On Horseback

Excerpts pertaining to the Laurel Bloomery area from

ON HORSEBACK
By Charles Dudley Warner


(The following excerpts are from a series of articles published in The Atlantic Monthley: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics in July and August, 1885. The articles detail a trip by a small group from Connecticut through the Southern Appalachians, from Abingdon, Virginia down to the Smokey Mountains.)

.....
With this amicable adjustment we forded the Holston, crossing it twice within a few miles. This upper branch of the Tennessee is a noble stream, broad, with a rocky bed and a swift current. Fording it is ticklish business except at comparatively low water, and as it is subject to sudden rises there must be times when it seriously interrupts travel. This whole region, full of swift streams, is without a bridge, and as a consequence, getting over rivers and brooks and the dangers of ferries occupy a prominent place in the thoughts of the inhabitants. The life necessarily had the "frontier" quality all through, for there can be little solid advance in civilization in the uncertainties of a bridgeless condition. An open, pleasant valley the Holston, but cultivation is more and more negligent and houses are few and poorer as we advance.

We had left behind the hotels of "perfect satisfaction," and expected to live on the country, trusting to the infrequent but remunerated hospitality of the widely scattered inhabitants. We were to dine at Ramsey's. Ramsey's had been recommended to us as a royal place of entertainment, the best in all that region; and as the sun grew hot in the sandy valley, and the weariness of noon fell upon us, we magnified Ramsey;'s in our imagination, --the nobility of its situation, its cuisine, its inviting restfulness, --and half decided to pass the night there in the true abandon of plantation life. Long before we reached it, the Holston River which we followed had become the Laurel, a most lovely, rocky, winding stream, which we forded continually, for the valley became too narrow much of the way to accommodate a road and a river. Eagerly as we were looking out for it, we passed the great Ramsey's without knowing it, for it was the first of a little settlement of two houses and a saw-mill and barn. It was a neat log house of two lower rooms and a summer kitchen, quite the best of the class that we saw, and the pleasant mistress of it made us welcome. Across the road and close to the Laurel was the spring-house, the invariable adjunct to every well-to-do house in the region, and on the stony margin of the stream was set up the big caldron for the family washing; and here, paddling in the shallow stream, while dinner was preparing, we established an intimacy with the children and exchanged philosophical observations on life with the old negress who was dabbling the clothes. What impressed this woman was the inequality in life. She jumped to the unwarranted conclusion that the Professor and the Friend were very rich, and spoke with asperity of the difficulty she experienced in getting shoes and tobacco. It was useless to point out to her that her al fresco life was singularly blessed and free from care, and the happy lot of any one who could loiter all day by this laughing stream, undisturbed by debt or ambition. Everybody about the place was barefooted, except the mistress, including the comely daughter of eighteen, who served our dinner in the kitchen. The dinner was abundant, and though it seemed to us incongruous at the time we were not twelve hours older when we looked back upon it with longing. On the table were hot biscuit, ham, pork, and green beans, apple-sauce, blackberry preserves, cucumbers, coffee, plenty of mild, honey, and apple and blackberry pie. Here we had our first experience, and I may say new sensation, of "honey on pie." It has a cloying sound as it is written, but the handmaiden recommended it with enthusiasm, and we evidently fell in her esteem, as persons from an uncultivated society, when we declared our inexperience of "honey on pie." Where be you from?" It turned out to be very good, and we have tried to introduce it in families since our return, with indifferent success. There did not seem to be in this family much curiosity about the world at large, nor much stir of social life. The gayety of madame appeared to consist in an occasional visit to paw and maw and grandmaw, up the river a few miles, where she was raised.

Refreshed by the honey and fodder at Ramsey's, the pilgrims went gaily along the musical Laurel, in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun, which played upon the rapids and illumined all the woody way. Inspired by the misapprehension of the colored philosopher and the dainties of the dinner, the Professor soliloquized:--

"So am I as the rich, whose blessed key
Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure,
The which he will not every hour survey,
For Blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.
Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare
Since seldom coming, in the long year set,
Like stones of wealth they thinly placed are,
Or captian jewels in the carcanet."

Five miles beyond Ramsey's the Tennessee line was crossed. The Laurel became more rocky, swift, full of rapids, and the valley narrowed down to the river-way."with standing, room, however, for stately trees along the banks. The oaks, both black and .white, were, as they had been all day, gigantic in size and splendid in foliage. There is a certain dignity in riding in such stately company, and the travelers clattered along over the.stony road under the impression of possible high adventure in a new world of such freshness. Nor was beauty wanting. The rhododendrons had, perhaps, a week ago reached their climax, and- now began to strew the water and the ground with their brilliant petals, dashing all the way with color; but they were still matchlessly beautiful. Great banks of pink and white covered the steep hillsides; the bending stems, ten to twenty feet high, hung their rich clusters over the river;' avenues of glary opened away in the glade of the stream; and at every turn of the winding way vistas glowing with the hues of romance wrenched exclamations of delight and wander from the Shakespearean sonneteer and his humble Friend. In the deep recesses of the forest suddenly flamed to the view, like the splashes of splendor on the somber canvas of an old Venetian, these wonders of color, tbe glowing summer-heart of the woods.'

It was difficult, to say, meantime whether the road was laid out in the river, or the river in the road. In the few miles to Egger's (this was the destination of our great expectations for the night) the stream was crossed twenty-seven times. Where the road did not run in the river, its bed was washed out and as stony as the bed of the stream. This is a general and accurate description of all the roads in this region, which wind along and in the streams, through narrow valleys, shut in by low and steep hills. The country is full of springs and streams, and between Abingdon and Egger's is only one (small) bridge. In a region with scarcely any level land or intervale, farmers are at a disadvantage. All along the road we saw nothing but mean shanties, generally of logs, with now and then a decent one-story frame, and the people looked miserably poor.

As we picked our way along up the Laurel, obliged for the most part to ride single-file, or as the Professor expressed it, --

"Let me confess that we two must be twain,
Although our undivided loves are one,"-

We gathered information about Egger's from the infrequent hovels on the road which inflamed our imaginations. Egger was the thriving man of the region and lived in syle in a big brick house. We began to feel a doubt that Egger would take us in, and so much did his brick magnificence impress us that we regretted we had not brought apparel fit for the society we were about to enter.

It was half past six, and we were tired and hungry, when the domain of Egger towered in sight, --a gaunt two-story structure of raw brick, unfinished, standing in a narrow intervale. We rode up to the gate, and asked a man who sat in the fron door porch if this was Egger's, and if we could be accommodated for the night. The man, without moving, allowed that it was Egger's, and that we could probably stay there. This person, however, exhibited so much indifference to our company, he was such a hairy, unkempt man, and carried on face, hands, and clothes so much more of the soil of the region than a prudent proprietor would divert from raising corn, that we set him aside as a poor relation, and asked for Mr. Egger. But the man, still without the least hospitable stir, admitted that that was the name he went by, and at length advised us to "lite" and hitch our horses, and set on the porch with him and enjoy the cool of the evening. The horses would be put up by and by and in fact. things generally would come round some time. This turned out to be the easy way of the country. Mr. Egger was far from being inhospitable, but was in no hurry, and never had been in a burry. . He was not exactly a gentleman of the old school. He was better than that. He dated from the time: when there. were no schools at all, and he lived in that placid world which is without information and ideas. Mr. Egger showed his superiority by a total lack of curiosity about any other world.

This brick house, magnificent by comparison with other dwellings in this country, seemed to us, on nearer acquaintance, only a thin, crude shell of a house, half unfinished, with bare rooms, the plastering already discolored. In point of furnishing it had not yet reached the "God bless our Home" stage in. crewel. In the narrow meadow, a strip of vivid green south of the house, ran a little, stream, fed by a copious spring, and over it was built the inevitable spring-house. A post, driven into the bank 'by the stream, supported a tin wash-basin, and here we performed our ablutions.. The traveler gets to like this freedom and primitive luxury.

The farm of Egger's produces corn, wheat, grass, and sheep; it is a good enough farm, but most of it lies at an angle of thirty-five to forty degrees. The ridge back of the house, planted in corn, was as steep as the roof of his dwelling. It seemed incredible that it ever could have been ploughed, but the proprietor assured us that it was ploughed with mules, and I judged that the harvesting must be done by squirrels. The soil is. Good enough if it would stay in place, but all the hillsides are seamed with gullies. The discolored state of the streams was accounted for as soon as we saw this cultivated land. No sooner is the land cleared of trees and broken up than it begins to wash. We saw more of this later, especially in North Carolina, where we encountered no stream of water that was not muddy, and saw no cultivated ground that was not washed. The process of denudation is going on rapidly wherever the original forests are girdled (a common way of preparing for crops), or cut away.

As the time passed and there was no sign of supper, the question became a burning one, and we went to explore the kitchen. No sign of it there. No fire in the stove, nothing cooked in the house, of course. Mrs. Egger and her comely young bare-footed daughter had still the milking to attend to, and supper must wait for the other chores. It seemed easier to be Mr. Egger; in this state of existence; and. sit on the front porch and. meditate on the price of mules and the prospect of a crop, than to be Mrs. Egger, whose work was not limited from sun to sun; who had, in fact, a day's work to do after the men-folks had knocked off; whose chances of neighborhood gossip were scanty, whose amusements were confined to a religious meeting once a fortnight. Good; honest people these, not unduly puffed up by the brick house, grubbing away year in and year out. Yes, the young girl said, there was a neighborhood party, now and then, in the winter. What a price to pay for mere life!

Long before supper was ready, nearly nine o'clock, we had nearly lost interest in it. Meantime two other guests had arrived, a couple of drovers from North Carolina, who brought into the circle --by this time a wood-fire had been kindled in the sitting-room, which contained a bed, an almanac, and some old copies of a newspaper-- a rich flavor of cattle and talk of the price of steers. As to politics, although a presidential campaign was raging, there was scarcely an echo of it here. This was Johnson County, Tennessee, a strong Republican county; but dog-gone it says Mr. Egger, it's no use to vote; our votes are overborne by the rest of the State. Yes, they'd got a Republican member of Congress, --he'd heard his name, but he'd forgotten it. The drover said he'd heard it also; but he didn't take much interest in such things, though he wasn't any Republican. Parties is pretty much all for office, both agreed. Even the Professor, who was traveling in the interest of Reform, couldn't wake up a discussion out of such a state of mind.

Alas! the supper, served in a room dimly lighted with a smoky lamp, on a long table covered with oil-cloth, was not of the sort to arouse the delayed and now gone appetite .of a Reformer, and yet it did not lack variety; cornpone (Indian meal stirred up with water and heated through), hot biscuit .slack-baked and livid, fried salt-pork swimming in grease, apple-butter, pickled beets, onions and cucumbers raw, coffee, so-called, buttermilk, and sweet milk when specially asked for (the correct taste, however, is for buttermilk), and pie. This was not the pie of commerce, but the pie of the country, - two thick slabs of dough, with a squeezing of apple between. The profusion of this supper staggered the novices, but the drovers attacked it as if such cooking were a common occurrence, and did justice to the weary labors of Mrs. Egger.

Egger is well .prepared to entertain strangers, having several rooms and several beds in each room. Upon consultation with the drovers, they said they'd just as soon occupy an apartment by themselves, and we gave up their society for the night. The beds in our chamber had each one sheet, and the room otherwise gave evidence of the modern spirit; for in one corner stood the .fashionable aesthetic decoration of our Queen Anne drawing-rooms, --the spinning-wheel. Soothed by this concession to taste, we crowded in between the straw and the home-made blanket and sheet, and soon ceased to hear the barking of dogs and the horned encounters of the drover's herd.

We parted with Mr. Egger after breakfast (which was a close copy of the supper) with more respect than regret. His total charge for the entertainment of two men and two horses-supper, lodging, and breakfast-was high or low, as the traveler chose to estimate it. It was $1.20: that is, thirty cents for each individual, or ten cents for each meal and lodging.

Our road was a sort of by-way up Gentry Creek and over the Cut Laurel Gap to Worth's, at Creston Post Office, in North Carolina, --the next available halting place, said to be fifteen miles distant, and turning out to be twenty-two, and a rough road. There is a little settlement about Egger's, and the first half mile of our way we had the company of the school-mistress, a modest, pleasant-spoken girl. Neither she nor any other people we encountered had any dialect or local peculiarity of speech. Indeed, those we encountered that morning had nothing in manner or accent to distinguish them. The novelists had led us to expect something different; and the modest and pretty young ladies, with frank and open blue eyes, who wore gloves and used the common English speech, had never figured in the fiction of the region. Cherished illusions vanish often on near approach. The day gave no peculiarity of speech to note, except the occasional use of "hit" for "it."

The road over Cut Laurel Gap was very steep and stony, the thermometer mounted up to 80 degrees, and notwithstanding the beauty of the way the ride became tedious before we reached the summit. On the summit is the dwelling and distillery of a colonel famous in these parts. We stopped at the house for a glass of milk; the colonel was absent, and while the woman in charge went for it, we sat on the veranda and conversed with a young lady, tall, gent, well-favored, and communicative, who stood in the doorway.

"Yes, this house stands on the line. Where you sit you are in Tennessee; I'm in North Carolina."

"Do you live here?"

"Law, no; I'm just staying a little while at the colonel's. I live over the mountain here, three miles from Taylorsville. I thought I'd be where I could step into North Carolina easy."

"How's that?"

"Well, they wanted me to go before the grand jury and testify about some pistol-shooting down by our house, --some friends of mine got into a little difficulty, --and I didn't want to. I never has no difficulty with nobody, never says nothing about nobody, has nothing against nobody, and I reckon nobody has nothing against me."

"Did you come alone?"

"Why, of course. I come across the mountain by a path through the woods. That's nothing."

A discreet, pleasant, pretty girl. This surely must be the Esmeralda who lives in these mountains, and adorns low live by her virgin purity and sentiment. As she talked on, she turned from time to time to the fireplace behind her, and discharged a dark fluid from her pretty lips, with accuracy of aim, and with a nonchalance that was not assumed, but belongs to our free-born American girls. I cannot tell why this habit of hers (which is no worse than the sister habit of "dipping") should take her out of the romantic setting that her face and figure had placed her in; but somehow we felt inclined to ride on further for our heroine.

"And yet," said the Professor, as we left the site of the colonel's thriving distillery, and by a winding, picturesque road through a rough farming country descended into the valley, --"and yet why fling aside so readily a character and situation so full of romance, on account of a habit of this mountain Helen, which one of our best poets has almost made poetical, in the ease of the pioneer taking his westward way, with ox-goad pointing to the sky, --

"He's leaving on the pictured rock
His fresh tobacco stain."

"To my mind the incident has Homeric elements. The Greeks would have looked at it in a large, legendary way. Here is Helen, strong and lithe of limb, ox-eyed, courageous, but woman-hearted and love-inspiring, contended for by all the braves and daring moonshiners of Cut Laurel Gap, pursued by the gallants of two States, the prize of a border warfare of bowie knives and revolvers. This Helen, magnanimous as attractive, is the witness of a pistol difficulty on her behalf, and when wanted by the areopagus, that she may neither implicate a lover nor punish an enemy (having nothing, this noble type of her sex, against nobody) skips away to Mount Ida, and there, under the aegis of the flag of her country, in a Licensed Distillery, stands with one slender foot in Tennessee and the other in North Carolina" -

"Like the figure of the Republic itself, superior to state sovereignty," interposed the Friend.

"I beg your pardon," said the Professor, urging up Laura Matilda (for so he called the nervous mare, who fretted herself into a fever in the stony path), "I was quite able to get the woman out of that position without the aid of a metaphor. It is a large and Greek idea, that of standing in two mighty States, superior to the law, looking east and looking west, ready to transfer her agile body to either State on the approach of messengers of the court; and I'll be hanged if I didn't think that her nonchalant rumination of the weed, combined with her lofty moral attitude, added something to the picture."

The Friend said that he was quite willing to join in the extremest defense of the privileges of beauty, --that he even held in abeyance judgment on the practice of dipping; but when it came to chewing, gum was as far as he could go as an allowance for the fair sex.

"When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment"-

The rest of the stanza was lost, for the Professor was splashing through the stream. No sooner had we descended than the fording of streams began again. The Friend had been obliged to stipulate that the Professor should go ahead at these crossings, to keep the impetuous nag of the latter from throwing half the contents of the stream upon his slower and uncomplaining companion.

What a lovely country, but for the heat of noon and the long wearisomeness of the way!-not that the distance was great, but miles and miles more than expected. How charming the open glades of the river, how refreshing the great forests of oak and chestnut, and what a panorama of beauty the banks of rhododendrons, now intermingled with the lighter pink and white of the laurel! In this region the rhododendron is called laurel, and the laurel (the sheep-laurel of New England) is called ivy.

At Worth's, well on in the afternoon, we emerged into a wide, open farming intervale, a pleasant place of meadows and streams and decent dwellings. Worth's is the trading centre of the region, has a post office and a sawmill and a big country store; the dwelling of the proprietor is not unlike a roomy New England country-house. Worth's has been immemorially a stopping place in a region where places of accommodation are few. The proprietor, now an elderly man, whose reminiscences are long ante bellum, has seen the world grow up about him, he the honored, just centre of it, and a family come up into the modern notions of life, with a boarding-school education and glimpses of city life and foreign travel. I fancy that nothing but tradition and a remaining Southern hospitality could induce this private family to suffer the incursions of the wayfaring man. Our travelers are not apt to be surprised at anything in American life, but they did not expect to find a house in this region with two pianos and a bevy of young ladies, whose clothes were certainly not made on Cut Laurel Gap, and to read in the books scattered about the house the evidences of the finishing schools with which our country is blessed, nor to find here pupils of the Stonewall Jackson Institute at Abingdon. With a flush of local pride, the Professor took up, in the roomy, pleasant chamber set apart for the guests, a copy of Porter's Elements of Moral Science.

"Where you see the Elements of Moral Science," the Friend generalized, "there'll be plenty of water and towels;" and the sign did not fail. The friends intended to read this book in the cool of the day; but as they sat on the long veranda, the voice of a maiden reading the latest novel to a sewing-group behind the blinds in the drawing room; and the antics of a mule and a boy in front of the store opposite; and the arrival of a spruce young man, who had just ridden over from somewhere, a matter of ten miles' gallop, to get a medicinal potion for his sick mother, and lingered chatting with the young ladies until we began to fear that his mother would recover before his return; the coming and going of lean women in shackly wagons to trade at the store; the coming home of the cows, splashing through the stream, hooking right and left, and lowing for the hand of the milker, --all these interruptions, together with the generally drowsy quiet of the approach of evening, interfered with the study of the Elements. And when the travelers, after a refreshing rest, went on their way next morning, considering the Elements and the pianos and the refinement, to say nothing of the cuisine, which is not treated of in the text-book referred to, they were content with a bill double that of brother Egger in his brick magnificence.

The simple truth is that the traveler in this region must be content to feed on natural beauties. And it is an unfortunate truth in natural history that the appetite for this sort of diet fails after a time, if the inner man is not supplied with other sort of food. There is no landscape in the world that is agreeable after two days of rusty bacon and slack biscuit.

"How lovely this would be," exclaimed the Professor, "if it had a background of beefsteak and coffee!"

We were riding along the west fork of the Laurel, distinguished locally as Three Top Creek, --or rather we were riding in it, crossing it thirty-one times within six miles; a charming wood (and water) road, under the shade of fine trees, with the rhododendron illuminating the way, gleaming in the forest and reflected in the stream, all the ten miles to Elk Cross Roads, our next destination. We had heard a great deal about Elk Cross Roads; it was on the map, it was down in the itinerary furnished by a member of the coast survey. We looked forward to it as a sweet place of repose from the noontide heat. Alas! Elk Cross Roads is a dirty grocery store, encumbered with dry-goods boxes, fly-blown goods, flies, loafers. In reply to our inquiry, we were told that they had nothing to eat, for us, and not a grain of feed for the horses. But there was a man a mile further on, who was well to do and had stores of food-old man Tatem would treat us in bang-up style. The difficulty of getting feed for the horses was chronic all through the journey. The last corn crop had failed, the new oats and corn had not come in, and the country was literally barren. We had noticed all along that the hens were taking a vacation, and that chickens were not put forward as an article of diet.

We were unable, when we reached the residence of old man Tatem, to imagine how the local superstition of his wealth arose. His house is of logs, with two rooms, a kitchen and a spare room, with a low loft accessible by a ladder at the side of the chimney. The chimney is a huge construction of stone, separating the two parts of the house; in fact, the chimney was built first, apparently, and the two rooms were then built against it. The proprietor sat in a little railed veranda. These Southern verandas give an air to the meanest dwelling, and they are much used; the family sit here, and here are the wash-basin and pail (which is filled from the neighboring spring-house) and the row of old milk-pans. The old man- Tatem did not welcome us with enthusiasm; he had no corn, --these were hard times. He looked like hard times, grizzled times, dirty times. It seemed time out of mind since he had seen comb or razor, and although the lovely New River, along which we had ridden to his house, --a broad, inviting stream, --was in sight across the meadow, there was no evidence that he had ever made acquaintance with its cleansing waters. As to corn, the necessities of the case and pay being dwelt on, perhaps he could find a dozen ears. A dozen small ears he did find, and we trust that the horses found them.

We took a family dinner with old man Tatem in the kitchen, where there was a bed and a stove, a meal that the host seemed to enjoy, but which we could not make much of, except the milk; that was good. A painful meal, on the whole, owing to the presence in the room of a grown-up daughter with a graveyard cough, without physician or medicine, or comforts. Poor girl! just dying of "a misery."

In the spare room were two beds; the walls were decorated with the gay-colored pictures of patent-medicine advertisements --a favorite art adornment of the region; and a pile of ancient illustrated papers with the usual patent-office report, the thoughtful gift of the member for the district. The old man takes in the Blue Ridge Baptist, a journal which we found largely taken up with the experiences of its editor on his journeys roundabout in search of subscribers. This newspaper was the sole communication of the family with the world at large, but the old man thought he should stop it, --he didn't seem to get the worth of his money out of it. And old man Tatem was a thrifty and provident man. On the hearth in this best room --as ornaments or memento mori --were a couple of marble grave-stones, a short head-stone and foot-stone, mounted on bases and ready for use, except the lettering. These may not have been so mournful and significant as they looked, nor the evidence of simple, humble faith; they may have been taken for debt. But as parlor ornaments they had a fascination which we could not escape.

It was while we were bathing in the New River, that afternoon, and meditating on the grim, unrelieved sort of life of our host, that the Professor said, "Judging by the face of the Blue Ridge, Baptist, . he will charge us smartly for the few nubbins of corn and the milk." The face did not deceive ,us; the charge was one dollar. At this rate it would have broken us to have tarried with old man Tatem (perhaps he is not old, but that is the name he goes by) over night.

It was a hot afternoon, and it needed some courage to mount and climb the sandy hill leading us away from the corn-crib of Tatem. But we entered almost immediately into fine stretches of forest, and rode under the shade of great oaks. The way, which began by the New River, soon led us over the hills to the higher levels of Watauga County. So far on our journey we had been hemmed in by low hills, and without any distant or mountain outlooks. The excessive heat seemed out of place at the elevation of over two thousand feet, on which we were traveling. Boone, the county-seat of Watauga County, was our destination, and, ever since morning, the guide-boards and the trend of the roads had notified us that everything in this region tends towards Boone as a centre of interest. The simple ingenuity of some of the guide-boards impressed us. If, on coming to a fork, the traveler was to turn to the right, the sign read,
To BOONE 10M.

If he was to go to the left, it read,
.M01 ENOOB oT (Editor's Note: the letters were all backward)
....

Awesome book!

This is a really interesting book about pond mountain and the cut laurel gap area.
You can read some of it on google print or buy a copy at Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786403918/102-4663867-0409710