Our Southern Highlanders

Who is most responsible for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park? A gentleman by the name of Horace Kephart (1862-1931), the author of this book. A librarian in St. Louis around the turn of the 20th century, in 1904, he gave that up and moved to Western North Carolina, following his fascination w [...]
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Who is most responsible for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park? A gentleman by the name of Horace Kephart (1862-1931), the author of this book. A librarian in St. Louis around the turn of the 20th century, in 1904, he gave that up and moved to Western North Carolina, following his fascination with outdoor life and his interest in this mountainous region. Kephart's fascination became his avocation -- he wrote numerous magazine articles for national periodicals of that day. A book from Kephart's pen -- The Book of Camping and Woodcraft: A Guidebook for Those Who Travel in the Wilderness (Outing Publishing, 1906) -- also proved popular and is still a widely-used reference today. Yet, all of the above -- as significant as it was in the field of outdoor writing -- pales when compared to this book, Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers (Outing Publishing, 1913). By that year, having lived here in these great hills almost 10 years, Horace Kephart possessed journal after journal in which he had meticulously written first-hand observations of the mountains and people during his travels. The book itself was well received, even among the mountain folk themselves (and we are often a clannish lot). The mountaineers called it "that book," but it soon became the book about Appalachia.