Editor’s Note: June 2004 marks the 100th anniversary of Horace Kephart’s arrival in the Smokies region. A series of four Back Then columns initiated this week will deal with various aspects of his life and career: (June 2-8) “Finding a Place of Refuge”; (June 9-15) “The Making of `Our Southern Highlanders’”; (June 16-22); “Establishing a National Park in the Great Smokies”; and (June 23-29) “The Kephart Collections at Western Carolina University.”


After Thomas Wolfe, Horace Kephart (1862-1931) is perhaps the writer most closely associated in the national consciousness with the mountains of Western North Carolina. Our Southern Highlanders — first published in 1913, with an expanded edition in 1922 - is considered by many to be one of the classic studies of Southern Appalachian culture. Kephart is certainly the most famous outdoorsman the region has yet produced. His Camping and Woodcraft is securely established as one of the classics of American outdoor writing, having been continuously in print since 1906. And aside from his literary career, Kephart is widely recognized as one of the forces behind the founding of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Evidence of Kephart’s influence continues to this day. In 2000 he was chosen by the “Raleigh News & Observer” as one of “North Carolina’s 100 Most Influential People of the Century.” The “Asheville Citizen-Times” named him one of “Western North Carolina’s 50 Most Influential People of the Century,” noting that after arriving in the southern mountains he “became one of the region’s greatest advocates.”

The Together We Read program in WNC has chosen Our Southern Highlanders as its topic volume for 2004. Entering its third year, this program’s mission is “to develop in the region a love of reading through the shared experience of well-chosen books. Sponsored by a number of regional agencies and institutions, the program is governed by a board of educators, librarians, business leaders, and readers. It is hosted by Asheville-Buncombe Technical College. In 2002 and 2003, respectively, more than 20,000 readers participated, sharing their reading experiences of Wilma Dykeman’s The French broad and Fred Chappell’s Brighten the Corner Where You Are.

Our Southern Highlanders started to come to fruition when Horace Kephart stepped off the train at Dillsboro, N.C., one June day in 1904. Still a relatively young man, Kephart left behind a failed career as a librarian in St. Louis, an estranged wife and their six children, and an aborted suicide attempt. All of the details of the events that sparked this mid-life crisis are not fully known, but it’s well established that chronic alcoholism was a contributing factor.

Kephart came south into the Smokies region looking for a “Back of Beyond” — a place where he could “begin again.” He was preoccupied with the desire to forge a literary career of some sort, while at the same time participating in a lifestyle similar to that he had experienced while growing up in rural Pennsylvania during the early 1860s. He had the notion “that I might realize the past in the present” and use that experience as a healing agent.

Departing the train at Dillsboro, Kephart walked west along the railroad for a mile or so before turning north up Dicks Creek. Here he obtained permission from a local family to pitch camp for the summer. By the fall of 1904, he had discovered the rugged, backwoods settlements along Hazel Creek — “far up under the lee of those Smoky Mountains” - and secured permission from a copper mining company that had gone into litigation to use one of their abandoned cabins.

Located about 2 miles from Medlin, a tiny settlement situated where the Sugar Fork enters Hazel Creek about 10 miles up Hazel Creek from its confluence with the Little Tennessee River (now inundated by Lake Fontana), this remote cabin site on “the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek” became the vantage point from which Kephart studied the land and its people. It was a two-room structure, half of logs and half of rough planking, probably with two levels that were constructed at different times. He refurbished the dwelling, adding his few belongings, including a small library that was hauled up to the cabin in a wagon.

Kephart immediately commenced exploring “that mysterious beckoning hinterland which rose right back of my chimney and spread upward, outward, almost to the three cardinal points of the compass, mile after mile, hour after hour of lusty climbing.” He also entered into the lives of the 200 or so native mountaineers that lived along the main Hazel Creek watershed and its ever-branching tributaries.

Kephart lived in the cabin on the Little Fork from the fall of 1904 to the fall of 1907. (He subsequently made his home in Bryson City from 1910 until his death in 1931.) Those years of life along Hazel Creek were the cornerstones for all of his subsequent writing. They also gave him the motivation to devote his latter years promoting a nation park in the Great Smokies.

In journals that he had brought for the occasion, Kephart recorded the exact phrases his neighbors along Hazel Creek used to express their hopes and aspirations as well as their trials and tribulations. This data became the foundation upon which Our Southern Highlanders was constructed. Next week we’ll take a closer look at the manner in which the book evolved.

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.