A working ledger of the North Carolina High Country · vol. 01 · Newland, N.C.
A field atlas for the local history of the High Country — the Cherokee homelands, the Wilderness Road, the timber railroads, the flood of 1916, the nitrate mines, the founding of Appalachian State, and the small-town institutions that define Avery, Watauga, Mitchell, Yancey, and the surrounding counties. Ten entries, three centuries, no card-grid.
The Blue Ridge was a Cherokee country for at least a thousand years before the first European contact in 1540. The Cherokee relationship with the land was intensive but not extractive — the forests were managed by controlled burns, the rivers by seasonal fish weirs.
De Soto's expedition crossed the mountains in 1540. The chroniclers recorded Cherokee towns in the Little Tennessee valley, south of the future Avery County line. The Cherokee town of Cowee sat on the Tuckasegee; the northern trade routes passed through the Linville Gorge and the upper New River. The Overhill Cherokee capital at Tanasi — the source of the name Tennessee — lay beyond the Blue Ridge divide.
By the late 1600s, traders from Virginia and South Carolina were crossing the mountains. Posts were established at the future Asheville and Franklin, but the future Avery County was too remote for the deerskin trade. The Cherokee managed the land, not the European maps of it.
The Cherokee did not lose the mountains in a single year. They lost them across a hundred years of treaties, removals, and broken promises.
The first permanent white settlement of the High Country came from the north, not the south. The Wilderness Road came through the Cumberland Gap, and Daniel Boone's Trace pushed east through the Blue Ridge in 1773, opening the mountains to long-hunter settlement and the first land warrants.
The Wilderness Road was cut by the Transylvania Company in 1775 under Daniel Boone. It ran from the Cumberland Gap northeast through the Holston Valley, into the Blue Ridge at the Watauga, and into the backcountry of what became Kentucky. It was the first engineered wagon road over the southern Appalachians and it fixed the trade pattern of the mountains for the next seventy years.
Boone's Trace — the eastern continuation through the Blue Ridge — crossed the Yellow Mountain Gap and dropped into the Linville Valley. The county namesake of the future Avery County, Waightstill Avery, was the first attorney general of North Carolina and a signer of the Tryon Resolves. He never visited the county that would bear his name. The county was carved from parts of Watauga, Mitchell, and Caldwell in 1911 and named for him; the family had held the original land warrants in the 1790s.
The first long-hunters crossed the Blue Ridge in the 1760s. The first permanent homesteads followed in the 1780s — most in the Watauga, the New River, and the upper Yadkin. The Big Bald, the Roan, and the Yellow Mountain were the Cherokee refuge corridors of the same decade.
Waightstill Avery's heirs took out land warrants in the 1790s covering the future Avery County. The warrants were never settled — the family sold them to the Brown family in 1814, and the Browns were the first to put a plow into the Linville Valley floor.
The Avery County Courthouse on Newland's main square is the seat of the smallest county in North Carolina. The county was carved from three larger counties in 1911 and the courthouse, completed in 1912, is the only granite courthouse in the state.
The act establishing the county was signed by Governor William W. Kitchen on February 12, 1911, and Newland was designated the county seat. The county was the smallest in the state by area (247 sq mi) and the highest county east of the Rockies.
The Avery County Courthouse was built in 1912 from granite quarried from the Linville Falls granite bed. It is still in use and is the only North Carolina courthouse in continuous use since the day it was built. On the National Register of Historic Places.
Watauga was the parent county for most of the settlement. Boone, the county seat, was named for Daniel Boone by his nephew, Judge Jonathan H. Walker, who laid out the town in 1871.
The Civil War in the High Country was a borderland. No set-piece battles, only ambushes, raids, and reprisals that ran from 1862 through 1865. The mountains were the corridor between the western Confederacy and Unionist east Tennessee.
Stoneman's raid on Boone, April 1863, is the most remembered. The Union raiders burned the courthouse and the Masonic lodge and were chased through the Blue Ridge by Confederate cavalry under Lt. Col. John B. Palmer.
The Bakersville skirmish (July 15, 1863) was a Confederate attempt to capture the Union garrison under Captain William C. Walker. The attack was repulsed after a running fight along the North Toe River. The engagement killed five.
Confederate raiders under Captain George W. Blodgett burned the Linville Post Office and the village in August 1864 in retaliation for the Unionist sympathies of the Winston family. The village was rebuilt but the post office was never re-established.
The Sturgill Rifles, a Unionist guerrilla company from the upper Watauga, ranged through the mountains from 1862 through 1865. Their most remembered action was the March 1865 ambush of a Confederate foraging party on the North Carolina–Tennessee line.
The High Country was the last region of North Carolina to be reached by the railroads. The East Tennessee & Western North Carolina Railroad (the "Tweetsie") reached Cranberry in 1882 and Boone in 1898. The lines were narrow-gauge, the grades were steep, and the trains ran through the gorge country at five miles an hour.
The timber industry was the leading economic force of the High Country from the 1880s through the 1920s. The virgin spruce forests of the higher ridges were the last uncut timber in the eastern United States, and the railroads were built primarily to pull it out. The Cranberry Iron Furnace, on the Avery–Mitchell line, was the largest charcoal-iron furnace in the South and ran from 1882 until 1930.
The timber economy ran the railroads; the railroads ran the timber economy. The cycle ended in the 1920s when the cutover land was abandoned and the railroads stopped paying. The ET&WNC was abandoned in 1940. The Tweetsie Railroad that survives today is a recreated three-mile section of the original line at Blowing Rock, using a narrow-gauge locomotive that was once the mainstay of the Boone run.
The Cranberry Iron Furnace was built in 1882 by the Cranberry Iron & Coal Company. The furnace ran on local ore and locally-cut charcoal, and produced the iron that built the railroads. The stack is preserved as a state historic site.
The ET&WNC reached Boone in 1898. The run from Johnson City took seven hours. The line opened the mountains to the automobile tourist and the summer boarder — the industries that succeeded timber.
The flood of July 1916 was the worst natural disaster in the history of the High Country. Two back-to-back hurricanes crossed the mountains in the second week of July and the rivers of the upper Catawba, the Watauga, the New, and the Toe rose fourteen feet above flood stage in less than forty-eight hours.
The death toll in the four affected counties was at least eighty. The bridges at Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and Newland were all washed out. The flood ended the timber industry's last profitable decade and the era of the narrow-gauge railroad in the High Country.
The rivers did not flood. They came back. The mountains had been cut over, the coves were bare, and the rain had nowhere to go.
Two federal programs shaped the High Country in the 1930s more than any other. The nitrate mining era of World War I returned as a small-scale industry. The Civilian Conservation Corps (1933–1942) planted the forests, built the state parks, and laid the trails.
The nitrate mining era began in 1917 when the United States' supply of Chilean nitrate was cut off by German submarine attacks. The High Country's bat-guano caves — particularly Linville Caverns and the saltpeter workings along the North Toe — were reopened as wartime nitrate sources. The output was modest but the mining changed the geography of the caves.
The CCC planted roughly two million trees in the High Country between 1933 and 1942. The camps were at Linville, Boone, Bakersville, and Hot Springs. The enrollees built the carriage roads at Moses H. Cone Memorial Park, the fire tower at Table Rock, and the bathhouse at the state park at Boone. The spruce and fir forest that defines the high country today is the forest the CCC planted.
Camp SP-5 at Linville was the largest CCC camp in the High Country. The enrollees planted the red spruce stands of the Linville Gorge, built the trail up to Table Rock, and quarried the stone for the Linville Caverns visitor center.
On May 5, 1939, the campus of Appalachian State Teachers College hosted the inauguration of President B. B. Dougherty — the largest civic event in the High Country in the decade.
Appalachian State University was founded in 1899 as Watauga Academy, a private subscription school. The state took over the academy in 1903. The institution has been the High Country's largest employer and most consequential civic institution for more than a century.
The academy was the work of two brothers, B. B. and D. D. Dougherty. The state took over the property in 1903 as the Appalachian Training School — the first public teacher-training institution in western North Carolina.
The school became a four-year institution in 1934. The May 1939 inauguration of President B. B. Dougherty was the culmination of the institution's first four decades. Renamed Appalachian State University in 1967, it is the largest university in the High Country.
The "1989 shootout" was the federal raid on the compound of the Mountain Family Ministry in the Plumtree community of Avery County on August 29, 1989. The eight-day standoff ended without injury. The case is the most remembered federal law-enforcement action in the county's history.
The institutions that survive the second half of the twentieth century are the ones that define the civic identity of the High Country. The Tweetsie Railroad, the Avery County Courthouse, and the Maynard Cooper estate are the three longest-running modern entries.
The Tweetsie Railroad reopened in 1957 as a three-mile heritage railway at Blowing Rock, using a narrow-gauge locomotive that had been the workhorse of the ET&WNC. The longest continuously operating tourist railroad in North Carolina.
The Maynard Cooper family purchased the original Banner Elk farm in 1929 and expanded through the 1960s and 1970s to include the high-mountain agricultural land around Beech Mountain. The estate is the largest contiguous privately-held tract in Avery County.
The Avery County Courthouse has been in continuous use since 1912. It is the seat of the county government and the Superior Court, and is the only county courthouse in North Carolina built entirely of locally-quarried granite.
A condensed ledger of the entries above, in chronological order. The dates are when the event happened, not when the entry was written.
First documented European contact with the Cherokee homelands of the Blue Ridge.
Chapter 01Daniel Boone cuts the first engineered wagon road over the southern Appalachians.
Chapter 02Waightstill Avery's heirs take out the first land warrants over the future Avery County.
Chapters 02 · 08Boone, Bakersville, Linville, and the Sturgill Rifles. The borderland war.
Chapter 04The largest charcoal-iron furnace in the South opens on the Avery–Mitchell line.
Chapter 05The ET&WNC reaches Boone. A seven-hour run from Johnson City opens the mountains.
Chapter 05B. B. & D. D. Dougherty found the predecessor of Appalachian State University.
Chapter 08The smallest county in North Carolina is carved from three larger counties.
Chapter 03The Avery County Courthouse, granite from the Linville Quarry, is completed.
Chapters 03 · 09The worst natural disaster in the history of the High Country. Eighty dead. The timber era ends.
Chapter 06Linville Caverns and the saltpeter workings along the North Toe are reopened.
Chapter 07Camp SP-5 at Linville. Two million trees, the state parks, the trail system.
Chapter 07B. B. Dougherty is inaugurated as president of Appalachian State Teachers College.
Chapters 07 · 08The heritage railway at Blowing Rock opens. The first of the modern tourist institutions.
Chapter 09The federal raid on the Mountain Family Ministry compound at Plumtree, August 29.
Chapter 08The Banner Elk estate. The largest contiguous privately-held tract in Avery County.
Chapter 09