There had been, of course, logging on a minor scale in the southwestern tip of North Carolina before the mid-1880s. But with the completion of various rail lines into the region, big-time, industrial operations commenced in earnest by the very early years of the 20th century. One of the industry’s epicenters in Western North Carolina was the massive, timber-rich range that became the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934.

Only a very few of the millions that visit the Smokies each year can envision rail and logging operations that extended from, say, the lowest elevations along present-day Lake Fontana (at 1,700 feet) up the rugged Forney Creek watershed to the very brow of Clingmans Dome (at more than 6000 feet). And they would be astonished to learn that similar operations were ongoing along all of the other watersheds on the North Carolina side of the Smokies: Big Creek, Cataloochee Creek, upper Oconaluftee River, Deep Creek, Hazel Creek, Eagle Creek, and Twenty Mile Creek.

One person who is envisioning these historic operations is Ron Sullivan, a Haywood County resident dedicated to mapping and documenting these activities in considerable detail. For several years, Sullivan and his wife, Marilyn, have been hiking (“bushwhacking” is a more accurate term) the old rail grades and diligently recording the locations of the various grades, trestles, fills, artifacts, and more.

Born in 1933, Sullivan grew up at Signal Mountain, Tenn. Now retired, he did some work as a petroleum geologist before embarking on a long career with IBM. His explanation for his interest in the history of logging in the Smokies is succinct: “My Dad loved trains. In the late 1940s, I went on a camping trip with my Scoutmaster to Elkmont on the Tennessee side of the Smokies, where we hiked some of the old rail grades. In retrospect, that seems to have been the ‘little kernel’ that sparked my present activities.”

To most of us the word “artifact” brings to mind small implements like arrowheads or bits of broken pottery. For Sullivan and his wife, an artifact can be as small as a railroad spike or as large as a skidder, a boiler, a piece of rail, or a railroad tie.

After each outing, Sullivan records their field-collected data in a two-page, computer-generated, journal format that contains dates of exploration, maps, GPS locations, photographs, any pertinent oral history that he has been able to glean from knowledgeable informants, and more. In time, he hopes to rework this material into a book about the logging of the North Carolina side of the Smokies during the early 20th century. Completed and published, it would be a major contribution to the region’s history.

Sullivan’s model for such a book would be, in part, Whistle over the Mountain: Timber, Track & Trails in the Tennessee Smokies: An Historical and Field Guide to the Little River Lumber Company and the Little River Railroad in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Graphicom Press, 1994) by Ronald G. Schmidt and William S. Hooks. While that study detailed the operations of but one lumber company, Sullivan’s will necessarily have to concern itself with the operations of numerous companies along a multitude of rail lines.

Readers of this column can lend their assistance to the project. Sullivan is quite interested in hearing from any old-time loggers (or their surviving relatives and friends) who might have had first-hand experience cutting timber in the woods, working along the rail lines, cooking in the lumber camps, or whatever. He can be contacted as follows: Ron Sullivan, 40 Hawks Lift Drive, Waynesville, N.C., 28786; 828.456.8376; or hikers2@bellsouth.net.

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.