In this world of headlines and sound bites and what is generally referred to as news, we often lose sight of the wonderful – those things that go right.

A press release from Friends of Great Smoky Mountains National Park (FOS) came in my email just the other day. It announced a four-year, $105,000 grant from the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation. The grant, secured by FOS, would go to the Appalachian Highlands Science Learning Center to support science teacher enrichment programs.

Hopefully, many in Haywood County and many who are supporters of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park know that the Appalachian Highlands Science Learning Center is Purchase Knob or simply “the Purchase” as many in Haywood County know it.

I was introduced to the Purchase in 1999. I was working as a regular outdoors contributor to the Smoky Mountain News when we learned that the Purchase had been deeded to the GSMNP.

I was able to arrange an interview with Kathryn McNeil to talk with her about this unprecedented gift to the GSMNP. The 530-acre parcel straddles the border between Haywood County and the GSMNP and is the largest contiguous contribution of land to the park since its creation in the 1930s.

I was greeted by a gracious, unpretentious woman — now living in San Francisco — who had just published a memoir, Purchase Knob, about her 35-year connection with the Purchase. We talked about her memories of the Purchase — bears, being snowbound and children and grandchildren playing in the mown meadows. We talked about nostalgia and the melancholy of moving on, but the thing that impressed me, and what I wrote in the story, was this: “Mostly, there is the heartfelt certainty she has done the right thing. You can see it in her eyes and in her smile when she talks about the Purchase.”

Well, in the middle of throwing my shoulder out of joint patting myself on the back about the colorful “lifestyle” article I had just written about Purchase Knob, I was contacted by Voit Gilmore.

“Cub” reporter that I was, I hadn’t done a thorough fact check. I had names confused. Kathryn McNeil’s husband, when she was introduced to the Purchase, was, in fact, Gilmore. Kathryn McNeil and Voit Gilmore were the ones donating the property to the GSMNP.

It was evident when I spoke to Voit Gilmore that he wasn’t upset about my sloppy journalism, but that he too was connected to the Purchase and that he and Kathryn agreed that the GSMNP had been a great neighbor and that they would be the best stewards for the Purchase.

Gilmore, at the August 2000 dedication of the gift to the GSMNP, said: “Our ideals for this place were reinforced by ... environmental neighbors who knew how to love and treat this land. Always, our best neighbor was the Great Smoky Mountains National Park ....The reasoning behind our unrestricted gift to the park is the fact that these acres should, indeed, be saved forever.”

But they have been more than saved. They have been turned into one of the most prominent education and learning centers in the nation’s national park system. The Appalachian Highlands Learning Center is one of just five education and science centers officially established in 2001.

And this center has been pro-active. It is an integral part of the park’s All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, an ambitious science-driven effort to catalogue all species present in the GSMNP. Plus it has partnered with regional educational systems to offer hands-on science based research and learning opportunities to students and teachers. More than 4,000 students, teachers, scientists and volunteers have participated in programs at the Appalachian Highlands Learning Center.

This new grant is directed at those who will be teaching our new scientists. The science teacher enrichment programs will focus on first-hand learning. According to resource education ranger Susan Sachs, “We will give teachers and teachers-in-training the tools, information, and comfort they need to make inquiry-based learning interesting for their students. “

Best of all, there is nothing serendipitous about the success of the Appalachian Highlands Learning Center. McNeil told me back in that 1999 interview that she would love to see an environmental-educational center established at the Purchase. That vision, plus the commitment and exceptional guidance of GSMNP staff — especially education coordinator Susan Sachs and science coordinator Paul Super — have helped establish the center as a showcase of public and private partnership.

(Don Hendershot can be reached at ddihen@earthlink.net.)