This book is the fourth in a series about the Smoky Mountain “west-of-the-Ridge” section of Western North Carolina—its history, people, customs, traditions, and folklore—with a strong emphasis on Haywood County.

Weaving together stories of his hiking adventures with reflective explorations of literary works set along the Appalachian Trail, Marshall traces a literary geography of the trail that ranges from Georgia to Maine and spans three centuries.

ONCED UPON A TIME AGO, in the Smoky Mountains, there lived a feller named Jack. So begin twenty Jack Tales, based on traditional folk and fairy tales, plus an extra tale, The Legend of Stingy Jack. Nine seasonal stories are adventures with Giants, a Witch, Trolls, and Death. Bonus Tales feature a heifer hide, a bear, moonshine, golden eggs, a ball of butter, a Kings ring, and a lost ax. Smoky Mountain Jack Tales of Winter and Old Christmas These are fun performance tales for reading aloud at home or in public, for oral interpretation, or re-told in your own words. Primarily for older youth and grownups, these varied tales are for readers and storytellers who already know and love Jack and those about to make a new friend.

Find countless opportunities to capture the beauty and natural diversity of America's most visited national park. On the border between North Carolina and Tennessee lie the forests and mountains of America’s most visited national park, Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Renowned for the diversity of its plant and animal life—the most biological diversity of any area in the world’s temperate zone—this beautiful place also boasts some of the last remaining pockets of Southern Appalachian mountain culture. The park offers countless opportunities to capture its beauty and diversity on film, and in this book professional photographer and writer Jim Hargan leads you to some of the best photo sites throughout this 800-square-mile wonderland.

The Great Smoky Mountains, at the border of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, are among the highest peaks of the southern Appalachian chain. Although this area shares much with the cultural traditions of all southern Appalachia, the folklife here has been uniquely shaped by historical events, including the Cherokee Removal of the 1830s and the creation of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park a century later. This book surveying the rich folklife of this special place in the American South offers a view of the culture as it has been defined and changed by scholars, missionaries, the federal government, tourists, and people of the region themselves. Here is an overview of the history of a beautiful landscape, one that examines the character typified by its early settlers, by the displacement of the people, and by the manner in which the folklife was discovered and defined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here also is an examination of various folk traditions and a study of how they have changed and evolved.

A timely study of change in a complex environment, Where There Are Mountains explores the relationship between human inhabitants of the southern Appalachians and their environment. Incorporating a wide variety of disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the study draws information from several viewpoints and spans more than four hundred years of geological, ecological, anthropological, and historical development in the Appalachian region. The book begins with a description of the indigenous Mississippian culture in 1500 and ends with the destructive effects of industrial logging and dam building during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Donald Edward Davis discusses the degradation of the southern Appalachians on a number of levels, from the general effects of settlement and industry to the extinction of the American chestnut due to blight and logging in the early 1900s. This portrait of environmental destruction is echoed by the human struggle to survive in one of our nation's poorest areas. The farming, livestock raising, dam building, and pearl and logging industries that have gradually destroyed this region have also been the livelihood of the Appalachian people. The author explores the sometimes conflicting needs of humans and nature in the mountains while presenting impressive and comprehensive research on the increasingly threatened environment of the southern Appalachians.

This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.

Jerry Barker has long championed North Carolina's Mountains-to-Sea Trail (MST) and led its development for many years. In Discovering North Carolina's Mountains-to-Sea Trail, he draws on that experience to take readers on a unique journey along the trail's full route, sharing the rich history and stories that live on each segment. Connecting the trail to the Indigenous history of western North Carolina, the long military presence near the Carolina coast, and more, Barker offers a new way to understand and appreciate not only the natural beauty of North Carolina but also its people and history. Dedicated long-distance hikers and day-trippers alike will value and enjoy this armchair guide. * Includes abundant illustrations with over fifty color photographs and maps for each of the MST's nineteen segments * Narrates significant histories related to each MST segment * Places prominent natural features of the trail in context * Introduces hikers to nearby attractions, cultural heritage sites, and trail towns Jerry Barker, a writer and avid hiker, is a former president of Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Terra Incognita is the most comprehensive bibliography of sources related to the Great Smoky Mountains ever created. Compiled and edited by three librarians, this authoritative and meticulously researched work is an indispensable reference for scholars and students studying any aspect of the region’s past. Starting with the de Soto map of 1544, the earliest document that purports to describe anything about the Great Smoky Mountains, and continuing through 1934 with the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park—today the most visited national park in the United States—this volume catalogs books, periodical and journal articles, selected newspaper reports, government publications, dissertations, and theses published during that period. This bibliography treats the Great Smoky Mountain Region in western North Carolina and east Tennessee systematically and extensively in its full historic and social context. Prefatory material includes a timeline of the Great Smoky Mountains and a list of suggested readings on the era covered. The book is divided into thirteen thematic chapters, each featuring an introductory essay that discusses the nature and value of the materials in that section. Following each overview is an annotated bibliography that includes full citation information and a bibliographic description of each entry. Chapters cover the history of the area; the Cherokee in the Great Smoky Mountains; the national forest movement and the formation of the national park; life in the locality; Horace Kephart, perhaps the most important chronicler to document the mountains and their inhabitants; natural resources; early travel; music; literature; early exploration and science; maps; and recreation and tourism. Sure to become a standard resource on this rich and vital region, Terra Incognita is an essential acquisition for all academic and public libraries and a boundless resource for researchers and students of the region.

Beginning with the legend of how a young Cherokee boy earned the name Dragging Canoe and weaving its way through three centuries, this book treats history not as a collection of names and dates, but as real-life drama filled with strong characters and vivid emotions.