Silveri: I do want to ask you some questions about the newspaper. Did he remain in that capacity with the newspaper until his death?

Stephens: No, he remained until about 10 years, about 1930 as I recall, and this man who invited him to come and join in the purchase, the two of them, had a buy or sell agreement by which if either of them wanted to go ahead and buy it out, he could do so, and Mr. Webb, the man who had approached him in the first place, said he wanted to buy it out. His purpose was to join with the owner of the other paper and consolidate the two. I stayed on, I believe, 3 years after the consolidation. After spending some time in the mechanical department, I went into the advertising, what is known as display advertising, the big type display advertising. My typographical knowledge from the year in the mechanical part helped me there, and I stayed about 3 years as I say in that.

Silveri: Oh, maybe we should go back and fill in the years since 26. You took that trip, and then you came home.

Stephens: Yes, and then I had some desire to want to get into the woods and work, and they were just beginning then the purchase of land for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and I had liked the out-of-doors always, so I was lucky enough to get a job as a tallyman, which is the humble part of the job in the timber cruising, which is the estimating function in land valuation. So, I started in... I was the only city fellow in the outfit.  The party chief was a veteran of World War I, who went on the early G. I. bill to a 4-year education in forestry at the University of Georgia at Athens, and he had great misgivings about me, I think. He wasn't sure whether I would make it or not, but I had been raised in a fairly rigorous way and would always run scared, so to speak. I took no chances. I tried to do my work well. And before long, we became very fast friends, and later, when there was a vacancy for the big job called the timber estimator, he had watched and I would always walk around the trees and look at every big, valuable tree and just took no chances; so he promoted me to be the first cruiser at the astronomical salary of $150 a month, with your usual board. I worked about half of that year as a cruiser.

Silveri: What was that gentleman's name?

Stephens: His name is E. J. Rosser. He's sitting behind the surveyors transit in the middle of the group. He was a Tennessee/Kentucky mountaineer, and then you see the others. I'm down in the lower corner, perhaps left corner, is it?  Pulling on an invisible thread which snapped the picture.

Silveri: Where, right here on the side?

Stephens: Yes.

Silveri: Well, you're very young looking there.

Stephens: I was about 23 or 24.

Silveri: 24, yes.

Stephens: So we had good luck on the picture,

Silveri: Well, you were only -- It looks as though pipes were in vogue in those days.

Stephens: Yes, that's right. Well, it's the only safe way in the woods.

Silveri: Yes.

Stephens: Cigarettes are dangerous.

Silveri: Yes, uh huh. How long, well, first of all, maybe I should ask you, your work was in estimating the timber there because the government was going to buy that property.

Stephens: Yes. The state had to buy it and turn it over to the Federal government to make a national park.

Silveri: All right. What about the people living there?

Stephens: Well, the law was a fairly humane one, they were allowed to live on the rest of their lives, the occupants were. Some of them took their money and moved out, especially if they had young children. I noticed the announcement of the death of one of them in one of those valleys in today's paper, Lush Caldwell, who was a young man at the time I was in there.

Silveri: How do you remember that? How did you happen to remember his name?  You mean he worked with you?

Stephens: No, he was just in the community. I remember names. Well, I can't brag on that, but the way-back memory is good.  Now, this was a maiden sister in the place where I boarded. I just brought 2 or 3 of those. That was Cataloochee Valley, it's called. Then farther up in the valley, there was a portrait painted or sort of a tinted portrait, I guess, of a man when he was young. His dearest possession was his rifle. You see it has a hammer on it, doesn't it?  Hammer style?

Silveri: Yes.

Stephens: And that's Turkey George Palmer, I believe his name was. So I took that picture, and I have somewhere a picture of him at the time I was there in his 70's.

Silveri: How long were you working in that area?

Stephens: I worked about, in the Smokies in the purchase, about a year.  But the whole purchase... cruising took, oh, 3 or 4 years.

Silveri: Okay, but in the Smokies about a year? Was it all throughout the Smokies, or in one particular area?

Stephens: Well, we could cruise out, that means systematically, tally the timber in one valley and then move to another, and we had as a director of the work a trained forester, whose family still lives here. The Forest Service had what they called a ten percent sampling system by which you followed the compass line from the valley base to the top of the mountain and set over and then came back, so that you covered 10% of the area, no matter what you went through, cliffs or anything, and we went through such scenes as that sometimes. 

Silveri: What is this?

Stephens: It's a moonshine still.

Silveri:  Oh!  Laughter.  Is that the moonshiner there too?

Stephens: No, that's one of our, one of my buddies.  And the people in those valleys were basically honest, good people, and there was no way to get cash except to make liquor.

Silveri: Uh huh.

Stephens: It was like the Corn and the Whiskey Rebellion time. They trafficked then.  And so they were, they were decent people, and I think there were something like thirty families.  And I believe there were twenty-seven of them in one way or another connected with the whiskey business, either in making it or carrying it out or what not.  Of which this Lush Caldwell that I mentioned was one.  Then some of the, some of the going was fairly rough.  It was so cold that waterfall was frozen.  There's my talleyman down in the foreground after I had been promoted.  And they... the big lumber companies were operating in there, and they were cutting timber as fast as they could before the North Carolina got the courts to stop them.  Tennessee wasn't as rigorous about that.  They cut out vast big acreage in the Tennessee side before they stopped them.  They said it was under contract or something.  But we stopped them in the courts. But there they are cutting great red spruce.  Can you see it falling?

Silveri:   Yes.  Red spruce?

Stephens: See, that's the tree of the Northern woods, but there's a little island of it in this plateau here.  Then there's Frasier's fir which is peculiar to this area.  That's different from the Balsam fir in the North.

Silveri: You weren't the only crew doing cruising?

Stephens: There was one crew for the state of North Carolina.  And one crew for the state of Tennessee.  It took us two or three years to ... three or four years to get it done.  They had to go to court and testify and get the evidence before a condemnation - forced purchase - could be carried through.

Silveri: Did you encounter any hostility from the people who lived there when you were coming through?

Stephens: No, not at all.  I think they were probably wary and took no chances, but they soon knew what we were about.  In a way I guess favored the prospect of getting enough money to sell out their farms and get in a place where they could educate their children better.  In fact some of those families did do that very thing.  They moved their children out during the school years where you could get good schooling.

Silveri: They must've wanted to be where they were if they were there.

Stephens: Well, the land, perhaps the better grade for farming, and nearer markets and schools was taken up when they moved in there in the early 1800's.  That was the story of a good deal of the settlement in the USA.  You took what you could find after the fellow who was ahead of you had already staked his out.

Silveri: Do you know if there are any families still living in the Smokies today?

Stephens: Well, they live near the Smokies.   I could show you before you leave this Lush Caldwell's ... He was... I think... I'm not sure, but he was connected with the still operation.   I remember him as a first class man.  And he's left a big family.  Many of them have gone to the midwestern industrial area.  That's what they had to make a living.

Silveri: When you were cruising timber and came across a homestead in the mountains, what did you do?  Did you have to make note of that?

Silveri: Yes.  My first job, by the way, in this Cataloochie Valley...  I was the first man employed in the field in cruising.  My first job was to go into this Calaloochie Valley and find out the name of each landowner.  And they were willing to give the information.  As I say, most of them wanted to look into the possibility of getting paid a reasonable price and moving out.  So I found people ready enough to give me the information I wanted, and I came out with a report of landowners.  And then before long, this man Rosser had been employed - and he had been working for a very good lumber company out in an extreme western county, and among those who you should interview is a member of that family of that lumber company where Rosser had been working.  Gennett.  Andrew Gennett.

Silveri:  What did you see when you went to find out who the landowners were?  What kind of houses did they live in?

Stephens:  Well, they lived in the second stage of house beyond the log house.  Mostly.  That is, they had...by then there had been saw mills in there. And in some instances the boards had been simply put over the central log structure and then additional rooms added as wings.  And they were wood shingle houses.  And I recall...I guess there was a shingle making point somewhere around there.  I don't know whether you know how that works, but there's a slightly swiveling saw which will saw wood billets into wood shingles... tapered wood shingles.  In the old days, of course, they split them.  And some of the oldest houses there had hand-split shingles, which I could tell you where to find around here along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Silveri:  Split with a [?] and a wooden hammer.

Stephens: Right. They're not tapered you see, they're not as easy to use as the sawn wood.

Silveri: Did you find that these were large families you dealt with, they had a lot of children?

Stephens: Mostly large families, not always.  This particular family where I boarded, the man  had married late in life, and they had, I believe, one child.  And did Miss Mariah have a baby in a basket?  There was one daughter to this perhaps forty year old couple.  And then their son was born a little later, to become one of the leading business men in the Waynesville community.  Just next, west of here.  Linton Palmer, I believe his name is.  And about three names covered virtually every family in that valley.  They were English names like Palmer and Caldwell and Woody.  Then there some are Scottish out there though, like Ferguson.

Silveri: This was the Cataloochie Valley you're talking about?

Stephens: Cataloochie Valley.

Silveri: And it's part of the Great Smokies today?

Stephens: Well, it's part of the Great Smokies.  Well, it's the eastern end that you see the... full of ridges.  Boundary up there, up to the left... well, the extreme eastern end of that is a landlocked valley called the Cataloochee.

Silveri:  So lets move on...

Stephens:  This little story will tell how I got there.  This Verne Rhoades was highly educated... fine man who was chief of the land purchase.  And then head forester... first head forester... there was no forester in this area, and later they got him to serve as purchase director.  So he said, "I want you to go back in Cataloochee and find out the names of the landowners."  And just about like the fellow who said, "You take the message to Garcia," in Cuba, that's about all the man said.  So I got to Waynesville and got off the train right by a wholesale grocery house, and I went over to the wholesale grocery house and I said, "Isn't there a little store back in the Cataloochee Valley?"  He said, "Sure is.  Hub Caldwell owns the store there."  I said, "I want to go back in there."  He said, "You'd better run real quick, because that's Hub's truck all loaded up ready to go."  And I ran over there right quick, and sure enough, he was just ready to start.  And it was piled high with sugar sacks.  Virtually... there were some other groceries, but it was mainly sugar sacks. (Silveri chuckles.)  And he says, "Yeah, I'll take you."  And I think he had a passenger or two in this little ole Ford truck's cab, so he let me ride up on the sugar sacks.  And we rode up over a oh 4 to 500 ft. pass called Cole's Creek Gap and into there.  I'd been told that Jarvis Palmer might be the... [some conversation is lost as tape is turned]

Tape II, Side 1

Stephens: He's a NC background man from down in the Cape Fear River Valley.

Silveri: Chancellor Highsmith?

Stephens: Yes, but he's been in the Southwest most of his life.

Silveri: Yes, down in the Jacksonville area.  Florida.

Stephens: Well, he came here from there, but he was in Oklahoma and Baton Rouge. He's had a good... I see a good deal of him.

Silveri:  I want to get back to the time when you were in the Cataloochie Valley.  We were talking about 1926 and 1927?

Stephens:  Well, I was there, actually, I guess, in '27 and '28, but conditions were going...back then there wasn't much money around.  The real estate boom had already begun to sag, and by 1930 we had our bank demoralization and trouble here.

Silveri:  I wanted to ask you, do remember how many property owners you counted in the Cataloochie Valley?

Stephens:  I guess between 30 and 40.

Silveri:  30 or 40, in a valley that was how big?  Can you give us some idea?

Stephens:  Yes.  The part that was in farms... the valley itself was, of course, much larger, but because of the forest slopes around it.  But in farms, I guess one by four miles.  And then there was an adjoining valley called Little Cataloochie, which was probably one by two miles.  

Silveri:  And they were largely small farms?

Stephens:  Largely small farms, but what the mountaineers called "good livers."  They had enough to eat, though not much more than money to meet their simple needs.

Silveri:  No extensive livestock holders?

Stephens:  Yes, it was rather interesting.  They wintered their cattle in large barns, and there's a good example of this right near the eastern entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  They wintered their cattle in these sheltered barns, for which they had made hay right in their farms, right down there, and there were sparse supplies of level land.  And then as soon as the danger of freeze passed, they would drive them out onto the mile-high country where there were mountain-top pastures, which they knew as the balds. B-a-l-d-s.  Cataloochie's favorite grazing place was called The Ledge, which, on the map shows as The Ledge Bald, which is the headwaters to the north and west of that valley.

Silveri:  A bald is a natural development, that's not been cut over, is that right?

Stephens:  Uh...they're not absolutely sure, but they believe that for some reason, freezing conditions have destroyed the trees, although they suspect at times that they were burned off by the Indians.  But in any event the grass is the dominant feature, and then there's a surrounding border of rhododendron and laurel or kalmia, and a flame azalea, which is another heath plant.  

Silveri:  What's kalmia?

Stephens:  Kalmia is mountain laurel.  It's common all they way to New England, I believe.  Kalmia Latifolia. 

Silveri:  What about the...was there a church in the Cataloochie Valley?

Stephens:  I believe at least two churches, but they did not have regular preachers.

Silveri:  Do you remember what denominations they were?

Stephens:  Baptists and Methodists, I believe.

Silveri:  How about school?  Was there a school there?

Stephens:  There was a small school which I believe, I should guess, maybe it had the first six years of grades.

Silveri:  What about the school house?

Stephens:  Well, maybe two teachers...I can't remember exactly, but very simple and primitive.

Silveri:  When you boarded at this gentleman's house, did you have a room of your own, or did you...

Stephens:  Well, I slept there in one of the rooms provided for visiting fishermen, so I slept in a good place, made for visitors.  But there was another time where I did board with a family where we were considerably more crowded than that.  I think there were 3 or 4 people slept in the room on Noland Creek, where Walt Jenkins had a home where a pair of cruisers and talleymen just boarded out there to cruise that particular valley.  And it was very interesting to watch...one of the older sons would come in our room before daylight and build a fire.  And then the family would be up by daylight to give us breakfast.  And soon after daylight we'd be out on the trail going to work.

Silveri:  What kind of meals did they serve?

Stephens:  Well, cornbread.  Let's see if I remember... what they called canned goods, which were put up in glass jars, which would be beets and apples and then pickled cabbage, which is sauerkraut really.  Those I do remember...there must have been many others.  I didn't suffer from a lack of variety.  It just happened that I'd been reared with a background of that sort where it was relished by me... you have a little more cornbread and a little more something to drink when you want it.  Then...so it was the "good livers," as they were called, that had a simple but ample life.  

Silveri:  Do you remember what it cost to board there?

Stephens:  Well, I guess that the park purchasing agency paid it for us, but I'm guessing 30 or 40 dollars a month for the bed and the food.  We slept in many places, and stayed in the upper, under-roof second floor, and one that I enjoyed very much was up Cooper's Creek, where... this was a real old timer, and he would come up with a lamp...they're very modest people... he'd say, "Roll out, boys, and come get your coffee."  And he'd come up with a lamp, though actually we had a good breakfast, but he'd just say, "Get your coffee."  And this fellow had this habit of getting up way before daylight, and I remember one of the mountain boys who was a talleyman or something, sat up in bed one morning and said, "You know, I'm going off somewhere where they'll let me stay all night!"

Silveri:  You were expected to get up when they got up, is that it?

Stephens:  Yea, and it was just barely light enough to walk the trail, when they got us going.  Well, we needed a full day to do our estimating work.

Silveri:  They went to bed at dusk, then?

Stephens:  Yes, because they did have oil lamps, but it was not good light to read by.  Of course broadcasting was almost unheard of.  They had some amusements.  One night they...down at the church down the valley there's a singing teacher who's got some new songbooks.  Let's go down there and see what's going on.  And they issued paperback books with a few new religious tunes, but mainly the old standby's.  The publisher will get those republished and republished.  I had a friend who did that for years.

Silveri:  Shape note?

Stephens: Are you familiar with shape note?  Well, it indicates the relative interval to the next note.  It doesn't tell you the pitch, the reason being that the shape note printing will be on the staff at whatever level that the key required.  So, it's an interval, and you think when you look at a triangle and then a square, or what have you, or a diamond, that you're going to jump a fourth interval or a third interval, or what not.  That's the way the shape notes worked.  But anyway, these people with the new songbooks went through once with the reader humming, and the second time through they sang the words and the tune, which may have been a new tune to them.  Those people were after a fashion, after their fashion, unusual musicians, as I see it.  And they have still these old-time shape note singing conventions.  I guess you know about them.

Silveri: You mentioned the homes where you stayed.  Did you see any musical instruments there that were played?

Stephens:  In those particular homes there was not.  I took a guitar back into the mountains.  So this man Rosser, our party chief, knew how to play a guitar and sing, so he brought out from memory all his old childhood tunes.  And we'd sit around in the evening and listen to him, and I don't think I did much with the guitar.  But it was quite interesting to me to hear them play, and many of them are based on the early British Isle tunes.

Silveri: Well, in the Cataloochie Valley you did not see a guitar or a banjo or a fiddle?  Or a dulcimer?

Stephens: I don't remember seeing one at all, though there's been a comeback in musical instruments, largely thanks to Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a long-time friend of mine, who died two or three years ago.  You've heard something about him, haven't you?

Silveri: I have met him.

Stephens: Oh, you did.  Good.  Well, he was something of a scholar, but an unusual showman.  He knew how to get things going.

Silveri: Okay, you did mention that they had singing schools, that they were learning the shape note singing.  Did you ever attend any of their... did you have need of preachers [inaudible]

Stephens: I did not go to a preaching at least in them, but I've heard them at times, and they supply the emotional needs of the people.  Their life pattern is rather quiet... restrained.  So they need that and they need it today.  I drove by some place in the country last evening where there was a Holiness Meeting going on, and the man was shouting to be prepared.  There was a real need for it.

Silveri: I think you said before that you thought the two churches were Methodist and Baptist.

Stephens: Yes, plus this Holiness, which is... I don't think it... it may be an organized sect now, based in Cleveland, Tennessee.  But it's... I think it just came of these spontaneous small congregations not requiring standards in education, or even religious ritual, but meeting some kind of need of the people.

Silveri:  You did mention, however, that you did ride in or ride out with a Presbyterian... who was trying to come in and proselytize?

Stephens: Well, I don't know whether that is the right word or not.  They were just trying to do their duty by...  well, I suspect that some of these churches are not strictly denominational.  That where ever they could get a preacher, they would ask him to come.

Silveri: I see.  I suppose I could go on for hours talking about those years up in the cove.  It's a fascinating life to me.  But your experience in those woods ended in 1929, did it?

Stephens:  Yes, probably late '28.  Then I went to work for the newspaper.  Worked about four years for the newspaper.

Silveri:  But from '26 to '28 you weren't just in the Smokies.  You were doing other ...

Stephens: I was on two trips overseas that I mentioned.  I guess some of that time I was not doing anything.  Then after the Smokies work, then I went to work for the newspaper, starting down in the type makeup, in the composing room.

Silveri: What year was that?

Stephens: That was during 1928.  So I worked there about four years, the last year in the advertising part.  Next to the last year.  I was out when the front doors of the banks were locked, I was out trying to sell newspaper advertising.  So I'm much more cheerful than most people, because everything has gotten better since that time.

Silveri: You had a front-row seat in what happened in Asheville.

Stephens:  It was mighty hard on some people.  They just lost everything.

Silveri:  How did your father weather that period?

Stephens: Well, I suspect so far as most of his investments go that he was washed out.  The newspaper repurchase I mentioned took the form of Mr. Webb's taking the newspaper as a going business and my father taking the Haywood Street location, which is now Woolworth's store.  They were just ready to move, and that's a well-run outfit, as I guess you know, and so they've done a little better every year since then.  So it worked out reasonably well.  He was quite careful and provident with his own family, even though he was in the real estate business, which gets you in trouble mighty easily.  But he saw ahead with great care for his family.

Silveri: You say 1930 Webb bought our your father...

Stephens:  About that, yes.

Silveri: And combined with the evening paper...

Stephens: The Times, yes.

Silveri: The Times.  And so The Asheville Citizen-Times was created.  Who was the owner then?

Stephens:  Of The Times?

Silveri: Of The Times, yes.

Stephens: A man named Don Elias, who had a background from some of the counties to the west.  He appealed to Mr. Webb, I guess, as a partner, because he had an active interest in politics and some business talent, so they seemed to get along all right together.  Mr. Webb, the irony is, sold the Times ... when he bought the Citizen with my father, sold it for $20,000, and I understand that when Mr. Webb took the Times in the merger of the two papers, he took it in at a million dollars.  It was before the worst of the crash, so Mr. Elias got a pretty good arrangement with Mr. Webb.  And he later, I believe, got possession of it and was head of it for a while.  Then then some Greenville investors, a family named Peace, P-e-a-c-e, from Greenville, South Carolina, came in and bought virtually all of the stock.

Silveri:  That was the beginning of the way it is now?

Stephens:  That was the beginning of the present management, in which Bunnelle became publisher, and still is Chairman of the Board, I believe, of the corporation, and Wynne, who was a student at Asheville-Biltmore when I was in the printing business, and has been a long-time friend, a first-class man, was made publisher when Bunnelle withdrew active direction.  Bunnelle lives down on the South Carolina coast, I believe, now.  Wynne has run things, but Bunnelle is still nominally, and for more in practically in authority.  He's the final authority. [Robert E. Bunnelle, Richard B. Wynne]

Silveri:  All right, let's get back to the Depression years.  You were in Asheville.  You saw... you know the real estate boom took place in the '20's.  And then it busted.

Stephens: By the late '20's.

Silveri: Late 20's... '27, '28.

Stephens: I never missed a... Webb, while we were overseas, wrote my father that things were quick... rapidly... going bad in the real estate field.  That is '27, I guess.

Silveri: And then the big, big bust in the country came in October, 1929.  And the next few years were very desperate years for the city, because people lost a good deal of money.

Stephens: Well, yes, it had a very large bonded debt from over expansion of water line systems and public buildings, so that when the final bank crashes came locally... my dates are not exact on them. .I believe the Wall Street crashes were in '28 or '29.  And my recollection is within a year after that there were local bank closings.  And it took us four or five years to work out with the bond holders agents a satisfactory plan, and perhaps you've read the section of the newspaper recently which quite carefully goes over the details of that.

Silveri:  Yes, I did read also your letter that came later on.

Stephens: One or two matters were overlooked which were quite important. My immediate... or one of my superiors was the one who worked out the plan of going out on the market while the faith was so low in Asheville's ability to pay Asheville's bonds that they bought up at favorable prices a large part of Asheville's refunded public debt.  As I understand it, they never failed on one cent of the principal value, although they did get concessions on interest rates that made a big difference.  But there never was a default as I understand it ... technically, that is.

Silveri: OK.  Well, when did you terminate your association with the newspaper?  '33?

Stephens: Somewhere along there.  My father called my attention to an opening to edit a farm magazine of the farm cooperative here called the Farmers' Federation.

Silveri: The McClure...?

Stephens: Right.  And so I went to work as editor, or managing editor, whatever it's called; later it was called editor.  But in any event I worked four years in that farm cooperative

Silveri: Could you explain a little bit about that?  And Mr. McClure, I understand, is the one who founded it?  

Stephens:   That's right.  Well, he was the son of the head of the McCormick Theological Seminary, which is Presbyterian in Chicago.  This is James G. K. McClure, Jr.  He married a wealthy and very talented Chicago lady named Elizabeth Cramer, I believe.  [Elizabeth Skinner Cramer]  He was full of ideas and full of energy... a very convincing, winning personality.  And so he soon started up a farm cooperative based on  the Danish, largely Danish, but I believe the English models too.  But, in any event, he started that, and a farm supply cooperative and gradually added one branch after another in various counties until he had somewhere between twelve and eighteen counties being served by this farm supply and marketing cooperative.  

Silveri: In the Asheville area?

Stephens:  Right.  And it probably did a lot of good.  In the time it was much needed when business was slow.  And he didn't use his talking talents in preaching.  He'd been trained as a ministry.  But he used them in talking the Yankees into contributing to these project development funds. They were called educational development fund, I believe, or something of the sort.  He must've... I just don't know how much money he raised in New York and Cleveland and Chicago and poured it into these projects.  I think it was mostly useful activity.

Silveri: You became editor of the... what was the name of the journal?

Stephens:  Farmers' Federation News.

Silveri: It came out of Asheville?

Stephens: Yes, came out of Asheville.

Silveri:  And it dealt with the progress of the Federation?

Stephens:  Yes, it reported on Federation activities.  But it had a  good deal of general information, and I was able to use my Chapel Hill connections to get some very useful contributors and ideas from there.  Particularly this rural social economics and Danish methods and such things as that.

Silveri: The magazine was mostly for the membership in the cooperative?

Stephens:  Yes,  you're welcome to see the bound copies if you want to get an idea of what it was like.

Silveri: How long did you remain in that position?

Stephens: Four years.

Silveri: Four years... until 1937?

Stephens: As I remember it was '36.  I'm not sure how... because the Stephens' Press was founded in 1936.  That's definite.  I simply bought the operating printing plant which had the contract for printing the Farmers' Federation News.  And I let myself in for practically forty years of hard work.  Rewarding work, but a small printing business is under the most rigorous competition.  And you do without any price agreement with the others in your industry or anything else.  You just fight it out.  And that's what I did for much of my life, but I was able to get a great deal of reward out of it.

Silveri: All right.  Before we get into that... that was 1936.  What kind of impressions had you made of FDR and the New Deal?

Stephens: Well, I happened to think he was on the right track, because I had read Stuart Chase, A New Deal prior to his election.  Others were not so sympathetic, including Mr. McClure.  They represented the capitalist Chicago outlook, I guess.

Silveri: What did his wife's family make their money in?

Stephens: Quaker Oats.  Their name was Stuart... I think Cramer was his wife's name.  Anyway her brother was named was Douglas Stuart, who was head of the Quaker Oats Company.  [McClure's brother-in-law Douglas Stuart was actually the husband of McClure's sister Harriet McClure Stuart: see We Plow God's Fields by John Ager] 

Silveri: So were you enthusiastic about Roosevelt and the New Deal?

I guess you might say so. I thought he was on the right track.  The whole John Maynard Keynes economy has been based on that approach.   You have to get purchasing power into a wide part of your market, or your market doesn't work.

Silveri: What about your father?  What was his opinion of Roosevelt?

Stephens: Well, in general I would call him a progressive.  He would always look at new ideas,  and particularly he thought the Tennessee Valley Authority idea was good.  He did a good deal of study of that.

Silveri:  I want to also back tract a little to the creation of the Smokies, the Great Smokies National Park

Stephens:  Well, alright.  I'll... maybe I'd better answer your questions on it.  Except I'll say it started in the mid twenties.  The Movement.  Although there was a realization in the '90's that some kind of large forest reserves should be set up in the Southern Appalachians, and that did not really succeed and went into the form of forest reserve and the energy went into the Week's Act which created the US Forest Service.  So the National Park idea remained dormant until, I understand a couple in Knoxville named Mr. and Mrs. Davis tried to stir interest and did stir enough so that it was picked up on both sides of the Smokies.  And then...

Silveri: [Inaudible]

Stephens:  There was that.  And then we always believe that the Tennessee's leaders know how to toot their own horn pretty well.  There was one called Birth of a National Park by Carlos Campbell, which I believe that he took reasonable care.  But the facts are that more land and more money were contributed by North Carolina than by Tennessee.

Silveri:  This has nothing to do with the Natahala National Forest that was created?

Stephens:  That is part of the US forest service under the Weeks Forest Purchase Act.  [Weeks Act of 1911]

Silveri:  And the purchases for that national forest were begun before the Great Smokies?

Stephens:  Yes.  The first purchases were on the east slope of the Blue Ridge, and they became a part of the Pisgah National Forest.  And the big step forward in it was the action of the executives of George Vanderbilt's estate in selling.  I notice that it is always called "deeded" to the government, but it doesn't say the government paid for it...but in selling for cash to the government at a moderate rate, the Pisgah area.  And I suspect that after that success and the setting up of the first national forest based on the Pisgah in Asheville, headed by Verne Rhoades.

Silveri:  That always interests me because I understand that the Vanderbilts at one time had or owned approximately 140,000 acres of land.

Stephens:  That's right, and over 100,000  went into the sale to the Forest Service, I believe.

Silveri:  I'd like to know, if you can tell me, how he happened to get a hold of all that land.

Stephens:  Uh, he was an idealistic and very well financed young man who came here soon after the railroad.  And the legend is that he sat on the porch of the old Battery Park, up on that hill, and swung his hand and said, "I'd like to own all that I can see here."  And it was just about the extent of the Pisgah land track.

Silveri:  You mean he had agents going out and buying up pieces of property?

Stephens:  Yeah, right down to where we are here.  His agents went out and quietly bought out one farm after another over a period of several years, and one morning the community woke up realizing that Mr. Vanderbilt owned from about where we sit on beyond Mt. Pisgah, with certain exceptions, such as the place we're sitting on.

Silveri:  Did he pay a good price for what he bought?

Stephens:  Well, it was a willing seller and a willing buyer.  It was done so quietly; it was not done by any force of law.  Then perhaps a personal part of that might be mentioned.  When my father came here, he loved real estate and he loved improving things.  It wasn't a year that he was here until the agents of the Vanderbilt estate approached him, and he bought Biltmore Village.  He had two or three committed re-purchasers, so I can't say it was just the grand purchase of the whole village, but anyway he was the purchaser of Biltmore Village.

Silveri:  Why did Vanderbilt want to sell it?

Stephens:  Well, Vanderbilt was dead by then.  He died in 1916, and the executives I've mentioned of his estate wanted to liquidate, maybe for estate tax reasons, I don't know why.  They wanted to liquidate much of their holdings and what they held on to was the tract from about North Carolina Highway 191 on the far side of the French Broad River, to just about where we're sitting.  They held onto 5 to 7,000 acres; then they sold somewhere around 1,000 of that to the Biltmore Forest Company in the early '20's.  So those were the steps in the liquidation of the vast Vanderbilt holdings.  First the National Forest purchase and then the Biltmore Village purchase by George Stephens, and then a small syndicate bought Biltmore Forest from the Vanderbilt estate, I believe.  And then at some point the estate was incorporated as the Biltmore Company, which it is now, of which George Cecil is the president and his brother is the vice president.

Silveri:  Why didn't the area which is now the Great Smoky National Park come under the Weeks Law and become a national forest, instead of whatever it is now?

Stephens:  The enthusiasm was to get a national park; as you know the forest program is to cut and replant, or manage, in one form or another...

[telephone rings]

[tape stops, and conversation is resumed while Silveri and Stephens are riding in a car.]

Silveri:  We're driving now through West Asheville...we're going to be heading toward Canton, but we'll turn off and head towards Cherokee, right?

Stephens:  That's right.  But we started by leaving Biltmore, where interstate 40 crosses US 25...the old road of Asheville/Hendersonville.  And at that point, we passed the old Drum Spring, where probably the first political meeting to organize in the county was held, right by the lodge gate of the Biltmore estate.  That is historic...later in the flood of 1916 several people were hanging in trees where the flood waters were gathering, and some finally gave up and dropped off and drowned and others survived.  But that old base there and it's only second to the settlement on the east side, near interstate 40, where the first Davidson came over the mountain and settled, and was scalped by the Indians later.  Samuel Davidson, I believe.  So we were in a pretty historic area, and then coming this way we crossed the French Broad near the old traditional crossing, used by the Indians, which we've known as Sandy Bottom, I believe.  So we followed and continued to follow on interstate 40, almost literally the early pioneer routes, and before that the Indian routes, which tended not to follow the stream bed, and to cross the stream many times, because of the difficulties of flooding... seasonal floods... but tended to follow the long low ridges paralleling the stream.  So our interstate 40 route is literally following a low, long ridge that happened just in the north of the settlement.  When General Rutherford came through in 1776 on a punitive expedition because the Cherokee were troubling the foothills settlers, why he camped right near this Enka rayon plant, the old Rutherford campground.  And that was near the old Sand Hill settlement, which was one of the oldest, and which has now a cemetery, which has the greater number of graves of pre-1800 settlers than any in this whole mountain area.  As we go along here we're looking southwest to Mt. Pisgah, which was more or less the heart of George Vanderbilt's purchase.  It's an outstanding landmark, of course named for a biblical landmark.

Silveri:  You've always referred to it also as "Mt. Pisgah and the rat."

Stephens:  Because to the left, the lower ridge looks to many like the back of a rat.

Silveri:  Climbing up?

Stephens:  Climbing to Mt. Pisgah.  Then in icy weather on the northeast face of Mt. Pisgah is a bare rock shining area, known as the bride and groom.  And that can be seen.  It would take perhaps getting started with a child's imagination, and then you'd never doubt it thereafter.  But as we go along here we are going just along the path that the Indians traveled in the old route which was then known later as General Rutherford's war trail.  

Silveri:  Now, where the city of Asheville is located, I've heard it referred to as the Asheville plain.

Stephens:  Plateau.

Silveri:  Plateau.  That extends down toward Hendersonville, doesn't it?

Stephens:  That extends to the Blue Ridge slightly south of Hendersonville, where the Appalachians divide, perhaps 4 miles southeast of Hendersonville.  And then the plateau on the north side is of course not a watershed, but a series of very deep gorges where the rivers that enter the French Broad have cut through the other parallel range, which is known variously by other names, but mainly as the Unicoi's, which is a Cherokee origin name.  And it cut through the gorge in the famous Madison County, which has many isolated gorges of its own, where the English origin early people...I guess both English and mostly Scottish were landlocked for well over a century, had enough to eat and were able to carry on their traditions, particularly in folk music.  As the...almost the only resource of entertainment.  Some dancing, so-called "square" dancing...so well preserved that a man who was born in that area, on the campus of Mars Hill College, had the vision to preserve it and to get other people to help him.  And that was the beginning of the Asheville Folk Festival, under the leadership of Bascom Lamar Lunsford.  I think I watched the first gathering, and except for one summer when I was overseas, every gathering since then.  And Mr. Lunsford became my good friend, and finally we published a small biography, which a newspaper man [Loyal Jones] wrote the text, largely interview, and I did the editing and design, and contributed most of the pictures and the lines under the pictures.  In our edition we added my small book on square dancing, called It's Fun to Square Dance, which is a simple outline of the more popular movements.  So that all together became a little paperback Bascom Lunsford, Minstrel of the Appalachians.  Which was his favorite self-characterization.
[Loyal Jones, Minstrel of the Appalachians:  The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford (University Press of Kentucky 2002) (original copyright 1984 Appalachian Consortium Press)]
He was a born showman, but in such a modest, disarming way that you were hardly conscious of it.  But he knew how to run things.  He was a country lawyer, made part of his living there, moved his family out to a tract, where his wife had her early life.  So that held things together.  He had, I believe, six daughters and one son, as I recall.  They could be helpful.

Silveri:  Now we're driving out here...and those grassy areas on top of these mountains, are those natural balds, or have they been cut down?

Stephens:  Some are natural, some are cut down for pasturage.  In the early days featured, really, agriculture based on grasslands, making hay enough to carry your cattle through the winter, raising them on the high ridges of the natural balds in the summer.  And the place we crossed west of Asheville, about 28 or 30 miles, is called Clyde.  Which was, for many years, the leading point for shipping beef cattle in the entire state.  We are in just the beginning of the underlying limestone area, which is much more favorable to grass.  Once you cross the Unicois, and go into Tennessee, the limestone base is much more pronounced, and the grass is much more prosperous.  Therefore, Tennessee is, for the south, one of the outstanding livestock areas.  So we're going through a natural gap, which, strangely enough, leads us into another river valley of the Pigeon River, which is another flowing north to the Unicoi river gorge, which interstate 40 follows, by the way.  But this gap we passed through, approaching the town of Canton, makes us rise from Asheville Plateau, rise perhaps two or three hundred feet, into the Pigeon River Plateau, just right next to each other, but at a higher elevation.  And some bright man had the idea of damming the Pigeon, and turning it through the gap between the two plateaus, and generating power.  But the plans fell through, so my engineer father-in-law told me.  But nevertheless, the Pigeon has been a great resource of water, having in its upper reaches a dam for the storage of water, to serve the giant corporate paper mill, the Champion plant in Canton.  And then farther down, having a dam called the Walters Dam, at a very acute part of the gorge, from which the water was carried through solid rock tunnels to the border of the state, and there dropped, I believe, for about 700 feet, to get a very large power and generating capacity.

Silveri:  Is this a private generator?

Stephens:  It was developed by the big electric holding company called Electric Bond and Shaft.  And later marketed, probably at no small profit, to a regional company, now known as Carolina Power and Light Company, headquartered in Raleigh.  So it's my understanding that untold millions were made in the financial transactions involving the development and sale of power facilities, all built into our electric rates, no doubt, by this day.

Silveri:  I want to ask you about the soil.  For somebody who comes from the north, the soil is very strange.

Stephens:  We have clay, predominately in the valley, but when you get into the mountains...

[end of tape]

Tape II, Side 2:

Stephens:  We change from what is known as Cecil clay loam in the valley, and I'm an amateur on this...I just read what the farm agent said...to the mountain soil known as Porter's loam, which surely must be largely the residue from great amounts of decaying vegetable matter.  It's black and generally rather rich.  Farmers tended to clear land, crop it a few years, and when erosion and over-cropping made it less productive, they would abandon it.  Often it would re-vegetate, with briars, and perhaps black locust, finally become a normal forest, and then they would take the new tract.  And that was the story from the late 1700's to the late 1800's.  But a man down in the middle of North Carolina, who became later the head of the US Soil Conservation Service, came forth with the idea that you did not need to let water just run, you could terrace it and make water walk.  And so from that came a great but slow salvation of portions of the Carolina Piedmont.  My memory doesn't always give me names as I would like to have them for you, but this was the eminent founder of the Soil Conservation Service, coming out of a Scotch-Irish, or maybe a highland Scotch background at the fall line of the Piedmont..

Silveri:  Now, as we drive along this road, I believe it's this road, later on there's a sign that says "beware of fog," or something of that nature.  I suppose everybody really knows that that's not fog, it's from the Champion paper mills, isn't it?

Stephens:  Greatly compounded by the atmospheric moisture. It is the well known California smog that surrounds the moist areas by the sea coast, and is trapped in by the surrounding mountains.  And we have exactly that situation here, which is called an atmospheric inversion, in which the warmer and moist and smoke-polluted air mass in the valley is sealed off apparently by a cold layer of air moving slowly across the top of it.  And as the day warms up and the sun begins to heat the air by radiation, then the smog generally disappears.  So that's the daily cycle during a large part of the year.  But it is so bad when compounded by the smog and the paper plant discharge, that they have to put in automatic speed control apparatus, which is operated by a sensor on the low side, which immediately lowers the curtain on the 55 speed signs, and lowers speeds.  And then will raise them again when the smog disappears. 

Silveri:  That's why the speed limit 55 miles an hour signs are larger than normal?

Stephens:  They are mechanized signs.  Quite an ingenious device.  Some devices...looking like funnels...are the sensors beside the highway.  We passed one to the east of the signs, and then one I believe, near Clyde, on the west of the signs.

Silveri:   I understand that Champion paper company has cleaned up some of the...

Stephens:  Cleaned a great deal of it, yes.  Much of the discharge they have recaptured through smoke arrestors and sulfide absolvers.  I think one of the major effluents into the air would be carbon...perhaps it's carbon disulfide, but it's a sulfide, anyway.  And that can be recaptured and re-utilized for commercial capital.  They have been doing something on this for close to 50 years, under the leadership of Reuben B. Robertson, a son-in-law of the founder Peter D. Thompson, who was sent down here, the story goes, when the mill was unable to operate well because the head of wood buying and the head of the mill operation, and the head of perhaps other parts, would quarrel instead of getting along together.  And this very glad but frightened Scottish descendent of the northern Scotch islands (perhaps the Hebrides) came down and was put in charge.  And they started then the practice of having lunch together every day.  And it was not long before things were running smoothly, and Reuben Robertson said, "All I asked them to do was sit down and eat together."  But anyway, the mill prospered, became the largest pulp mill in the world, I believe.  And later put in perhaps the largest web or width of paper making in the country.  Many now overshadow it, but Robertson's leadership, and particularly his dependence on research and on inviting the ideas of the employee, are surely responsible for the leadership of Champion.  He took away some of the brightest men in other work... I remember my manual training teacher was employed to come out to the mill and run an employee upgrading program, which the mill financed.  And as an employee increased his skill and productivity, he was automatically upgraded, thanks to education by the company.  Both in the physical research... there again I believe Peter Thompson's coating of paper, which began in Hamilton Ohio, near Cincinnati, resulted in...

Silveri:  [unintelligible]

Stephens:  Yes, I would imagine...resulted in what's called a production coating process, thanks to the Robertson research, by which the original running of the paper, which otherwise would have been run and rerun for coating has the coating applied to it before it even gets out of the machine.

Silveri:  Oh.

Stephens:  So the revolution on production coating of paper resulted in low cost quick paper and the emergence of magazines for illustration, like the great rise of...I said Time, and Time is one, but...

Silveri:  National Geographic?

Stephens:  National Geographic, but even more than that, the big illustrated magazines of the 40's, which would have been Look and Life.  That is wholly built on the lowered cost of production coated paper.  Then came along, and I speak here again from a career in offset lithography for commercial printing... then came along Reuben Robertson's idea that you could apply a much glossier coating and get a very high grade coated paper which would reproduce the tiniest of half-tone illustrations.  And that was from running the paper after it had been coated, through nickel compressing and hardening rollers...chrome nickel, and so the product was called "chrome coat."  And it is another revolution in paper-making.  Later followed by other companies like F.D. Warren, West Virginia Pulp and International.  But Reuben Robertson, right here in these mountains, was the pioneer.  So we have a good reason to be proud of what happened around us, in spite of interstate 40 as we're riding along.  We saw the smokestacks of the Champion mill on top of us in Canton as we went along.  Now we're passing the point that I mentioned where so many cattle were shipped after being driven in off the high grassy mountaintops, the balds.  And that, Clyde, was a tremendous shipping point, and still is.  Though shipping is not concentrated in one place now...it's done by railroads, more by truck perhaps, because you can do it in smaller groups for both places.  But we are going through an area with many interesting things.  We're looking now at the Haywood Technical Institute, which is an offspring of our public education system in North Carolina.  And it was greatly endowed by a man who came from the mid-west, I believe from the Dayton, Ohio area, where the Dayton rubber company was operating.  They came down here for the cooling effect of our mountain water on plastic rubber parts.  In the mold, they could cool them quickly that way, and it did not hurt the water...very much.  I doubt if the mountain trout liked it well after it was warmed.  Anyway this man Freelander made a marvelous success here in the Dayton Rubber Manufacturing Company, and he put a lot of his money into the Haywood Technical Institute for natural related applied science training...forestry and products coming out of the valley.  So he was a wise...a worthwhile benefactor...somewhat even better than Reuben Robertson.  And then along came the refugees from the Austria-German border, some of them very enterprising, a number of them of Jewish background, and they had escaped just barely ahead of the Nazi's.  And they settled next to the Dayton Rubber Manufacturing plant, using a patented rubber molded shoes process, by which the upper could be naturally molded into the shoe sole, and therefore a greatly improved and more economical product.  So in the Welco Shoe Corporation, we can thank the enterprise of people who were fleeing from Hitler for that.  Then another escapee from that area went all the way across the Trans-Siberian Railway and went around and landed out at a community farther west called Andrews, and took over an old abandoned tannery.  They've cut out most of the tanned wood and tanned bark.  And so Maximilian Alexandrowitz, having gone all the way across the Vladivostok and across the Pacific and across the USA and landing in the valley here, of all things developed a large chicken business in those great cavernous tanneries.  There's another example of the people who will survive in spite of everything.  And the chicken business, in the '30's and '40's grew tremendously in the mountains because it was a cool climate where you could breed chickens.  And it spread all the way down the mountains, nearly to Atlanta, down the Blue Ridge.  And there were chicken houses all along the mountains there, and so many on Mt. Oglethorpe, at the terminus of the Appalachian trail, that they had to abandon it as the terminus of the Appalachian trail because it was suffocating the chicken houses.  So they now started to bring them out a little farther north on that 2,000 mile trail.  So these are some of the goings-on here, we're passing now Lake Junaluska, one of the religious assemblies where people take happy refuge in the coolness of the mountains, and meet for periods of a week or a month... perhaps some of them stay all summer.  And Lake Junaluska is the assembly grounds for the Methodist Church.  And it's been highly successful...it's had good management and good leadership.

Silveri:  Is this the entrance to Maggie Valley?

Stephens:  We are soon to enter Maggie Valley.  When I first came through here it did not have the name Maggie Valley, but it did have a little post office there, and one clever tourist-minded man realized that Maggie was too good of a name to miss, so he got the community to adopt the name Maggie Valley, and it followed the not too attractive pattern of Gatlinburg, in growing into a roadside strip tourist development.  But that is the origin of Maggie, and I've known Maggie fairly well.  She was named, I believe when the postmaster was casting around for a name when their daughter was a teenager.  There were just a myriad of little post offices, because the roads were poor.  And Federal policy was to set up a post office within half a day's walking distance from virtually every citizen.  So the old maps are just speckled with post offices with picturesque names like "Hard Scrabble" and "Ledger" and "Daybook," just whatever struck the owner.  This Queen's Farm is a summer boarding house of a Valley family, which has very happily kept boarders for many years.  The son became a secretary in Washington to a congressman.  Sam Queen was a famous square-dance leader, among other things, and he employed a Cherokee.  Now this rarely has ever happened, but this Cherokee became angry at Sam Queen and shot him.  Cherokees generally are peaceful people.  This is Maggie Valley we are entering now.

Silveri:  It's narrow, and as we go along we'll go up into Saco gap, is it?

Stephens:  Soco.

Silveri:  Soco.

Stephens:  Which was Cherokee Sagwa'hi, I believe.  And it was the ambush place where the prowling raiding Indians from the west, Shawnee, perhaps, were massacred.  Except for one survivor who was reputed to have had his ears cut off and was sent back to take the message home.  But this country was the domain of the lumber barons in my early youth, in the 1900's.  After climbing across some of the high mountains from a railroad station in Boston Gap to the west, we came into Maggie Valley and I'll never forget coming down after sleeping on the steep mountainside, coming down and being so thirsty in the Valley, and we found a woman who would sell us some buttermilk.  That being one of my favorite drinks, why we had buttermilk and went on back out into the mountains.  And the logging was then abandoned, but some of the little shacks were still there.  And in one of those we ran across a mountain family...didn't have much food, perhaps had a little corn patch...and they said, "Come in and eat with us."  But all the meat they had was groundhog.  Which is bearable, if you pickle it... perhaps boil it in vinegar.  So we had a very, what I thought was a very pleasant meal of groundhog and cornbread and some kind of wild preserves...strawberry probably, or huckleberry, pokeberry.  So this valley has very pleasant early associations for me.  Now later, I was a timber cruiser, and cruised, among others, Maggie Valley and also Cataloochie Valley.  And one of the men I remembered there, whose name was Lushius Caldwell, came out of one of the three families: Caldwell, Palmer and Woody.  Those were the only names in the valley, as I remember.  And Lush died this past week.  L-U-S-H is the way it's spelled out, but it was Lushius.  And he died in the '70's, but I remember him quite clearly in his younger days in the valley when he was in his 20's.  My other mention was about going into the Cataloochie Valley...one of his cousins named Hub Caldwell..."Cowell" they pronounced it...we in the piedmont call it Caldwell, but it's the same origin... Hub Caldwell was the man who ran the store and brought me in on the truck with the high pile of sugar sacks on it.  And Hub, I think, moved over to this valley and died here 10 or 20 years ago.  Many young people moved out for greater opportunity, stayed a while, and then the old timers they took their park land sale money and moved out.  Some lived there nearly till the end of their lives.  And these are Scottish and Scotch-Irish... you notice I make a distinction because the Scots are the people north of the border, and the Scotch-Irish are the transplanted trouble-makers from the Scottish border who were put in Ulster.  And then legislated out with tariff laws and forced to come to the USA, but maybe some of the fighters still stayed there.  As you've noticed, they're still fighting.  And so these have names like Ferguson...if I looked down my list, I could tell you many others...and some of them have become quite successful.  In one family, the Ferguson's...the chairman of the great ship-building firm in Newport News, a ship-building and dry-dock company, and then another one was chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. And another was the engineer in charge of the Mississippi River drainage project of the US flood control and drainage of the US Corps of Engineers.  We might stop at a telephone somewhere along here, and I'll see if Mrs. Alley is coming down... we can go a little farther if you like...yes, let's stop at the Chamber of Commerce.  Turn in on this driveway.  This lady whose name escapes me at the moment, but I may recall it, is from...

[tape stops, then resumes.]

Silveri:  Ok, we're talking about Hayesville...

Stephens:  Yes, it's...I'll let you get squared away, so you can listen a little easier.  [Pause]  Are we running now?

Silveri:  Yes.

Stephens:  Hayesville, for some reason had a rather early settlement in the Clay County area, perhaps because the land was open and good... simple for pioneer farming, and some of the very old records are still there, and some of the old timers perhaps are still living, just because there's not the opportunity to move out, and so you find some of them there... they're worth asking about.  Maybe I can find out ahead of time some whom you'd like to meet, if there's opportunity there.  I wonder if you know the source of my Hayesville information, and that comes through his having family living farther west... his name is Albert S. McLean, a former post-office employee, now retired, living on Aurora Drive, west of the tunnel.  

Silveri:  Somebody else mentioned his name...

Stephens:  Well, he is outstanding in one way, and he married in this area here, into the Carpenter family...one of the old families, and his wife is very ill, I think, has serious leg amputations, and he's confined to looking after her at home.  But in any event, he methodically has recorded the names in the cemeteries for nearly 200 miles in North Carolina, from the Catawba River near Hickory west to the end of the state.  That would include Hayesville, and his knowledge of people in nearly every section is just amazing.  So when you can get to talking with him, you will find he has far outrun any information I could give you.

Silveri:  Has that information been published?  About the cemetery names?

Stephens:  No, it is in his notes.  He and I have discussed publishing it, and it's a quite valuable historic document... it at least ought to be on microfilm, which I've done with some that I considered perishable material.  Now there's the mountain I came down off of...that's 6,000 feet, with black balsams.  An old lady's farm home down here supplied us with buttermilk. 

Silveri:  Was this road just a dirt trail then?  When you came down?

Stephens:  I don't remember a wagon road, but there must have been a dirt trail.  It was a logging railroad, which went up to this point where the Cataloochie Ranch Road turns off into this ghost town...artificial West spectacle... just beyond this the railroad took a turn to the north, and climbed out on the high top of one of the gaps farther northwest... with a map I could tell you... Black Camp Gap, I believe.  And then the railroad ran along the contour of the High Balsam range, and enabled them to cut timber such as you saw in that photograph with the great Spruce trees falling.  And those railroads were up as high as 5,000 feet, and strangely enough they didn't use the good sense that Champion used on the other side where it operated a mill at Smokemont.  These sawmills on this side ran with a standard gauge railroad, which meant a much wider cut grading, hillside grading, to build the roads.  And I saw no real reason except once you loaded the scrap, or salvage wood... the pulp wood... on at the site out in the mountains, then you could haul it all the way to the Champion mill without reloading.

Silveri:  What about the small sawmills?  What was the first way in which they powered the sawmills?

Stephens:  Well, the so-called Soco mills were small... were powered with what we called slaps...or the trimmed off scraps from a steam boiler... steam engine.  In fact that method was used until the passing out of the great double-band sawmills, which sawed 100,000 board feet a day.  In the late '20's those went through bankruptcy after bankruptcy, and somebody else would invest in them, and they'd go bankrupt again.  And all the... I know a really hefty amount of timber went out of here, and it's taken 50 years to get a good regrowth started.  It'll take another 50 to have many beacon trees, particularly the leafy and hardwood trees...Yellow Poplars, Walnut, Basswood.  The conifers seem to come back a little faster.  The conifers survived as a crown along the tops of the high mountains, for some reason the cuttings or slashes as they called it, did not burn to the very top of the mountain, but the mountainsides were terribly devastated by the burning of the uncontrolled conifer dry twigs.  Spruce boughs.  We're in the midst of the tourist area, of course climbing the mountain to Soco Gap. 

Silveri:  When we get over the gap, will we be in the Qualla reservation?

Stephens:  We are then in the Qualla Boundary where there's some restriction on uncontrolled building and is therefore somewhat better to look at.  There you have a dressed up Indian in Plains Indian costume.  A war bonnet would not have survived a few hours going through this brush.  But the outlander's idea of an Indian is perhaps the Sioux or Shawnee war bonnet.

Silveri:  Now, the Cherokee reservation...only Cherokees can live there, but I understand it's a very liberal definition.  If you have one-sixteenth Cherokee blood you can own land there, is that true?

Stephens:  I believe that you're on the tribal rolls with one-sixteenth blood, and can therefore have your share of Cherokee lands, but in fact what they do is to lease... each family leases the land.  They had to work out some pattern from the chaotic old way with no system, and so each Cherokee has a leased home and somewhat limited in the amount.  There is also a commercial lease pattern which enables... what the Bureau of Indian Affairs may believe to be useful enterprises to come in and lease, subject to good behavior, say for 20 years... long enough to make an investment and building.  And so a good many are what are called "licensed traders."  Though, each generation there's a push for the larger proportion of these white Indians, they're learning their ways.  And some of them are clever to begin with.  They were part descendents of the Scottish "licensed traders," who knew they would spend their lives in Indian country, so they took Indian wives, generally from the family of the chief.  And therefore, we got, instead of the down-grading, as I understood the "half-breeds" system of the plains in the west, we got an upgrading from the very finest of the Cherokee strain and the very keen-minded Scotch-Irish licensed traders. 

Silveri:  Do you know Fred Owl?  Frell Owl?

Stephens:  I know Frell Owl quite well, yes.  [Dr. Frell M. Owl] And he's the son of a blacksmith who had a shop right where the museum is now.  And that family is a good example of the Cherokee Scottish blood strain.  Frell says his name is Scottish.  I fancy that the English accent of the Cherokee is Scottish, but that is possibly rather far-fetched.  But I want you to listen to some of the Cherokee speech.  It will not be Frell Owl's accent, because he's... he's a sophisticated gentleman who has lived all over the country, and maybe I told you, was called back to Dartmouth where he was educated in Indian Programs, and given an honorary doctorate.

Silveri:  I heard him speak four years ago when the Western North Carolina Historical Association met at Cherokee.

Stephens:  Yes.

Silveri:  I have his speech on tape, and it's very interesting to hear him relate the feeling that the Indians have a very warm spot in their hearts for the Federal government... they cherish the relationship between the Federal government and the Indian tribes.

Stephens:  Well, that is the Cherokee experience.  It has been enlightened, and I believe we can thank North Carolina's political leadership and local leadership partly for that.  Particularly the enlightened leadership of William H. Thomas, who was in his youth a traitor, but who so won the affections of Chief Yonaguska [Drowning Bear] that he was adopted as his son, and became therefore the principal agent during the very precarious times when the Eastern Cherokees who had escaped from the forced migration were in need of land.  And that William H. Thomas episode surely is the seed of much of the feeling toward the white man and the Federal Government on the part of the Cherokee.  They have little to thank, really, and Chief Crow is one who expresses himself on the other side...

Silveri:  Yes.

Stephens:  But nevertheless, most of them are practical, easy to speak with human beings, and they just fell in as perhaps no other tribe that I know of did, with the ways of the white man.  They took the good, and adapted themselves where they had to.  And did not stand up and fight to the last man the way the Plains Indians did.

Silveri:  Well, Frell Owl did say in his talk how what the Cherokee had to go through for the many years in which the government's policy was to divest them of their cultural heritage.

Stephens:  Right.

Silveri:  They were taken to boarding schools, they weren't allowed to live their own way...

Stephens:  Yes, that has changed, and of course many back in the mountains speak Cherokee as a household language now.  I'm guessing possibly a fourth in the remote valleys here speak Cherokee habitually at home.  Though virtually all know Indian, because they went to what were called boarding schools, and are now called day schools. 

Silveri:  How large is the Qualla reservation?

Stephens:  I would have to look up the figures...I believe in acres it's something like 60,000.  Being therefore about...it'd be about 100 square miles...no...640 acres to a mile, if I remember right...no, it would be about 10 square miles.  And it's just a pocket in the side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which is 704 square miles.  But it straddles the eastern and southern entrance, so it was the next best thing to being transplanted to oil lands.  As a matter of fact, I think, in some ways it's better.  It was not so sudden and demoralizing as the oil. 

Silveri:  Now we're coming down into the Qualla reservation...

Stephens:  This is the head of Soco Creek Valley, and we'll begin to see the uppermost of homes along the roadside which are leased holds, probably, of tribal lands.  Some are quite intelligent, enterprising people, and the ablest of them have held staff jobs in the Indian Agency, so they've had a very favorable situation.  And out of their families have come many who are developing as good businessmen.  When we started, for instance, the Cherokee Historical Association to launch an outdoor drama, we had only a few Cherokee who could take part in the project as board members.  Each generation, or each decade that passes, more and more are taking a useful part.  I hope by the end of my lifetime the Cherokees will be in almost full control.

Silveri:  About how many Cherokees reside here?

Stephens:  I believe the count is something like 6,600 now, I could be wrong on that.  But I would say that Cherokee blood is half or slightly less... white blood the other part.  A little Negro blood.  Now here ahead is an example...  Lost Cove Campground is operated by a man named Arneech [?] Newman, who holds one of the better paying staff jobs on the Indian Agency, and as you see has used good sense in making a campground.  And he has a name that was originally probably something like Anetzie... just a slight change.  And the Cherokee build very well... they build brick houses, probably because the home finance lending system is built on good urban housing standards and federal patterns.  So while they're at it, they're getting enough money to build what's elastic and best, and there's a wide variety in their knowledge of caring for property, but many know how to do well with caring for things, while others are very slip-shod.

Silveri:  They just dedicated a new Cherokee historical museum, is it?

Stephens:  That is right, yes.  I hope we'll have time to see it.  That is the accumulation of a collection started in Asheville by a man named Burnham S. Colburn, a well educated and financially comfortable man, who I believe bought part perhaps of the Valentine collection in Richmond, which was a product of an early digging and looking into this area.  And then a man born right on the edge of the reservation, from the old pioneer family names of Samuel E. Beck bought it from Mr. Colburn, and added considerably to it and then sold it to the Historical Association, and then continued to help the Historical Association... because he was quite an intelligent man.  So it ended up, from what I understand, as a collection better than the Smithsonian's Cherokee collection.  And then they were able to get donations and federal grants, and help from the earnings of Unto These Hills and the Historical Association, and have built a, what you will see, is quite a worthwhile museum, and hired some professional exhibition consultants.  And they've done a good piece of work, as I've said.

Silveri:  You mentioned the outdoor drama Unto These Hills.  Are they able to break even, or are they losing money on that drama?

Stephens:  Well, the first year, it overran our fondest dreams by playing to 107,000 people.

Silveri:  What year was that?

Stephens:  1950.  And we just had good luck, especially...

Tape III, Side 1:

 [Silveri and Stephens are still talking as they drive.]

Stephens: ...especially fortunate with good people.

Silveri:  What was your relationship to Qualla?

Stephens:  I was one of the organizers of the Cherokee Historical Association, and have been on the board most of the years since then.

Silveri:  Why did you do that?  After all, you were way away in Asheville.

Stephens:  Well, many people have a sort of pride in the public spirit of... knowledge, and have constantly given their time to developing whatever their resources might be.  It happened that I liked the Cherokee portion  from my early contact as a timber cruiser, and I made friends then and continued, and for every reason it pleased me to do it, and a byproduct was some work for my publishing...

[the sound is coming in and out at this point, and stops altogether here...]

...Herbert H. Cutch [?] and joined the faculty at Chapel Hill.  This wise leadership in bringing in men has made Chapel Hill much what it is.  So, he said, "You can write plays, just write about your own..."

[Addressing Silveri] Are you on tape now?

Silveri:  Yes, we're on tape now.

Stephens:  And Cutch said, "You can write plays, you've got a wonderful historic heritage here."  So they started writing plays, and one of them was Paul Green, and many others did, but Paul Green was very successful and able. As I mentioned, when I was sent down to interview Paul Green, I believe I was then on the Trustee Board of Chapel Hill, so I was the natural choice, so I went down and he quite courteously said, "Well, I'm working on scripts for Hollywood, and I cannot give you the time."  So I then turned to Samuel Seldon, who said, "Let me come up and look around... he was always a very slow, deliberate and courteous person.  [Samuel Selden was chairman of the Dept. of Dramatic Art and director of the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1944-1959]  So he came up here and went out on the Cherokee ball field down there in the Indian Agency school, and we thought the bleachers in the grandstand would be a ready-made theatre.  He said not that, "You're all wet."  He didn't say that... he said, "Let's just walk around and look and see what we can see."  So we walked back up a little narrow ravine, for several hundred yards, and all of a sudden it fanned out into a typical little Cherokee farm, with steep cornfields which formed actually a natural amphitheater.  So I being fairly energetic, climbed up to the far edge of the cornfield, and said, "How do you hear me from this place?"  He said, "I can hear every word you say.  Gentlemen, this is the place."  And that is the site of the Mountainside Theatre.  Well, we were working on that, and had a very generous, public spirited young man who was a trained engineer and landscape architect who directed the design of the theatre, and a Cherokee bulldozer operator... you know they've gone out and learned all sorts of trades...he had the reputation... of doing beautifully.  This is one of the Cherokee Mission Churches, and we'll see several down in the valley.  So, we got things bulldozed out and the play started, and as I've said broke our fondest hopes by over 100,000 people the first year and slightly increasing each year, till we were at 3 1/2 years without a rainout.

Silveri:  The author of it, Kermit Hunter, also wrote some other outdoor drama...

Stephens:  Yes, and I can tell you about that now.  Under Seldon's guidance, we started to work on the theatre, and on the play, and even on preparing the casting.  And he said, "I'll find you a man," and he brought Kermit Hunter in, who was in the English faculty, but an accomplished pianist, so he understood, as few would have, the blending of music and drama.  Paul Green had already pioneered in that, but Hunter carried it a long way forward also.  So we had an ideal man and a hard worker as a young man just beginning, and the drama turned out...got good criticism... and turned out very well.  We're passing now the little mission cabin of the Cherokee Mission Macedonia, which I believe was at one time the trading post that William H. Thomas had, just across the valley a few hundred yards.

Silveri:  The original building?

Stephens:  The original building of the early 1800's.  They fortunately preserved it, and I guess it's in good hands.

Silveri:  [unintelligible question]

Stephens:  We got then the drama well started and in two or three years our enterprising chairman of the drama board, Harry Buchanan, who was a moving picture theatre operator, actually a lobbyist for the moving picture theatre industry in the state legislative general assembly.  So he had the idea that we ought to put in Oconaluftee village a replica of houses showing how the people lived, had their food, did their carving and basket making, in about the time the whites first came in in 1750.  So Oconaluftee Village was the result, and it has been as productive of revenue as the drama has.  Then we took our little collection of Indian artifacts, and set them up in our ticket office building, where they were exposed to fire, of course, and was not a good place.  So we worked there for 25 years to build this museum.  So it's a dream of many people, perhaps the principal dream of some.  This Indian named Curly Lambert had a father who, when the railroad was pulled out, they just pried up the railroad and planted a corn patch, and took a police hold, and said, "That's my farm."  It became the center of the development of the enterprises going into the Smokies.  Curly Lambert's father went on farming, and at one time was a champion corn raiser.  But Curly drives a Cadillac to Florida every winter, and spends the time fishing.  So that's what happened in the Cherokee development.  Many Indians have used their earnings to good advantage, and there are many fine families here who have worthwhile enterprises, have educated their children well.  There are others, though, who don't know the difference, I guess, between what is generally considered in harmony with nature and what is not.

Silveri:  I was here four years ago, and I can see a lot of development.

Stephens:  This strip development has continued, but nevertheless, it will improve, because there is a lighter guidance in the Indian Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  And more and more enlightened people are interested in the community.  And particularly that applies to the native Cherokee family.  So I am very hopeful that I may live to see something that I can be quite proud of. 

Silveri:  Well, I think that the work that has been put in here is tremendous.  Have they been supported financially by the Federal government?

Stephens:  Not the Historical Association.  They had to fetch for themselves, though they have gotten a number of very helpful grants... they had nothing to quarrel over.  And the state of North Carolina, and that dates back to the state's original dealings with the Cherokee, has shown a quite liberal and helpful and enlightened view.  And I believe we can say that William H. Thomas, the adopted white son of Yonaguska, probably set the pattern of an attitude toward the Cherokee, so that when they needed a charter to be protected as a corporation in 1885, I believe it was, why, Thomas was able to get them to go along with it.  And at nearly every step there have been very fortunate acts of supporting the interests of the Cherokee.  And of course it's helped the whole area around it, it's the mainspring of the economy of several surrounding counties, except for manufacturing and other things.

Silveri: The reservation is in the North Carolina county of Cherokee, right?

Stephens:  Partly Jackson and partly Swain.  Cherokee is the extreme western county.

Silveri:  Jackson and Swain?

Stephens:  Yes.

Silveri:  But they have nothing...government-wise, they have nothing to do with those counties?

Stephens:  No.  Reservation is the correct term, and it is applied to the less civilized Indians of the west.  These people refer to it as the Qualla Boundary, because it's actually simply attractive land on which free citizens of the USA have lived for several generations.  And the reservation as a trade term is used, but you'll find that the old timers will say Qualla Boundary.  I don't mean to correct you, I'm just giving an example of usage.  Now these shops I could almost pick them out and tell you which are native Cherokee families and which are outside licensed traders.  But they're all improving in their practices.  They can't get  away from the American mal-education.  They can't get away from Indian war bonnets.  They will some day.  Gatlinburg is getting farther and farther along.  It was like this in the early '30's and '40's.  So things will get better and better.  In fact you will notice that I, who was out on the streets when the front doors of the banks were locked, trying to sell advertising in Asheville, that I perhaps am an incurable optimist, because I believe that things can't help but be better than I knew them to start with.  So you'll have to write that off... discount that... because that's the only approach I know.  It's the only approach that many of us could use to still survive, as a matter of fact.  So it's a very happy way to look at things.  This man here, named Homer Burgess, has of course a good English...old-timey English name.  Burgess is a local official...Homer is, well, I believe a multi-millionaire.  He...I think he's part Indian, perhaps married an Indian.  This person over here, the Beck family are mostly Indian, and the son of old Sarah Beck is an outstanding music teacher, trumpet player.  I've heard him conduct Johann Sebastian Bach's music, and could really bring tears to your eyes.

Silveri:  We're crossing the Oconaluftee River...

Stephens:  Yes, we're crossing the Oconaluftee River, and we'll now turn to the right, and stop briefly up there, and then we'll go to the place where the meeting is.  This junction was a place where the council house sat, and where there's always been a church here.  The Baptists have had it a long time.  The Indian idea of improvement is the same as the American typical idea:  the greatest improvement is a shopping center.  So you'll see... where the beautiful riverbank might well have been preserved, you'll see one shopping center after another.  That will change for the better... they'll all fall down.  And so all in all, if not in my time, it will get better.  The Indian Agency, whose office we see here, is an enlightened place.  Mostly staffed by Cherokee, and a Western Cherokee is the Superintendent, just the way Dr. Frell Owl was Superintendent in the west.  This man named Jeff Muskrat, a Western Cherokee, has come here with a great understanding and a way of talking with people.  I believe we can go to the right, just down the side restaurant and talk briefly to the general manager, who has been here since the beginning.  There's the field that we thought might be our show place, and now go a little beyond the restaurant, going behind where those... just don't run over the apple lady... and I believe we can park temporarily in the shade.  Right here, and we'll go in and talk to Gerald White.

Silveri: Ok.

[tape stops, and resumes after an interval]

Silveri:  We're going to go back to 1936 when you left the editorship of that farm journal...

Stephens:  Yes.

Silveri:  And what did you do then, you bought out a printing shop?

Stephens:  I bought the shop that had the printing contract for the farm journal.

Silveri:  Oh.

Stephens:  The editor, the owner of the plant was interested in going into radio, and he's been a very useful citizen...named Harold H. Chons, who built up both the radio and even TV, and sold it to a Florida group.  But anyway I bought his plant, and then it was a long slow pull to get it into a sizeable, working...

Silveri:  Where was it located?

Stephens:  When I started in '36 it was on a little street called Wall Street, in mid-city, and then I moved it over a couple of blocks to a street called Walnut Street, where I stayed for the remainder of about 35 years of operating.

Silveri:  How many people were employed when you first...

Stephens:  Perhaps three employees.

Silveri:  And what's the largest number of employees you ever had there?

Stephens:  Uh...six or eight, something like that.  But I bought the first large, relatively large, offset lithographic press, which meant that one man could turn out five times the value that he would on a shop press.  And so to go into business and improve equipment.  I had gone out west and saw what was happening ...made what turned out to be a sound decision, but only after I had taken a little table model off that press and learned to operate it myself.

Silveri:  That was considerably after you first...

Stephens:  Well, within a year, as I recall, I started with the little offset press...[unintelligible], so once I had mastered that, then I bought a modern sized offset press, and I just had the vision the offset lithography  method was fairly growing . [unintelligible].

Silveri:  Now, what kind of business did...[unintelligible] when you first bought it out?

Stephens:  He had a labor related newspaper, and he had a job printing business.

Silveri:  It was the Asheville Advocate, wasn't it?

Stephens:  The Asheville Labor Advocate.

Silveri:  You continued to do that?

Stephens:  No, I cannot remember now what happened on that... I believe he sold the newspaper to a printer in West Asheville who had a suitable plant, and I kept the what you might call commercial  or job printing business.

Silveri:  About how many printers, how many printing businesses were there when you took over in '36?

Stephens:  Perhaps 5 or 6. 

Silveri:  Would you say that was quite a lot of competition?

Stephens:  Tremendous competition, because for one thing there's no price structure or understanding among the printers at all, and I relied on my knowledge of the area, and went out of Asheville and got most of my business, and in that way built my acquaintance all over the trading area, which was very pleasant to me and rewarding in a business way, too.  So you see, when I get together now, I speak of people I've known for these many many years.  It's never been an easy business, but it got better and better until finally my plant manager wanted to buy it out...oh, in about '55, or 6, 8, and I sold it to him and he... there was nothing remarkable in the in-between time except that the offset press allowed me to indulge me in my hobby of designing and printing maps.  And, oh, by 20 years in business, I perhaps printed a million maps.  And then went to Switzerland, to learn from the Swiss how to make those beautifully designed maps that they have.

Silveri:  When did you sell out?

Stephens: Well, to be exact, I sold to my manager, I believe, in about 1958, retaining for my own purposes the name Stephen's Press as a corporation, but allowing him to do business under the Stephen's Press for a while... two years.  And then he found the printing business too strenuous, I guess, and he went into the paper business...took a managership there.  And one of my former printing competitors, a very fine outfit called Gilbert Printing Company [1960 Asheville City Directory: Gilbert Printing Co., Inc., 21 Buxton Ave.], with several brothers in it, bought the Stephen's Press, good will and records, but I kept the corporation.  So I have continued as a publisher in the sense that the Poplin [?] brothers are publishers, who keep their financing, their production, but contracting the actual printing out, and then doing the marketing myself. 

Silveri:  You still do that?

Stephens:  I was doing it on books, paperback books like those Cherokee books, Blue Ridge Parkway, and maps.  And when I passed the age of 70, it appeared wise not to have to buy 20,000 books at a time which was necessary in order to get a favorable price... not to have that many books in my lap compelled to market.  So I am gradually easing away the paperback book business, so I have kept, until I can revise and rewrite the Smokies guide book, which was my first love, and very successful too.

Silveri:  You mentioned about maps, but the city map of Asheville is done by the big Champion company...

Stephens:  In Charlotte. 

Silveri:  Did you ever do any...

Stephens:  I did several for several years, city maps.  And mainly done though visitor maps of the mountain regions, visitor's maps of the mountain regions.  We saw the vacation map which has gone into perhaps a quarter million in print, a fishing and hunting map...

Silveri:  A trails map?

Stephens:  The trails map was rather interesting.  There was a mountaineering club here called first the Carolina Appalachian Trails Club, which is an organized society to blaze and mark and build the Appalachian Trail through our part of the Southern Appalachians.  And then it merged through a generous offer from an older club called the Carolina Mountain Club.  And that is the name we operate under now.  I had started as President when the Appalachian Trail Club was organized, and many years later, I said to the trails chairman, "if you will tell me what the 100 best trails are, perhaps getting the Smoky Mountain Hiking Club on the other side of the Smokies to help us with suggestions, I'll consider publishing a map of trails."  And that began in, oh, I believe about 1970, I guess, with 5,000.  And in a few years it had climbed to 15,000 sales of this dollar map a year, which was quite a surprise and pleasure to me, because I would almost rather design maps than eat.  And so it has gone on very well, and then I took a trip down to the National Forest from near Shining Rock down to the foot of the mountains, to what we know as the Pisgah Forest Post Office, and so out of that we planned another map just based on our family experience, and it sold moderately well, maybe 5,000 a year.  So the map business, in a vaguely sort of gradually pulling out of actual work, has been just a right pleasure to have, and giving up the book business slowly.

Silveri:  What are some of the more successful titles that you have published?

Stephens:  Well, the series of four Blue Ridge Parkway Guides came out of the Blue Ridge Parkway Superintendent, whose name was Sam Weems, bringing this great big manuscript to me and saying, "Can you get this published somehow?"  And in the American Institute of Graphic Arts I had met a very attractive man named Alfred A. Knopf in New York, so I sent it to him.  And he said, "That's a good manuscript.  It's just not our dish. We take mostly titles with a national market."  So I said, "Well, If you'll let me, the Parkway people, let me divide it into about four sections, I'll try the most likely section, which was Boone, Blowing Rock, and Asheville."  And I did try that, and it sold fairly well.  And then when another part of the Parkway was just about fully opened, I tried another sixty-four page section keeping going with the earlier one.  And finally I got up to four sections covering the entire Parkway.  And requiring a fairly large person to [?] about every other year.  But that made a very worthwhile, rewarding venture.  Meanwhile the Smokies Guide was going pretty well, but people's habits are changing, and so finally I let it drop out of print, oh, about 1975 and I'm revising it now.  Then years ago I got my friend Samuel E. Beck to show me his manuscript on Indian wild turkey, wild food, and so out of that we made a fairly marketable book, and it sold a little more each year.  And the person who has edited that for him, compiled it, I guess, is a better word, because I did the editing of most of our books, was Mary Ulmer, the librarian in Cherokee, and so I'd kept a friendship with her, and she's a nice fine person.  Then she married the gifted wood sculptor named Going Back Chiltosky.  So after that marriage I pulled out an old Cherokee, what we know as an alphabet but is really a syllabary, which is 85 characters representing each sound in the Cherokee language, and when you put the syllabary characters together, you have a three-syllable word if it's three characters and so on.  So Mary took that, and with her good knowledge of Cherokee and her fairly good ability to copy, we took old Will West Long's Cherokee syllabary (my friend up in Big Cove) and put out Cherokee Words, which I believe you have.  And it has proved very successful. Now Mary has taken over both the Cherokee Cooklore and Cherokee Words.  And strangely enough, I have worked hard on editing and designing the books, but I've had the best luck with titles of just about anywhere: the Smokies Guides, Cherokee Words, Cherokee Cooklore, the Blue Ridge Parkway Guides, 100 Favorite Trails of the Great Smokies Blue Ridge, 100 Competition [?] Spots.  All of these have just... people have,  without even seeing the products, have bought on respect of the title.  So it's just a good luck piece of a knack for the titles so far used.

Silveri: Do you have a large mail order business?

Stephens: I don't know whether... you would not call it large.  Several hundred a year.  And if I would do what some of my friends said, if I would go to the big industrial plants and make arrangements for the employee recreation associations to get the news of these maps, why, Detroit and Cleveland and Toledo and Chicago and Cincinnati would be my big markets.  I'm still having so much fun with maps, I still could do that.

Silveri: What other titles have you done?  I know you've published some other kinds of work?  I'm thinking Mary King's book on poetry.  How did you happen to do that?

Stephens:  That was... a good local poet just came and she financed it and I guess did everything but the designing and the production work on it.  Then I've done one or two on leaders.  I rather like the idea of publicizing the leaders of this area who've been successful, and the most spectacular one was Zebulon Baird Vance, who was born, I guess, in the early 1800's and had a gift for oratory and a real gift for politics and unquestioned integrity.  And altogether it made an outstanding career and one very valuable for the mountain regions in becoming legislator, governor, senator.  And he had such a knack for  expression that enabled him to get through to really prejudiced parts of the country.  I say prejudiced because they did not know better, such as the New England and middle Atlantic state area, where they thought that the secessionists were devils and nothing more, and he showed them that there were people in the mountains who stood for the Union, and it was only when Lincoln actually ordered in the troops that they had no other choice but to join the Confederacy,  So Vance had a very colorful and I think a very meaningful career.  So I put out a book of about sixty pages written by a good teacher or school teacher in the teacher's college in Cullowhee.  Her name is Cordelia Camp.  That book went fairly well.  Then we took another local man named David Lowery Swain, who became Governor and then president of the University at Chapel Hill.  Who was slightly early than Vance I believe.  Miss Camp wrote that.  And that sold very well.  They would go on, but I've saturated the local interest market, and there's not a widespread market beyond the state and region.  So I have enough copies to supply the occasional demand, so that's just about it for them.  There's been an occasional other book for special purpose.

Silveri: Did you have a lot of what you might call commercial publishing for firms?

Stephens: Well, that was the main business, and the only business where just particular detail for design offered an opening was accounting forms.  So I began to do the accounting forms for the factories in this area.  It happened that my equipment was right for that.  So I worked under, operated under the motto, "Send us your hard work."  And prospered fairly well over the whole mountain region.

Silveri:  Did you do all of the designing yourself of these forms?

Stephens:  Yes.  Well, in many cases the accountant in a factory would do it, but at least I knew what he wanted.  And there again, it's interesting to see what happens.  The way I got into that accounting form work was that the Wage and Hour Law came in, and it gave a small firm many real problems on record keeping.  So I went to work and studied the requirements of the law on record keeping and made up a set of forms simply in pads which complied with the law.  The labor law inspectors guided me, showed me what design.  Then when I'd go in a new prospective costumer and say, "I'd like to do some of your printing," and they'd say, "Thank you, we're well satisfied with our present source of printing." I'd start out and then I'd turn around and say, "Oh, how are you getting along with your Wage and Hour Law records?"   And they'd invariably say, "I'm having trouble."  And then I'd pull out this pad and I'd say, "Here is one that the labor inspector has said is correct that follows the proper form., and I'll sell it to you for a dollar."  And that's how I broke into many, many resistant, hard-to-get big firms.  And in the course of time I had I'd say the vast majority in number and a very satisfactory amount of the industrial business in this area.  So it was just from a little quirk like which I happened to meet in a way which was...  I've always been impressed with the account in the conquest of Mexico of Cortez burning his ships on the beach.  That's how he got his men to go back into the mountains to conquer the Golden Empire, and that's about the way I operated and have advocated very often with people I was working with in projects.  "Don't mind burning your ships.  Go ahead and do what you think you can carry through."  So, let's say, granted that you don't mind making the effort, it's an interesting and rewarding career.

Silveri: Let's turn to some of the different community activity you've done.   What was your involvement in putting together the... or did you have any involvement in bond settlement after the crash in Asheville.

Stephens: Not much except, you may have seen a reference in the newspaper, to a letter attributing to Hiden Ramsey the plan which did succeed and ended now paying off two weeks ago the last of the bonds, forty years afterwards.  And Hiden Ramsey picked me out from the newspaper staff and said, "I'd like you to do some extra fact research for me," and so in the course of that I did have a little involvement in the bond finance plan and was careful to make sure they didn't forget Hiden Ramsey on the occasion of the bond burning, which they did not quite.  Somehow they overlooked that record, in spite of his being the general manager of the newspaper.

Silveri:  While we're on this point, tell me a little bit more about Hiden Ramsey.

Stephens:  Well, he was.. I suppose, out of one of these good mountaineer stock families - three or four brothers - but he was the brilliant one.  And a man...

Silveri:  Out of Madison County.  A lot of Ramseys up there.

Stephens:  I think there's a possibility, though I never saw that clearly established where they came from.  But there were at least four brothers I knew.  But Hiden is the oldest or next to the oldest was among the brightest.  And a man down at Old Fort who was the railroad station agent for the Southern Railway said, "We saw this fellow was so bright that we got him into college, and it was the University of Virginia, one of the very good quality places within reach.  So Hiden got a splendid education for this good mind, and I think he told me once he was one of the city government commissioners at, oh, at 22 years old, and then later went into the afternoon newspaper, and evidently fighting uphill all the way, built that into the paper that I believe I mentioned to you that the controlling man traded in on a merger for a million dollars.  So Hiden carried through with that and then had some sort of break with the later owners resulted in his retiring from the newspaper business a little earlier that he might have otherwise.  But he died soon after that.

Silveri:  So that's mainly what he did in his career was newspaper work?

Stephens:  Newspapers.  But he was highly regarded and probably served on many public boards across the state.  People appreciated his abilities.

Silveri:  And the University of North Carolina at Asheville library is named after him.  D. Hidden Ramsey Library.

Stephens: Hiden.  H-I-D-E-N.  I think he has an honorary doctorate from Chapel Hill.  And Dr. Sondley had one.  And the greatest reward I had in this work out here is that it produced the same honor.  And then there's one more, I believe, whose name is Glen Tucker, whom I think undoubtedly Hiden had recommended.

Silveri:  When you say about "that work out here" what are you talking about?

Stephens:  Well, I believe the citation was for "interpreting the life of the mountains and its people."  More or less to that affect.  And it probably came through the director of the play, with whom I worked very closely, who was named Harry Davis.

Silveri:  And what year was that?

Stephens:  Something like 1970.  That's Ghost Mountain.  And that's Cataloochie Ranch, a little pasture back over on the left skyline.  Are you still taping?

Silveri: Yeah, we're still on now.  I wanted to ask you was... let's see... you continued... in 1936, so you sold out in about the middle '50's?

Stephens:  Late '50's.  In other words, about 35 years.  And this is the 40th year of the Stephens Press.

Silveri:  I wanted to ask you also how you got involved in... I believe you said you got involved in conservation work in North Carolina?

Stephens:  Well, I guess the first enterprise of that sort, and it was launched, I believe, by this same association of communities was a regional planning commission in which Charles Ray there was involved and some of the other leaders there, and I became the secretary of a commission serving about thirteen counties I believe it was, set up under state law to administer planning grants and to run a central office with expertise available to do local planning, and that enabled every town or county, and it was mostly towns at first, to analyze their situation, decide what the needs are, were then, and decide what remedies could be undertaken.

Silveri:  Are you talking about the 1950's now, aren't you?  Early '50's?

Stephens:  Yes.  And so, oh, the planning commission served for about ten years or longer, as I remember it.  And then the government at Raleigh seemed not at all happy with a mountain planning commissioned, put in well organized.  They seemed to want to administer things from Raleigh.  And so events took place which broke up the regional planning commission and centralized it all at Raleigh.  But then later the regional approach was so practical and necessary that the state itself had set up regional offices.  So they simply returned to our pattern for this region.  After more or less destroying the work that we had done.

Silveri: Were you a member of any community organizations or boards during the 1930's?  Or state?

Stephens:  Well, a community organization which I have served almost my entire career.. or rather from the early '40's is the library board, which serves Asheville and the county.  And that's been a rewarding, not spectacular work, but it called for the efforts of quite intelligent, good people.  In a small board.

Silveri:  Were you a member of that board when the Sondley collection was accepted?

Stephens:  Yes.  As I recall.

Silveri:  About when was that?

Stephens:  I'm not absolutely sure I was a member then.  Perhaps I should correct that I'm not sure enough to say.  But it very shortly came.  I guess when I went to work it was a part of the responsibility of the Asheville Public Library System. And as I was an out of city resident, they soon broadened the board and appointed me as a county member, and which I have been ever since.  There has been continuous service on the board nevertheless.

Silveri:  What can you tell me about Dr. Sondley?

Stephens:  My earliest recollection of him is on the campus of the university where he was brought about, in the '20's to receive an honorary doctorate, which he well deserved.  I'm not sure if I had any other contact with him  But he was the legal counsel for the Southern Railway, which was perhaps the top client in the early days, in my early days.  And he had somehow started collecting books.  He never married, and he had a large income.  He evidently spent a  lot of his time reading, and this collection of books, so I'm told, is built on a... [some words lost]

Tape III, Side 2:

Stephens: There was some buyer or collector, who would first approach the.... what's the San Mareno, California...?

Silveri: Huntington Library.

Stephens: Yes.  Would approach Hunnington first with an offer of books, and if they didn't take them then they would come to Dr. Sondley.  So he got some really quite good books.  He was a good market.

Silveri:  So, in other words his book collecting ranged beyond Western North Carolina history.

Stephens:  Regional history was his hobby.  But he had a two or three others, like cookbooks and Bibles.  But his real interest was in local history.  He was a descendent of some of the earliest families.  The Forster and the Alexander families were both pioneer.  So the result of that was that he bought everything he could find, I suppose, on early history.  And he would read some early historians' works, and apparently he had a strong prejudice, or a strong reaction to the writing of people on the conflicts involving the Civil War.  And many of them wrote expressing a different view, and he would write in the margin.  You can find them in the books there now. By this paragraph: "A lie."  Further down: "A lie."  And then further down: "A damnable lie!"   It was his own books.  He could write what he pleased.  That Sondley collection was not very useful in its bequeathed form, as it came over.  But it's been slowly organized in the North Carolina material put together, and the less used parts put in the vault.  The extremely valuable books put in the vault.  And some in extra storage.  So it's now a useful part, and once we get into a building which was meant to house human beings, instead of a four-story exercise, not in scholarly research, but in climbing steps, we'll have something good, I believe.  Hopefully in another year or year and a half.

Silveri:  What other committees were you on, or commissions, or member of community groups?

Stephens:  I guess those were my main activities.

Silveri: Now, before you mentioned that you have at least met, if not known quite well, almost every governor in the last 50 years.

Stephens: That was from the inherited friendships of my father.  Plus some direct contact in the course of time on my own.

Silveri:  Which governor was the first one that you knew quite well and maybe did some work with?

Stephens:  Well, when I was in college, the one named Angus Wilton McLean was working on and presented in his campaign ideas - the executive budget, financial control, the first in the South, I believe - and I was studying that in government, local government classes, and Gov. McLean offered me a place to work in state government.  My folks wanted me to go on to work in Asheville.  The experience would probably have done me good.  But inn any event I knew him well.  Then served on others, first with the Rural Electrification Authority when the New Deal set up an electrification program.  I was a member from the mountain region.

Silveri:  For the State?

Stephens:  For the State.  Yes.

Silveri:  What year was that?

Stephens: In the Roosevelt times.  I should guess '35, '34.

Silveri:  Maybe a little later?

Stephens: I served several years on it.

Silveri:  What was the duty of this?

Stephens:  The board met once a month I believe.  At first it was working simply, well, to pressure local power companies into extending their lines. And then came a movement to finance extensions of lines through public funds.  And even to build local distribution systems.

Silveri: You had a particular concern about extension of lines in the mountains?

Stephens:  That's right.  I was perhaps a natural choice, having been in the Farm Cooperative, the Farmers' Federation.  So that came about perfectly naturally, and I could do it in the course of my work very well, being editor, I could move around and I would go and talk to local power company officers or sometimes to local consumer groups, to show them how to get organized.  So that was a worthwhile experience.  Oh, there were some other minor projects I went on, but those were the principal public works. 

Silveri: Back in the First World War and the Second World War when it came along...  what was your situation?  How did it affect your business, if at all?

Stephens: Well, business was... took more work. One man or more in the plant...  it happened to be the paper cutter.  The man who ran the guillotine cutter went off to....  And I could run the paper cutter.  I had a general knowledge from working in the Ad Alley of the newspaper earlier.  Identical makeup type setting.  But anyway, I did the paper cutting for perhaps a year in the plant.  So that in addition to running the sales and management.  All in all, it would be a strenuous life, and a long hours life.  I ran the plant in the daytime, did the estimating in the evenings.  I did that for perhaps 20 years.  Pricing and estimating.

Silveri: You know, I just thought maybe we should go back and talk about Horace Kephart.  W haven't talked about him yet on this tape.  When did you first meet him and how well did you know him?

Stephens: I was interested in Kephart quite early, perhaps when I was... oh, perhaps soon after I was a student in college.  I believe I had read Our Southern Highlanders quite early.  Which he wrote when he was out living on Hazel Creek. He had had emotional troubles, and something else and had to take a remote place to live.  And in that place, his scholarship could be used.  And he was, I think he was director of the St. Louis Industrial Library, or something of that sort.  So he was a scholar and a writer.   So he wrote down what he saw around him and put it into a very good, usable, popular book, Southern Highlanders.  And it sold well, but then I got into an earlier book which is called Camping and Woodcraft.  Well, he outcome of it was, that those two books made me seek him out.  And he was very shy and hard to find.  Understandably.  So many people came to Bryson City to seek him out, ask him questions.  Ask his autograph and what not.  So he was hard to find.  He would disappear.  But I did become friends.  And then later after I went to work in the park commission land purchase, we had a base camp up on Boot Creek, which was above Bryson, one of the waters flowing into the Bryson City area  He would take refuge up there in summer, from the summer visitors.  He would set up a little camp.  It was quite a fascinating sight to see his camping and woodcraft put into practice.  And so he would pile up a wall of green birch logs behind his campfire and he would have all sorts of poles across and put pot hooks for his cooking pots and a nice little compact long low tent which would catch the heat to allow him to sit in front of it.  We would go down at night and talk to Old Kep.  One of the men in our party said that so far as he could tell, that Kep's family tried to make him go out every night and put on a claw hammer coat and it was just too much for him and he took to the woods.  Well, that was anyway the maladjustment or emotional breakdown, stated another way.  He had a good deal to say, and it was very interesting.  He was highly respected and served as Mayor of Bryson City.  He was one of the best educated men there.  So I knew him off and on to his last years.

Silveri: He remained in the mountains until his death?

Stephens: He died in the little Inn, which is called the Cooper House, where he had lived most of his time in Bryson City.  But he died not literally in the Inn.  I think, off and on, he had trouble with alcohol.  And he was out, so a reliable source told me, riding in what's called a taxi, but it was just a local car for hire.  The driver ran into a bridge abutment, which I believe killed him and Kephart also.  But he was about 75 years old then.

Silveri:  Do you have that list of names I gave you?

Stephens:  I believe I do.

Silveri:  Why not getting it out?  Another one I wanted to ask you about was Verne Rhoades.  Was very important here in Western North Carolina, wasn't he?

Stephens:  That's right.  Now, he came here in as a forester, soon after the Weeks Act was passed, and land purchase on a large scale began.  So he was the first forest administrator or supervisor, as they were called for the Pisgah National Forest.  I believe he came before 1920.  The Weeks Act began to operate then.  So the big sale of the Vanderbilt land probably took place under his direction.  And it was not until a great deal later that I knew him well, but in 1927, when I got out of Chapel Hill, I said I wanted a job with him in the woods, and he said, well, these young, bright young mountain men have made good at being talleymen.  I'll give you a try; you might make the grade.  So, it did work out all right because I just took no chances, was always as careful as I knew how to be and worked as hard as I could.

Silveri: You mentioned Buck Ray before.  Did he work with you, or did he come later?

Stephens:  He came later.  The cruising party gradually turned over.  I don't believe anybody went all the way through it.  I'm not sure just who followed after I was in there, but I made quite worthwhile, long-time friends.  And I saw them occasionally afterwards, because they had to come and testify in the land condemnation suits.  When the values were being set for condemnation and purchase.  So I saw something of them, and then I gradually, as I say, got to know Verne Rhoades better as time went on.  He married fairly late and reared a family about the same age brackets as my children.  So they've been school mates, friends, all the way along.

Silveri:  What can you add to the Tom Wolfe lore?

Stephens:  Not a great deal.   I knew a great many of Tom Wolfe's boyhood friends, and I did... I entered Chapel Hill the fall after he graduated.  He graduated in 1932, and I entered that fall.  So there was some talk of him.  But he was not famous then, because he was not famous until Look Homeward Angel came out.  But he did come to an alumni meeting, I remember, and he was a great big, fairly awkward man, with a good sense of humor and pretty bright, and in the course of time I gathered a good deal from what some of my newspaper friends who had worked with him when he was a newspaper delivery carrier and other times; they would chuckle about him and laugh at his ways... unexpected ways of doing things.  So I did not know really a great deal about him though and only second hand.  Though I did know his teacher, Professor J. M. Roberts who ran the North State Fitting School... knew him quite well.  And a younger sister named Margaret, who is still in Asheville and who would be worth talking with and recording.  She was quite a small girl when Tom was in school there and knew a little about him, but Margaret turned out to be one of the best handicraft buyers in the mountains.  So she's had a long and interesting career, first with the Highland Handicraft Guild and then running her own shop.

Silveri:  Well, you were in Asheville when Look Homeward Angel was published, weren't you?

Stephens:  That's right.

Silveri: And what... did you read the book right away when it came out?

Stephens: I did not.  Only parts of it.  But I did read it with some care within the past year or so, and enjoyed it a great deal.  One of the men who knew a good deal about Tom's background was my wife's father.  His name is Charles E. Waddell, the consulting engineer I mentioned to you who started out, I guess, wiring people's churches and houses and what not, and just never stopped and worked with General Electric and finally became, as I mentioned to you, a very able consulting engineer.  But he remembered Tom quite well and remembered the family, Tom being much the youngest of a large and very unusual family.  And W. O. Wolfe was remembered by many people on Pack Square, having the monument and tombstone shop.  And even the mother was fairly well remembered for the boarding house she ran.

Silveri: But you can say the city and the people of the city and surrounding the area were very upset by his book.

Stephens: They were shocked at the frankness of the relations in it, and Tom had a photographic memory, and so it created quite a furor, because it treated people of all ranks of life with the same frankness.  Some of it is masterful writing, we think.  As years have gone by, we appreciate more the art that he put into it.

Silveri:  Well, okay.  You mentioned that after you graduated from Chapel Hill, Howard Odum came and started his well-known research there.

Stephens: About the same time.  He started somewhere during my Chapel Hill time.  But many years later, Howard Odum, I don't know why, got interested in some of my efforts.  One of which was to start a review of Southern books.  I had watched the University of North Carolina Press, and there were several other university presses going pretty well in the early forties, and Odum seemed to take some interest in me, and I enjoyed him very much.  He contributed perhaps two or three features to my little book review journal which was called The Southern Packet.

Silveri:  Southern what?

Stephens: Packet.  Like a steam packet, steamship packet.

Stephens: And he did a collection... a bibliography of Southern books for me.  And he did a piece on what he thought was the best place to put our efforts in social improvements in the South... where we'd get the most results for our resources.  And all in all he came up with some pretty worthwhile ideas.  And I remained quite friendly to him until his final years and went to see him in the hospital which I guess he never left again.

Silveri:  Uh, hum.

Stephens: And he said he was getting along fine and something like, "And I'm not afraid to die."  I didn't know that he had... he didn't appear to have any dangerous illness, but maybe it was.

Silveri: What about.... you know his Southern Regions of the United States published in the 1930's?

Stephens:  Yes.

Silveri:  It's interesting to compare that with an historical account of the South.  You find very little reference to the mountain region as a rather distinct region of the south in the historical work, but in his work he gives a good bit of attention to it.  He used a 1935 agricultural survey about the mountain region quite extensively.  So he gave interesting attention to it. Which I think is a great credit to him, and...

Stephens:  Well, he was...

Silveri:  Go ahead.

Stephens: He was systemic, and therefore when he found that John C. Campbell had done for the Russell Sage Foundation a thorough and reliable survey of the Southern mountains, he made use of that in a proper way as source material and as an avenue for further study.  So he knew how to do things right.  I'm not sure whether he had the help of Willis D. Weatherford.  

I'm not.  I don't remember whether there was much connection, though I knew them both fairly well.

Silveri:  Odum was also very interested in folklore.

Stephens:  He thought that was a way to interpret the people.  

Silveri:  Uh hum.

Stephens:  And he did several works on folklore.  As you may know.  And he was probably right.  That was a good way to understand.

Silveri:  You mentioned Willis D. Weatherford.  When did you first meet him?

Stephens:  There again, he seemed to come into my sphere of operations... I don't know why, but he made some... showed some interest in what I was doing and swapped ideas.  I don't know if we did anything in an organized way together, but we had several years of pleasant friendship, and it was probably during the time that I was on this Regional Planning Commission.  Weatherford's main drive in life was to discover and utilize the native talents of the mountain people.  He was born at Weatherford, Texas but of mountain... Southern mountain stock from Mitchell County, I believe.  So he had a natural understanding and ambition for mountain people.  And he, I guess... I don't know whether he outdid Odum or not, but he was one of the talented grant getters for study and worthwhile projects.  Odum, I guess, was turned toward publishing studies from his institute... no telling how many millions Odum shook loose from the foundations for study... Southern Regions was probably a product of that. 

Silveri: How about Frank Graham.  Did you know him?

Stephens: Quite well.  He was teaching when I was at Chapel Hill but went on sabbatical to the University of London, I believe, at the time I would have had his North Carolina or American history, so I had a different American history teacher.  But I knew him on the campus because he was one who made it a point to know everybody.  But I did inherit a family friendship anyway.  And he was quoted as saying at the point when he did not know by name everybody by name on campus, the place was getting too big.  I think it was perhaps when it had 2,000 students, and he didn't know everybody.  He had a talent though for bringing forth the best impulses in people, and he just loved to do that, and that's how he got most done.  And he never thought twice about going into risky and tight situations.  And uncomfortable situations.  He was just like maybe I am... he had a low pain threshold.  And so he would get... go into situations when he was President there and I was on the Board, where his friends would just tremble for what would happen.  And they'd get him out of scrapes as best they could.  And they loved him so much, instead of getting angry at him, they were just patient, and they would tell him don't get in another one like this.  And it was a time there were changes in racial attitudes, and he took a lot of punishment on that.  But he didn't flinch... that was his way.  He was a true Scotch Irish Presbyterian type, as I said.  He was one of the old Covenant... just down a hundred and fifty or two hundred years later. 

Silveri:  You mentioned that you were on the Board.  You're talking about the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina?

Stephens:  Yes.  An eight-year term.

Silveri:  When were you appointed to that?

Stephens:  I should guess in the late '30's.

Silveri:  Late '30's.  And who appointed you?

Stephens:  They are elected by a committee in the General Assembly.  And there's a great deal of log-rolling and swapping.  But the legislator from up here, when I expressed an interest in it, was successful enough to get his candidate through.  It was a great education to serve in it.  

Silveri:  For eight years.  The membership of the Board was how many when you were in it?  Approximately?

Stephens:  My recollection is that in the early days it was hardly over forty.  And at some point it expanded to about one hundred.  And I liked it... got along with it. I think I was chairman of the academic awards committee.  Which meant the O. Max Gardner award for the outstanding faculty... teacher.  And Dr. Odum won it one of the years when I was chairman.  When Dr. Odum was called up to receive the award, he very carefully... first took the check that was handed to him and put it in his pocket before he even started acknowledging it, which was his way of taking care of the money end of things so he could do the other end better too.

Silveri:  First things first.  At that time you were on the Board, what comprised the University of North Carolina?

Stephens:  Chapel Hill only.

Silveri:  Just Chapel Hill.

Stepehens.  I  believe, but perhaps at that time there was a change which brought... I believe that's correct... which brought N. C. State College, it was then called in Raleigh... the College of Agriculture and Engineering and what was called the Women's College in Greensboro into the University system.

Silveri:  And the Board sets policy...

Stephens:  Right.

Silveri:  And approves the budget which has to go to the Legislature.  Is that right?

Stephens:  I believe that's correct.

Silveri:  You must have had a front row seat on the way politics...

Stephens:  Yes, it was interesting to watch particularly the way fairly simple matters like letting county farm agents from the Black race come on the campus only in the daytime to study at N.C. State and those... some of the legislators just rose up in red fury over that proposal.  And they... they said something I never saw done, except in a legislative body, a legal body... they said, we demand a roll call vote on this issue of whether black farm agents are allowed on the campus at N. C. State.  Just in the daytime for classes, not to eat or room there.  And there was a roll call count, and at the next expiration of trustees, I was dropped.  I was one of, I guess... the measure carried, all right, but they did not forget who voted for it, and they dropped, I believe, every member who voted for it whose term expired, except Spencer Love, the head of the great Burlington Mills, who must have given them billions of dollars that year.  They didn't have quite the courage to drop him.

Silveri:  Evidently Spencer Love was a Massachusetts native, you probably know, who came down after the first world war and began the Burlington... what became...

Stephens:  He was a Massachusetts native, but his father was a native of Burlington.  His father was a professor at Harvard.  I can't believe how much the family is identified with Chapel Hill.  Cornelia Spencer is the name of one of the dormitories there.  She was the one who held things together during the tough times of the Civil War and it did not close during the Civil War, but only when they appointed a carpetbagger president did it close.

Silveri:  You were not on the Board when Frank Graham was president, were you?

Stephens: Yes.

Silveri:  Oh.  I see.  Let's see... You were appointed in 1936, or elected in '36... Is that what you said?

Stephens:  I am not sure of the dates.  I could look it up.  But about that.

Silveri:  About that, but for an eight-year period.  And you were there when Frank Graham was appointed president?

Stephens:  My recollection is that consolidation, as we called the three coming together, came around that time, around '36, and that Harry Woodburn Chase, the president of Chapel Hill only, was replaced... not dismissed, but replaced when he left (I think he became President of New York University after that), but Harry Woodburn Chase's successor was Frank Graham, I believe.

Silveri: Earlier you were talking about how Frank Graham would get involved in some of these projects that were rather controversial in those days, and the Board members would have to keep careful watch on him.

Stephens: He would not... he would get involved by just carrying out what he considered his duty, instead of side-stepping.

Silveri: In a state like North Carolina, he was considered a very liberal person.

Stephens: If I had to pick one man as the outstanding influence for this century in North Carolina, and which has made this state different from the states north and south of it, I would say it's Frank Graham.

Silveri:  Yet this is the man that couldn't be elected... couldn't.. yet the people of North Carolina..

[Graham, president of The University of North Carolina (1930-49), political liberal, and advocate of racial desegregation, was appointed to the US Senate in 1949 by NC Governor W. Kerr Scott to complete the term of J. Melville Broughton, who died in office. In 1950, Graham campaigned for election on the Democratic Party ticket against Willis Smith, Robert R. Reynolds, and Olla Ray Boyd. The first primary of May 27, 1950 resulted in a run-off between Graham and Smith, with Smith prevailing the runoff primary, 281,114 to 261,789. Graham later became a UN official, primarily as mediator of international disputes.]

Stephens: The reason is that the financial interests and particularly the power companies, who had the opposing candidate, went beyond what were reasonable bounds, as I saw it, in their political behavior.  And Frank Graham, (whose secretary was this Richard Green, I believe I've told you about) told Richard, "I just don't believe the people of North Carolina have done this."  He didn't have any bitterness apparently.  He just said, I just can't believe that happened.  He was completely a large and forgiving person.  I never heard of him carrying a grudge.  But the influence in the men that he brought into the faculty and the way he faced and met the issues, I am confident has changed the character of North Carolina, as other Southern states did not change that rapidly.  They are now many of them following the same course.  But Frank Graham was the man who started out because that was the way to do it.

Silveri:  Was he a native North Carolinian?

Stephens:  Yes, born in Fayetteville.  His father was superintendent of city school in Charlotte when I was in the third grade and came and visited my class... I have a very clear recollection of that.  So he was the arch type of the Scotch Irish enlightened Covenant.

Silveri:  Was Kerr Scott, who was Governor in the '30's, your friend?

Stephens: Well, when I served on the Rural Electrification Authority, he was also a member.  They pronounced that in the British Isles way, which is Karr.  He was master of the State Grange, I believe, and decided to run for Governor while we both were on the Electrification Board.  I correct myself; he decided to run for Secretary of Agriculture.  And there was an entrenched man named Graham, I believe, as Secretary of Agriculture.  And he overturned this Graham regime and as a result of that success, later, offered himself later for Governor.  [William Kerr Scott, NC Governor: 1949 - 1953]  And he was such a hard, almost vindictive fighter... and there again this same Scotch Irish type, but somewhat... not an abrasive character, he was just frank.  Whereas Frank Graham had a way of never seeming to resent something... and Scott did all right though.  And frankness, with some practicality, can survive... there are better ways, but frankness can survive.  I believe that the Governor before that I knew directly, who had the worst of the Depression dropped in his lap.  His name was John Christoph Blucher Ehringhaus, [Governor: 1933 - 1937] from way down on the Tidewater, and apparently a man of fine heritage and character.  But he had to face the financing of the public schools during that time.  Fortunately Governor McLean's idea [Angus Wilton McLean, 1925 - 1929] of the budget controlled by the executive [of had succeeded.  And it was in effect.  And whereas many southern states were unable to pay their bills, North Carolina could refinance sales and meet the crisis.

Silveri: Who defeated Kerr Scott?

Stephens:  I'll have to think about... I might not come up with it.

Silveri: Well, I wanted to find out whether you had an association with any other governor until Terry Sanford had the job.  [Terry Sanford, NC Governor: 1961 - 1965]

Stephens: Well, at time I was engaged in the Citizens Committee for Better Schools Movement, and Sanford's whole philosophy was built on the Scottish belief that education is where you start.  And so it just came naturally that I would be working supporting Terry Sanford.  And perhaps I should tell you an opportunity I had for appointment from him which I did not accept which would have involved me a little more in Raleigh.  But I did know Sanford quite well and perhaps was of some help to him in this area.

Silveri:  What was the appointment he offered you?

Stephens: Oh, I don't believe it's relative to mention it, because I found him a man with such outstanding record in it, and he served in that office many, many years later, and he served the state far better than I could have in it.   But somebody later (a wise man) said I should have taken it for a while just for the experience.  But I...

Silveri: It was Terry Sanford who pushed for the sales tax on food.

Stephens: He drove through the legislation - quite unpopular, really - necessary to pull the schools out of their precarious situation, so in a way you might say that Terry Sanford had as far reaching an influence as any man though if you're looking at the whole philosophy of this state, I would still stick with Frank Graham for long-lasting effect.  But Sanford's work was very worth-while, and many people viewed my son, who was appointed by Sanford to his immediate staff, as a radical.  However, George got there by being picked out of class in Planning by the head of the highway department because George would pick him up on... he would question the visiting lecturer there.  He said at some point that he was looking for somebody who would pick you up on pointed questions and not give in if you thought you were right.  Anyway George was appointed to the staff in the highway department and from there, I believe, over into the governor's own immediate development staff.  He ran the Appalachian Regional Commission in Washington.

Silveri:  This is your son George, who is now teaching in Houston?

Stephens: No.  This... he is... this fellow is a professional planner, who is on his own as a planning consultant in Raleigh.  He's the older son, and then the younger is a political science professor over at Houston.  Then the younger sister is a professional planner too who married a planner in Washington in the National Counselor's staff - Planning Commission.

Silveri:  How long did your son work in the ARC?

Stephens: I believe about a couple of years.  And I guess that the Washington experience was very worth while.

Silveri:  The sales tax on food was an admission by Terry Sanford that he couldn't get another kind of tax through the legislature because of the special interests that didn't want to be taxed.  Is that right?

Stephens: Probably so.  Although it was a workable formula because every man nearly had children in school, and he knew that schools had to be supported, so he did not have as much opposition as you might think.

Silveri: It seems to me that even more basic than education is eating, and for a state to impose a tax on it is something that I still cannot get used to.  But it's done all over the South.

Stephens:  Well, even New Jersey is about to come to it now, and it's one of the workable growing tax bases, whether it's altogether just or not.

Silveri:  It certainly brings in a lot of revenue.

Stephens:  The difference... the problem in North Carolina is that it did not have taxable wealth... corporate wealth... manufacturing wealth.. and all sorts that you have in many of the Northeastern and middle Western states.  We had to work with what we had.  And we had to take care of the needs of the people.

Silveri: Did you happen to know Daintry Allison, who was involved in getting Terry Sanford elected.  I guess just about every teacher was involved in Terry Sanford's election.

Stephens:  I don't know one by that first name.  But I've known an Allison or two.  Would it be in this area or where?

Silveri: Fairview.

Stephens:  No.

Silveri:  She has some very touching stories about her own experience teaching in a one-room school at eighteen years of age before the first world war.  I wondered whether Sanford was involved in [inaudible]

Stephens:  Well, the son of Kerr Scott ran for Governor... Robert Scott.  I had some part in that, though some of my friends were doing more than I.  I guess with each governor in recent times I've had some more or less active part.  Dan Moore, who was born here in the mountains, was Governor.  [Dan Killian Moore, Governor: 1965 - 1969]  He had been legal council for the Champion Paper Mill.  Then he served as Governor.  There again, he had to lean over backwards not to favor the mountains.  Then he took a state Supreme Court appointment, I believe.  

Silveri: Did you ever meet Sam Ervin?

Stephens: Yes, I knew him fairly well.  He turned out to be a fairly clever man.  He did not seem so in my observation in my earlier acquaintance with him, but his final committee work in Congress showed him up as a fairly good trial man, anyway, didn't it?  I'm trying to think if there are any other public figures who would... of my acquaintance wouldn't be of interest.

Silveri: How about Weldon Weir, City Manager in Asheville?

Stephens:  I did know him fairly well.  He was a quite skillful politician, and I'm sure I didn't have a great appeal to him because I wasn't that type, but I did work with him on the planning commission for several years.  And I must say that his sense of timing and his general judgment of what to do next and how to do it saved Asheville a great deal of trouble.  Even though I did not agree with him.  I think...

Silveri:  Some people call him a political boss.

Stephens:  One might say that.  And yet I can't see that it was for his ultimate personal gain.  I think he just was fascinated with that career and went ahead that way.

Silveri:  Did you know Jesse James Bailey?

Stephens:  Through the Bascom Lunsford acquaintance.  You have a clear path around if you want it.  [Apparently comment on traffic situation]  Through the Bascom Lunsford acquaintance, I saw him casually, and got to be fairly good friends really.  He had a... as you have observed, had a...

[Conversation ends abruptly.]

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