I first became aware of Macon County’s remarkable Silas McDowell (1795-1879) back in the 1970s, due to his association with many of the 19th century botanists who were exploring this region of the Blue Ridge. Like many 19th century country gentlemen, McDowell was a man of varied interests.

I located a summary of his life by Gary S. Dunbar that had appeared in the “North Carolina Historical Review” in 1964. One fine one day I traveled to Chapel Hill to peruse his voluminous papers, which are housed in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina. So, I know a bit about McDowell and decided to devote this week’s “Back Then” column to him.

Almost as an afterthought, I entered his name in my favorite Internet search engine (Google) to see if a tidbit or two of useful McDowell information might pop up. Bingo! - up popped an entire web site named “Silas McDowell & Southern Apples” (www.rabun.net/~phillips).

Despite the title, this site not only covers McDowell’s interest in propagating apples but also his life, botanical associations, theories about the thermal belt, writings and a whole lot more. The creator of the site is T. Duane Phillips. All I know about Phillips is that he apparently lives in Rabun County, Georgia, that he has an interest in old-time apples, that he knows a lot more about McDowell than I know and that he is a whiz at creating web sites. In the last few years, “Silas McDowell & Southern Apples” has won 28 prestigious awards for excellence.

I love the quote from Aristotle that Phillips placed at the top of his homepage: “All paid employments absorb and degrade the mind.” The next time someone asks me why I write for a living, I’ll quote Aristotle.

Phillips summarizes McDowell’s career as follows:


“Silas McDowell was a southern pomologist and a botanist of some renown who discovered or introduced at least 15 new apple varieties during the 1850s. He was a farmer, scientific observer, mountain guide, clerk of the Superior Court and a man of letters. Born in York District, South Carolina, he was a distant relative of the renowned Indian fighter and hero of the Battle of Kings Mountain, Colonel Joseph (Pleasant Gardens) McDowell, the man for whom McDowell County, North Carolina, was named. He maintained a farm near Franklin, North Carolina, where he grew grapes and had a large apple orchard. He has been called ‘the outstanding apple producer in the state.’ ... He was the originator of the ‘thermal belt’ concept which is a zone on a mountainside where frost and freezes are less common than in the valleys and on the mountaintops. McDowell gained fame as a writer and storyteller and was the source of much of ‘the first North Carolina novel’ (titled) Eoneguski written by Senator Robert Strange. His writings were published in such widely diverse places as Harper’s, The North Carolina Planter, The Raleigh Observer, and Southern Cultivator. His prose landscape sketches were highly praised by James Wood Davidson in The Living Writers of the South (1869).

“As a youth, McDowell was trained as a tailor, a profession he practiced for most of his life. In 1812 he went to Asheville where he was educated at the well-known Newton Academy ... From 1814 to 1816 McDowell lived in Charleston, South Carolina, where he worked as an apprentice tailor. He moved to Morganton, North Carolina, and worked as a tailor until 1826, when he again moved to Asheville. McDowell married Elizabeth Erwin in 1828. His mother-in-law was the half-sister of David Lowry Swain, a North Carolina governor (1832-35) and the first president of the University of North Carolina.

McDowell moved his wife and young child to a farm in Macon County, North Carolina, which he had purchased in 1820. He was able to buy this land after the Cherokee cession in 1819. Silas had learned about the area from his landlord Daniel Smith, who was part of the Rutherford expedition against the Cherokees in 1776. Silas wrote about his farm in a letter to Lyman Draper in 1873 and said that he had “resolved to buy the Hiddintown in the Cullasajah Valley ... when a romantic youth in school.

“He lived on this farm, which he variously referred to as Hiddintown, Sugartown, and the Vale of Cullasajah, until his death in 1879. The name Cullasajah, today spelled Cullasaja and now used to designate a small river between Highlands and Franklin, North Carolina, has been variously spelled over the years as Cullasajah, Cullasaga, Cullasaja, and Callasaga.

“One of the apple varieties developed by McDowell, which is still cultivated, bears the name Callasaga.”


Between 1812 and 1850, Silas served as a guide to several botanists during their collecting trips to Western North Carolina. He also collected plants for several prominent botanists of the day, including Asa Gray, Moses A. Curtis and S. B. Buckley. McDowell served as Clerk of the Superior Court of Macon County from about 1830 to 1846. During this time, he continued his trade as a tailor and worked to build a large apple orchard.


“By 1850 McDowell had attained some measure of wealth and his orchard amounted to some 600 apple trees. The 1850 census listed the value of McDowell’s 230 acres as $4500 with his farm valued at $1100 and his livestock at $500. Included among the inventory were 3 horses, 4 asses/mules, 18 milch cows, 20 other cattle, 40 sheep, 25 swine, $75 worth of slaughtered animals, farm implements worth $50 and ‘homemade manufactures’ valued at $40. Also listed were 400 bushels of Indian corn, 200 bu. of oats, 70 pounds of wool, 100 bushels of sweet potatoes, 200 pounds of butter, and 4 tons of hay. The 1850 census listed nine people living on his farm at that time including his mother-in-law Patience Erwin, and seven children. His wife Elizabeth had died in 1848. Three of McDowell’s sons, Thomas, William, and James, served with Confederate forces during the Civil War. Three daughters, Mary, Ada Jane, and Georgia were also listed as living at home ...

“McDowell spent his later years writing about a variety of subjects. He carried on a long and extensive correspondence with Lyman Draper concerning the Cherokee wars in North Carolina. He wrote several long essays, notes for newspapers,and articles on mica production in North Carolina, cheese making, fish culture, sheep-raising, supplemental irrigation in agriculture and the resort possibilities of the nearby Highlands, North Carolina, area. He carried on a large correspondence and wrote numerous articles which were never published.

“Silas McDowell died on his farm near Franklin on July 14, 1879. He is buried in the old Methodist cemetery in Franklin near the grave of his mother. His grave is marked with a simple monument. A historical marker was erected in 1990 on U.S. 64 between Franklin and Highlands, North Carolina.”
You’ll have to visit “Silas McDowell & Southern Apples” to fully explore the man’s varied interests. Since the origin of the thermal belt concept is a subject of wide general interest here in WNC, I’ll conclude this column with some of Phillips’ commentary on that topic.

“Silas McDowell is probably best known as the originator of the thermal belt concept. In all likelihood, he developed the idea through observation over many years, but first wrote about it around 1858.
Ironically it was a severe freeze on April 28, 1858, which ruined his apple crop, prompting him to ultimately quit the apple business and devote his time to viticulture. “McDowell had noticed that certain elevations did not seem to experience the same frequency or intensity of frosts and freezes as surrounding areas of lower and higher elevation. This phenomenon was obviously important to those engaged in agriculture because it allowed farmers a longer growing season in areas where crop loss due to freezes were frequent. Today we know the phenomenon as a temperature inversion in which a warm layer of air overlays a lower, colder layer. Temperature inversions may happen virtually anywhere, but they occur relatively frequently in the southern Appalachians during the spring when fruit trees are in bloom, a time when a late freeze could result in severe damage to a year’s fruit crop.

“Dr. Gary S. Dunbar presented a thorough discussion of the early history of man’s knowledge of temperature inversions in his paper ‘Thermal Belts in North Carolina’ (The Geographical Review, 1966: pp. 425-435). McDowell was not the first to observe the phenomenon, nor even the first American ... McDowell, however, was the person who wrote several articles on ‘thermal belts’ and the concept gained widespread acceptance.”

“McDowell first wrote of the phenomenon in July, 1858 in the `North Carolina Planter.’ After the publication of McDowell’s article, others began to report the phenomenon in other parts of North Carolina. The Weather Bureau investigated the phenomenon during 1912-1916.... Stations were established at 16 locations in the western North Carolina mountains, and uniform observations were conducted during the four-year period of 1913-1916. The study confirmed that temperature inversions frequently occur in the mountain areas of western North Carolina, and that they were important from an agricultural standpoint, but that they were elusive and somewhat unpredictable.”

“One interesting finding of the study was that the area near Highlands, North Carolina in the mountain region close to the North Carolina-Georgia boundary, is the wettest place in the United States except the extreme northwest Pacific coast.”

“The term ‘thermal belt’ has fallen out of favor today, but temperature inversions occur throughout the western North Carolina-north Georgia area. Likewise, apple growing has declined from its former importance. The need for each homeowner to have his own orchard to provide fresh fruit, cider, and vinegar for the winter months no longer exists, so modern man pays less attention to such ephemeral weather conditions.”


For many 19th century country gentlemen like Silas McDowell, there weren’t many topics so ephemeral as to escape their attention.

(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., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com

 

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