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Authors
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Although a native of Decatur, Georgia, Thomas W. Alexander fell in love with the Southern Appalachians when he was only seven years old. He found that he could never be happy anywhere else. A forester, outdoorsman, farmer, and entrepreneur, Tom Alexander is strongly identified with the Great Smoky Mountains and the hardy, self-sufficient folk of the region.
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Marcellus "Buck" Buchanan |
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Marcellus Buchanan was born and reared in Sylva, North Carolina. Buck left his native mountains to obtain his legal education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then went to Raleigh to spend three terms in the 1950s representing his home county of Jackson — along with Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Macon, and Swain counties — in the North Carolina House of Representatives.
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Ray Cunningham was born in a hundred-year-old log cabin in northern Alabama, in a rural community where almost everybody had less than an eighth-grade education. That doesn’t mean his neighbors were uneducated — just "short on book learning."
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 Photo courtesy of the Marietta Daily Journal |
Joseph E. Dabney is a native of Kershaw, South Carolina, a graduate of Berry College, and a veteran of the Korean War. Currently an author and public speaker, Mr. Dabney is retired from Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, Marietta, Georgia, where he served as a public relations representative from 1965 to 1989. Prior to that, he was a reporter for fifteen years and an editor with several Southern newspapers, including the Atlanta Journal and the Morning News of Florence, South Carolina.
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 Photo by Kari Brayman |
Jeanine Davis was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and has lived both east and west of the Mississippi. She earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in horticulture from Washington State University. In 1998, Dr. Davis joined the faculty of the Department of Horticultural Science at North Carolina State University. Currently, she is an associate professor and extension specialist at the Mountain Horticultural Crops Research and Extension Center near Asheville, North Carolina.
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 Photo courtesy of Powell/Roach |
Emma Carpenter Edsall is the youngest of Lucy’s grandchildren. Her earliest memories include being "rocked in a straight chair" on Granny Lucy’s lap and listening to stories of Tate City, rattlesnakes, and screaming panthers ("screaming painters", Lucy would have said). As a Toastmaster, Emma often delights her audiences by recounting these tales.
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Sylvia Fisher and her husband Francis enjoy making wine at their home in Candler, North Carolina. Their son Dan provided the helpful illustrations for this book. |
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George Ellison is a writer, naturalist, lecturer, and historian who resides near Bryson City in the mountains of Western North Carolina near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. His natural history columns appear in the Asheville Citizen-Times and the quarterly Chinquapin: The Newsletter of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society. He also writes a regional history column for Smoky Mountain News, published in Waynesville, North Carolina.
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A native of Asheville, independent publisher, and former publicity director for the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce, Lou Harshaw has been photographing and writing about the mountains throughout her career. She has also taught classes on Southern Appalachian history and culture at several colleges in Western North Carolina.
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Dr. Gloria Houston is the best-selling author of several books for young readers, including My Great-Aunt Arizona, The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree, and the Littlejim series. She is also the author of numerous textbooks and other teaching materials. However, she describes herself as "first, last, and always a teacher."
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 Photo courtesy of Hales Corners Hstorical Society |
Walter Ben Hunt (1888–1970) was an important figure in outdoor recreation and the revitalization of skills and crafts from the pioneer era. His writings, including more than 20 books and 1,000 magazine articles, have been printed in 26 languages.
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Robert Johnson, known to friends as Bob, spent his boyhood in upstate New York and his entire working career in western Massachusetts, retiring as the senior vice president of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. He and his wife, Suzanne, who is William Stone’s great-granddaughter, moved to North Carolina in 1992, then to South Carolina in 2000.
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 David Joy was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and quickly demonstrated a fascination with fishing and writing. Growing up as the youngest in a family of fishermen, David was exposed to the passion of casting lines at an early age. David earned a degree in literature and a Master’s in professional writing from Western Carolina University and is currently a columnist and staff writer for the Crossroads Chronicle in Cashiers, North Carolina, where Appalachian culture and landscape feed his creativity.
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Junior League of Asheville |
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For more than 85 years, the Junior League of Asheville, a nonprofit women’s organization, has strived to positively impact the city of Asheville and its surrounding areas by investing in the lives of women and children throughout the community.
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Eva Carpenter McCall is the granddaughter of the real-life Lucy Carpenter. Eva lived for nineteen years with her grandmother in Franklin, North Carolina. She has taken the many stories her grandmother told her and structured them into Edge of Heaven and Children of the Mountain to provide a sense of what family life was like in the mountains of northeast Georgia and Western North Carolina in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
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Clarence Meyer, the second son of Joseph Ernest Meyer, was born in 1903. He grew up working in his father's business of selling herbs and printing herbal publications in Indiana, but he aspired to become a portrait painter. He studied for three years at the Chicago Art Institute, then moved to Germany to pursue his dream. He continued to study art in Munich, but he also continued to add to the family collection of antique European herbal books and manuscripts.
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Joseph Ernest Meyer was born in 1878 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and grew up in Milwaukee. He was the son of a photographer who especially enjoyed photographing plants. Joseph frequently accompanied his father on nature outings and was destined to love flora. Upon the death of his father, Joseph’s mother could not afford to keep the family together, so Joseph and his brother were reared in a Franciscan orphanage, while his sisters stayed with their mother. In the orphanage, Joseph was educated and taught the printing trade. He opened his own print shop, married, and started a family.
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Born in 1861 at a Quaker settlement in Richmond, Indiana, James Mooney was the only son of Irish immigrants. He was heavily influenced by the history, folklore, and rituals of his Irish heritage, and later drew many parallels between the Irish and American Indian cultures and their struggles for survival.
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Joe Richard Morgan left the western North Carolina mountains to serve in the United States Marine Corps during and after the Korean conflict.
A teacher who has taught language, literature, and writing for over forty years, Joe Morgan has been selected twice by his colleagues as teacher of the year and has received the Illinois Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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 Photo courtesy of the Polk County Historical Association |
Margaret Warner Morley was born on February 17, 1858, in Montrose, Iowa, but her family soon moved to Brooklyn, New York. Margaret was the product of Victorian America, an era defined by a yearning for social evolution. As a result, she took advantage of the dramatically improved educational opportunities for women.
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 Photo courtesy David Hooks Photography |
The late Mead Parce was a newspaper editor with a lifelong interest in history and the mountain people of the Southern Appalachians. A graduate of Utica College of Syracuse University, he lived in such diverse places as Texas, Utah, Florida, Central New York, New England, and Hawaii before settling in Hendersonville, North Carolina. There he was the editor of the community’s daily newspaper, the Hendersonville Times-News, for a number of years. In addition to editing the paper, he wrote six columns a week, many involving regional history. |
 Photo By Mark Haskett |
Scott Persons has successfully grown American ginseng for twenty-five years. Born in Durham, North Carolina, he graduated from Duke University in 1967 with a B.A. degree in philosophy, and then went on to earn M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in educational psychology from Emory University. When marriage led him to settle on his wife’s homestead in Western North Carolina, Dr. Persons became fascinated with the valuable woodland herb that flourished there on the heavily forested hillsides.
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Milton Ready is a Professor Emeritus of History living in quiet contentment in the mountains of Western North Carolina near Asheville. He was born and bred in the area around Willis, Texas, where he attended public schools. Upon graduation he attended Rice University and the University of Houston, followed by a tour of duty in the United States Army.
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 Photo by Darrell J. Carter |
Michael Renegar was raised in the small town of East Bend, North Carolina, where he still resides. He graduated from Forbush High School in 1987, receiving a Sara Lee Scholarship to attend Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.
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Maurice Stanley is a native of Western North Carolina and the author of the historical novels The Legend of Nance Dude, Sorrows End, and Midwinter. He has also written several college philosophy textbooks, including Logic and Controversy.
Dr. Stanley holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a retired lecturer of philosophy and religion at UNC Wilmington. He lives with his wife in coastal North Carolina, where he enjoys reading, writing, and watching classic films. |
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In 1978, Doug Swaim completed architectural school and was the editor of Carolina Dwelling, the student publication of the School of Design, North Carolina State University. He then completed the historic properties inventory of Buncombe County for the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. At the conclusion of that project in 1981, Doug edited the inventory publication, Cabins & Castles: The History and Architecture of Buncombe County, North Carolina.
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A native of Sylva, North Carolina, Bob Terrell lived all his life in Western North Carolina. After attending Western Carolina University, he joined the staff of the Asheville Citizen-Times as a sports reporter. For more than fifty years, readers enjoyed Bob Terrell’s daily columns chronicling the fun and foibles of his family, friends, and neighbors. His many humorous columns comprise several of his most popular books, including Fun Is Where You Find It! and A Touch of Terrell.
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 Photo by Virginia Porter Reynolds |
Eleanor Lambert grew up on Long Island and graduated from Vassar College in 1941. Her sense of adventure led her to leave the conventional society of her youth to take a job at the John C. Campbell Folk School in the tiny Appalachian community of Brasstown, North Carolina. There she met and fell in love with Monroe Wilson. After World War II, they married, and in 1949, the Wilsons bought a dairy farm in Brasstown. During their marriage of fifty years, they raised four children: Danny, Anne, John, and Florence.
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