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13 |
Writers and Mountains | Illustrations |
| INTRODUCTION, EXPLORATION AND EXPLOITATION | ||
| Introduction | :
Image: L.C. Le Compte Postcard Company Collection "Scenic Grandfather Mountain on the Blue Ridge Parkway," lec230. D.H. Ramsey Library, UNC Asheville. |
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| Introduction |
Image: "The Smoky Mountains. (North Carolina)" New York, D. Appleton & Co. - Entered according to Act of Congress A.D. 1873 by D. Appleton & Co. in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, Washington. Print held by UNC Asheville. |
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| 1540 Desoto |
Hernando de Soto, "AN OLD PORTRAIT OF HERNANDO DE SOTO
(ca. 1500-1542). Engraving from Retratos de los Espanoles Illustres con un
Epitome de sus Vidas, Madrid, Imprenta real, 1791." from
Wikimedia Commons. Hernando de Soto and the "Discovery of the Mississippi," by William Powell. from Wikimedia Commons |
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| Bartram 1739-1823 |
William Bartram from the
Wikimedia Commons
Illustration: Franklinia alatamaha http://www.georgiahistory.com/bartram_and_nature.htm |
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| Asbury 1800-1812 |
"In the
year 1800, Bishop Francis Asbury began to include the French Broad Valley
in his annual visits throughout the eastern part of the United States,
which extended as far west as Kentucky and Tennessee. (1922. Sondley,
F. A. Asheville and Buncombe County, p. 106.)
Image: Francis Asbury statue, Wilmore, Kentucky |
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| 1827-28 Mitchell |
Mitchell, Elisha. |
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| Jacques 1850's |
THE SWANNANOA [poem]
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No image |
| 1856 Lanman |
Lanman, Charles.Letters from the Allegheny Mountains. [The author's travels through northern Georgia, western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee and the valley of Virginia] New York: G.B. Putnam, 1849. [Afterwards reprinted in v. 1 of his Adventures in the wilds of the United States and British American provinces. Philadelphia, 1856] Includes Qualla Town, home of a band of Cherokee Indians, pp. 84-114.] | No images |
| Following the early exploration literature of Bartram, Mitchell and Lanman, there followed a series of accounts that could be described as "adventure literature." This literature is characterized by a series of vignettes that occur in the process of traveling in unknown territory. Lanman, perhaps acts as the catalyst for this new genre of literature, but his work is largely characterized by the exploration and exploitation of the land, rather than the interaction of the traveler with the land and with its people. There were many contributions to this literature, but perhaps the most important contributions were from Wilbur Zeigler and Ben Grosscup and Charles Dudley Warner, whose adventures on horseback through the mountains of western North Carolina give us some of the best information on this area in the late nineteenth century. James Lane Allen, who wrote "Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback,"(1886) did not write about western North Carolina, however, his work served as an influence on other writers in the Appalachian mountains. | ||
| 1864 Appleton |
Appleton, Elizabeth Haven. "A Half-Life and a Half a Life," Atlantic Monthly, 13: 157-82 (February 1864). |
No images in article. |
| 1867 Guernsey |
Guernsey, A.H. "Illicit Distilling of Liquors." Harper's Weekly 11: 773 (7 December 1867). Guernsey, A.H. "Hunting for Stills." Harper's Weekly 11: 811 (21 December 1867) |
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| 1870 | [unsigned] "The North Carolina Mountains," Appleton's Weekly 4: 465 (15 October 1870) |
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| Colton 1870-71 |
PICTURESQUE AMERICA 1870
Colton [Coulton], Henry E. "Picturesque America." illustrated by Henry Fenn, Appleton's Journal 4: 26 (November 26, 1870), .p 644 |
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| 1871 Clingman |
Clingman, Thomas L. "Western North Carolina,." Appleton's Journal 5: 587 (May 1871). |
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| Reid | ||
| Porte Crayon 1874 |
Strouther, David Hunter [pseud.: 'Porte-Crayon']. "The Mountains." Harper's Magazine 44: 659-675, 801-15 ; 45: 21-34, 347-361 502-516, 801-815; 46: 669-680; 47 821-32 ; 49: 156-67 (July 1874) ; 51: 475-485 (April-June, August, September, November 1872 ; April, November 1873 ; July 1874 ; September 1875). |
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| 1874 King |
King, Edward. "The Great South: Among the Mountains of Western North Carolina." Scribner's Monthly 7 (1874): 513-44. [MOA- FULL TEXT] |
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| Reid 1875 |
"The Land of the Sky;" or, Adventures in Mountain By-Ways, Chapter X
Christian Reid, pp. 737-741
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| 1875 Davis |
Davis, Rebecca Harding. "A
Night in the Mountains ,"
Appletons' Journal: A Magazine of General Literature, vol.3, issue 6,
Dec. 1877, pp. 505-506 Davis, Rebecca Harding. "The Yares of Black Mountain," Davis, Rebecca Harding. "Qualla," Lippincott's Magazine 16: 576-86 (November 1875).
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| 1875 Woolson |
Woolson, Constance Fenimore. "The French Broad," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 50 (1875):617-636 |
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Burnett 1877 |
France Hodgson Burnett | |
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Woolson 1878 |
Woolson, Constance Fenimore. "Up In the Blue Ridge." Appleton's Journal 5 (1878): 104-25. |
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Davis 1880
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" Davis, Rebecca Harding. "By-Paths in the Mountains II," Harper's New Monthly Magazine. 61: 353-369 (July 1880). |
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[Illustrated Guide Book] Untitled 1881 |
[Untitled] Travel Guide, Western North Carolina, c. 1881, p. 12 |
No images in item |
| Lanier 1881 |
THE HILLS
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| Zeigler 1883 |
Image: Frontispiece Zeigler, Wilbur. In the Heart of the Alleghenies: or, Western North Carolina, comprising its topography, history, resources, people, narratives, incidents, and pictures of travel, adventures in hunting and fishing and legends of its wildernesses, Raleigh, N.C.: Williams & Co. ; Cleveland, OH, W.W. Williams. 1883, p. 128 |
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| Craddock [Murfree] 1887 |
Image from: Leach, Anna. "Literary Workers of the South,"
Munsey's Magazine. Vol. 13, 57-65, New York, April 1895. Image: Casper David Friedrich, "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog." |
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| Warner 1888 |
Warner, Charles Dudley, 1829-1900 Warner, Charles Dudley. On Horseback. A Tour In Virginia, North Carolina And Tennessee. With Notes Of Travel In Mexico And California. Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and company 1889 [c1888] |
No images in publication. |
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Lindsey 1890 |
Lindsey, Thomas H.
Lindsey's Guide Book to Western North Carolina. Asheville, N.C. The Randolph-Kerr Printing Co., 1890. |
Images available in publication |
| "After 1890 however, writers found Appalachian
otherness less quaint than bothersome, and sought to provide some
explanation for it in their stories and sketches." This was a time
when the attention of the missionary movement turned its attention from
the "negro problem" following the war , to the "mountain white" problem of
Appalachia. Francis Asbury had been ministering to the mountains for years
before this movement got off the ground, but like Asbury, a number of
mountain preachers came into the area on horseback bringing the gospel to
the people with the hope that they could take this new congregation into
the fold. Baptists of all kinds, Methodists, Episcopalians, Catholics,
Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, and others staked out their claim to the
souls of the impoverished and "heathenish" mountaineer. , Tyndale Wilson's
fact-full, The Southern Mountaineer (1906), Appalachia emerged as a "problem" around 1890. This was the period of "Mountain White work." But not all writers recognized the problem as a social one. Many continued to write in the same vein as they did in their earlier novels and articles, perhaps influenced by the success of Frances Hodgson Burnett's "Esmeralda" (1877) and her later"Lodusky," (1877) written for the popular periodical market and later published in book form. In Esmeralda, Burnett writing under the name Charles Egbert Cradock, describes a heroine who is defeated by her inability to cross the broad cultural chasm into the world of her lover and who dies, leaving the hero to return to the "safe" world of "America." In the stories of Mary Noailles Murfree, the theme of a clash of cultures is re-visited. Her love story " A Star In the Valley," (1878) in which she sets the two cultures, Appalachia and the rest of America, in opposition to one another, sets the tone for the "romance in the mountains" literature that followed. One of the most popular of these romances was that described by John Fox Jr., in "A Modern Europa," (1892) in which the he re-works Murphree's "A Star In the Valley,"but gives the tale a classical wrapper. In this, the first of John Fox Jr's, mountain fiction, the"Europa" refers to the image of a mountain girl who rides to market astride a bull, an allusion to the mythological tale of the "Rape of Europa." In John Fox, Jr.'s tale and in "Esmeralda" by Burnett, the two authors killed off the heroine to take care of the "problem" that would be created if a mountain woman married an educated "Northerner" and contaminated American culture. As both authors continued to writer romantic tales of mountains and mountaineers, they clearly became more aware of the growing "problem" in the Appalachians and more uncomfortable with their hard division of class and under-class. For example, as if to correct the sexist and elitist ending and bolstered by a rapidly growing awareness of the Appalachian "problem," Burnett wrote her short story "Lodusky" later in the same year (1877), but in this tale she makes the mountain woman triumphant. In "Lodusky," the theme is the same, but the heroine does not die, but goes to Paris where she is "trained" in the cultural trappings necessary to triumph in life and to mock the arrogance of her lover. It is interesting that here, foreign influences trump the "American." Literature after 1890 is unified by the presence of explanatory argument -- but it is not uniform in its explanation. ....A STRANGE LAND OF PECULIAR PEOPLE ... MOUNTAINEERS ... MOUNTAIN PEOPLE. Mountains (their physical geography) were responsible for isolating the people. |
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| Pool 1896
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IN BUNCOMBE COUNTY Pool, Maria Louisa. In Buncombe County, Chicago: Herbert S. Stone & Company, 1896, p. 294. [Compare to Lee Smith's account of "being lost on a mountain." |
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| Carter 1900
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Carter, Mary Nelson. North Carolina Sketches: Phases of Life Where the Galax Grows, Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1900, p. 23. | |
| Rives 1905 |
Ora Rives Collection |
[P10]
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| 1906 Wilson |
Wilson, Samuel Tyndale, 1858- Wilson, Samuel Tyndale. The Southern Mountaineers. New York : Literature Department, Presbyterian Home Missions, 1914 |
Contains map and plates |
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COUNTRY LIFE MOVEMENT & SETTLEMENT SCHOOLS After 1900 the home missionary movement abated to some degree and the Appalachians saw the rise of what some have called the Country Life movement. Settlement School workers, like missionaries, to some extent, came to the mountains to work with rural poverty and to use the same models that had been successful in the settlement houses of Chicago, under Jane Addams' guidance and in New York and other eastern cities. The settlement workers fore-grounded moral reforms through such agencies as the WCTU and other Christian organizations, but they stressed the improvement of existing life-styles rather than the integration of the Appalachian people into the larger society. They championed the "country life" and in many cases, they lived it. In fact, they promoted the retention of native craft and encouraged the collection of Appalachian music, folk tales and lore. It to the efforts of these settlement workers, that another "mountain" characteristic, that of consumate craftsmanship, became known throughout the country and the world. In western North Carolina, Frances Goodrich, founder of Allenstand, a forerunner of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, is often credited with bringing the Arts and Crafts Revival to the mountain counties of western North Carolina. From her early work in 1895 modeled after the settlement school approach, a number of industries were born, chiefly that of weaving. Industries such as the Tryon Woodcarvers initiated by Charlotte Yale and Eleanor Vance in Biltmore Village in 1901, and the later Biltmore Industries grew from similar efforts to tap into local craft traditions. 1910 was also the beginning of the "Country Life" movement. Established by the many surveys completed by the Country Life Commission, this movement took a hard look at rural education. It concluded that to be effective, the education must meet the people's needs and that urban models were not appropriate. One of the traits that had continually worked against the communal activity of education, was the "rugged individualism" of the mountaineer. The period preceding the Country Life movement had been characterized by what John C. Campbell, founder of the John C. Campbell Folk School, referred to as a period of over-developed individualism. In his famous quote we see another "truism" evolving about the mountains :
See: Craft Revival: Shaping Western North Carolina, Past and Present at Western Carolina University. {look for ----] West, Max. "The Revival of Handicrafts in America," U.S Bureau of Labor Bulletin 9: 1573-1622 (1904 no. 55) |
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| 1913 Kephart |
Kephart, Horace, 1862-1931 Kephart, Horace. Camp Cookery / by Horace Kephart. New York : Macmillan, 1926 Kephart, Horace. Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life among the Mountaineers, New York, Outing Publishing Company, 1913. |
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| 1913
Morley
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Asheville Morley, Margaret. The Carolina Mountains, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913, pp. 134-137. Images: "Going Home" photograph by Margaret Morley. Watercolor for cover of The Carolina Mountains by Amelia Watson. |
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| O Henry 1921 |
Cover: O'Henry. Let Me Feel Your Pulse. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910. |
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| 1924 Peattie |
Peattie, Elia W. "These Be the Mountains That Comfort Me," in Azure-Lure: A Romance of the Mountains, Souvenir of Asheville and Western North Carolina, edited by Idyl Dial Gray, Asheville: Advocate Publishing Co., Carolina Souvenir Booklet Association,1924. [See Donald Peattie.] |
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| Raine 1924 |
Image from Catherine Rittenhouse photograph album, Pine Mountain Settlement School, KY. "Carrying mail." The Land of Saddle-bags: A Study of the Mountain People of Appalachia, New York: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1924, p 65.. |
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| Dargan 1925 |
Dargan, Olive Tilford. Highland Annals. |
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Kephart 1927 |
Kephart, Horace. Camping: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for Travelers in the Wilderness, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927. pp.17-18, 21-22. |
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Prosser 1928- |
George H. Prosser, George H. Prosser Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville. |
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| Ebbs 1929 |
Oh Western Carolina, “Fair Land of the Sky.” |
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| Goodrich 1931 |
Image from
Biltmore Industries
Archive, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, UNC Asheville.
Goodrich, Frances Louisa. Mountain Homespun, New Haven: Yale University Press ; London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931. |
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| Miles 1933 |
Herbert D. Miles Collection, 1912-1958 [M2007.09.01]
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| Dykeman 1938 |
Dyjkeman, Wilma. Bluets, "In the Style of...", 1937 |
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| Peattie, Donald 1930's |
PEARSON FALLS Near Tryon a small stream flows west to the Pacolet river. On this stream a series of cataracts fall approximately 75 feet down the mountain. The area was recognized for its scenic beauty many years ago and the Tryon Garden Club purchased a tract of 325 acres to preserve the area. Today it is a preserve and protects some of the more remarkable plants found in the areas mountains. The Club charges admission to the preserve which may be reached by traveling US Highway 176 some 5 1/2 miles west of Tryon. Peattie, Donald Culross. A Natural History of Pearson's Falls and Some of Its Human Associations. Tryon, N.C.: Printed by and for the Garden Club, [193-?] 1898-1964 |
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| *Dargan 1941 |
Olive Tilford Dargan - Portraits in the Charlotte Young Collection, D.H.Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville. |
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| Sandburg 1945 - |
Web thumbnail of Carl Sandburg. |
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| Ora
Blackman
Western North Carolina : its mountains and its people to 1880 / Ora
Blackmun A spire in the mountains; the story of 176 years of a church and a town growing together, 1794-1969, Asheville, N.C., First Presbyterian Church, 1970 viii, 387 p. illus., facsims., map, port. 24 cm |
No image. | |
| In 1978 Appalachian studies took a new turn
in scholarly direction. Many scholars in the field began to re-think what
defined the area we called "Appalachia". Two books were largely
instrumental in shifting the focus of scholarship and subsequently
literature -- both non-fiction and fiction. The two books are Henry
Shapiro's Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and
Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (1978), and
Helen Lewis' Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case
(1978), both early postmodern explorations of the Appalachian mountains.
Both scholars tapped into the evolving streams of postmodern thought and
study and challenged the conventional scholarship of "peculiar" and
"otherness" that had dominated the literature for many years.
Shapiro's book has not worn well with some scholars over the intervening years and some believe his dismissal of an Appalachian "reality, " -- a discreet entity defined by boundaries and tangible in a geographic and regional social and economic sense, cannot be trusted. Shapiro challenged us to think about our understanding of "insider" (those who profess to understand life in the Appalachian mountains) and the "outsider" (those who write about the region and are often criticized as not understanding the region) and how those intellectual constructs shaped the idea of "Appalachia.". Shapiro's critics feel the Appalachian mountain region is real and not just a mental construction, as Shapiro describes it. The ensuing argument, itself, became a postmodern dialogue, and an attack on Shapiro's cognitive dissonance theory and his constructivism that suggested that life in the region was neither unique nor "other" has still not subsided. "Appalachia" said Shapiro had been invented and was a purely intellectual construct. (See Roger Cunningham. "Appalachian Studies Among the Posts," Journal of Appalachian Studies, Fall 2003, vol. 9 no. 2, pp. 377-386). His critics "know" Appalachia, not as an American idea, shaped by local color writers, missionaries, tourists, and other outsiders, but as a geography within which there are defining environmental, social, medical, and economic realities. Helen Lewis, on the other hand, has fared well with her critics and her development of another postmodern thread in Appalachian scholarship, that of "colonialism," has given her many sympathetic readers. What Lewis suggests is that "colonialism" when applied to a regional concept holds up well and exposes the colonial relationship between Appalachia and America --- thus suggesting that the region is unique and that it can be freshly explored by overlaying the dialectic theories of Foucault and Marx. As Roger Cunningham has suggested in his essay, "Appalachian Studies Among the Posts," Lewis poses the question not "What is reality?", but more "What is our reality?" Lewis' thesis, say her supporters, has been substantiated in the extensive analysis of late given to the economic and political status of this region we refer to as "Appalachia", of which western North Carolina is a sub-set. Whether Lewis, like Shapiro will fall out of favor
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| 1978 Shapiro |
Appalachia On Our Mind Shapiro, Henry D.. Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978, p. 57-58. |
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| Young
19 ... |
Images from the
Charlotte Young Collection,
D.H. Ramsey Library Collection, UNC Asehville
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| Chiltowsky, Mary Ulmer | ||
| Dykeman 1980 Dykeman |
Smith, Clyde H. Appalachian Mountains ; text by Wilma Dykeman and Dykeman Stokely, Portland, Or.: Graphic Arts Center Publishing Company, 1980. Largely a photographic travelogue of the Appalachian Mountains, Dykeman and her son, Dykeman Stokely have balanced the rich visual experience of the region with text that is saturated in mountain-place. |
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| Bradbury 1984 |
Bradbury, Ray. Forever and the Earth: radio dramatization. Athen, Ohio: Croissant, c.1984. [Special Collections, D.H. Ramsey Library, UNC Asheville.] | |
| 1997 |
COLD MOUNTAIN Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997. p. 330. |
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| Pierce 2003 |
Dan Pierce, The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park (2000). | |
| Brown 2000 |
Brown, Margaret Lynn. The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains, Gainesville, et al.: University Press of Florida, 2000. | |
| Cunningham 2003 |
"The saying which I used as an epigraph to this essay
reads, in a longer form: 'To the unenlightened one, the mountain is a
mountain and the river is a river. To the one undergoing enlightenment,
the mountain is not a mountain and the river is not a river. To the
enlightened one, the mountain is again a mountain and the river is again a
river." After the foundations have been shaken, and everything has been
put on a new basis, the world is still there (wherever "there" is) to be
dealt with: to chop wood on the mountain and to draw water from the river.
... First there is a mountain: then there is no mountain; then there is a mountain. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, post-liberalism, post-Marxism: these (and others) are the posts among which Appalachian studies, like other change-oriented fields today, finds itself. Our task in the early twenty-first century, as I see it, is to stake out the posts and to locate ourselves among them. In so doing, we must remember that they are not fenceposts but guideposts; markers, themselves constructs, defining the points of a horizon: a horizon which in reality is only the illusory edge of an edgeless world, under a sky that is the illusory roof of an endless space. Nevertheless our task is to live on this earth under that sky, and under its erasure, working for the freedom and justice which, precisely because they are never fully realized, are the realest (and most realist) things we know." Cunningham, Roger. " " Appalachian Journal, |
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| Kathryn Stripling Byer, Gov. Michael F. Easley
appointed Kathryn Stripling Byer, of Cullowhee, to be North Carolina's
poet laureate on February 24, 2005. As poet laureate, Ms. Byer serves as
an ambassador of North Carolina literature, past and present. She
succeeded Fred Chappell. |
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| Smith 2006 |
Smith, Lee. On Agate Hill, Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2006. pp. 263-265. |
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| IMAGE USED IN EXHIBIT "The Lover's Leap"-At Early Sunrise. PICTURESQUE AMERICA page 140 Colton [Coulton], Henry E. "Picturesque America." illustrated by Henry Fenn, Appleton's Journal 4: 26 (November 26, 1870), .p 140 |
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| A Ferry on the French Broad. PICTURESQUE AMERICA
page 146.
Colton [Coulton], Henry E. "Picturesque America." illustrated by Henry Fenn, Appleton's Journal 4: 26 (November 26, 1870), .p 146 |
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| Blowing Rock. - R. E. Piguet.
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| Mountain Island. PICTURESQUE AMERICA page 136 -
A Scene on the French Broad.
Colton [Coulton], Henry E. "Picturesque America." illustrated by Henry Fenn, Appleton's Journal 4: 26 (November 26, 1870), .p 136 |
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| PICTURESQUE AMERICA. Chimney Rock, Hickory-Nut
Gap, North Carolina. Appleton's Journal, No. 90. Colton [Coulton], Henry E. "Picturesque America." illustrated by Henry Fenn, Appleton's Journal 4: 26 (November 26, 1870), .p 136 |
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