Quotes from The French Broad

“The French Broad is a river and a watershed and a way of life where day-before-yesterday and day-after-tomorrow exist in odd and fascinating harmony. Beneath the deepest waters impounded by Douglas Dam lies buried the largest untouched Indian mound of the French Broad country. Our most ancient relic of man and our most recent trophy of his scientific skill rest practically side by side. There is the same coexistence of past and present within the people. It helps explain how they may be at once so maddening and so charming, wrong about so many things and yet fundamentally right so often. This living past and present is my story of the French Broad. I should like to think that by some unmerited but longed-for magic I have spoken for a few of the anonymous dead along its banks and up its mountains” (25).

“He [Elisha Mitchell] was as different from Big Tom Wilson as a Doberman is from a bear dog, but there is one thing in common to both and that is intelligence. Developed along different lines, with unlike methods and varying uses, the intellects of these two men were drawn together because of mutual need. Each represented a sort of mind that seems particularly American, and without either the development of the country would have been far different and much less interesting. One more thing that the professor and the hunter had in common, the factor that gave them ground for understanding: interest in the natural world around them” (65-66).

“Years and generations of self-reliance lay behind the tentative solution to a problem that might have seemed insurmountable. It embodied an idea that would gather increasing importance throughout the South: diversification” (199).

“Factories came to the French Broad and its tributaries because the people were not of a manufacturing background – but they were highly intelligent.... And because of the regional stereotype which exists in most people’s minds, picturing the Southeastern mountaineers as careless and indolent while Northeastern workers are brisk and efficient, it is a refreshing surprise to have one of these transplanted executives reveal that in his opinion and experience just the opposite is many times true. The erroneous viewpoint that confused literacy with intelligence has in part already been corrected” (268).

“For somewhere along the way from their time to ours a bargain was struck. We exchanged the purity of simple necessities for complex luxuries, which were never meant to satisfy, but to stimulate our hungers. The French Broad is particularly a region of springs. The water of most of the brooks and streams and rivers they form is nearly as pure, in its pristine state, as water can be. But when we turned away from the spring at the edge of the kitchen yard and turned on the faucet in our porcelain sink, we turned off our interest in what came out of the spigot” (281).

“I stood beside the damp sand of one of the best and most ancient of these springs, beneath a clump of high straight poplars and a ledge of rock, and I remembered the wonder of the clear flowing water that had always filled the basin there. How right that we should say a spring is fed by veins – tiny threads of water leading from many sources – and that we can destroy a spring by probing too deeply for its delicate feeders” (345).