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.
In the early 1920s, Tom studied forestry at the University of Georgia, where he developed many of his outdoor skills. He left school due to a lack of money and took numerous jobs, mostly with the U.S. Forest Service, which led him to the mountains of Western North Carolina. He worked there as a forest ranger and also found jobs in land surveying, trail construction, fire prevention, and, of particular importance at the time, timber sales.
In 1926, Tom was hired as a timber estimator for the James D. Lacey Company, which was contracted to appraise the timber value on land the federal government was planning to buy for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. While working for the Lacey Company, Tom was invited to join a group of Asheville businessmen at a hunting and fishing lodge in Pisgah National Forest. He met Judith Barksdale there, and they were married in 1929. Four months after the wedding the Depression hit, and the Lacey Company went bankrupt. Tom lost his job, and Judy was pregnant.
 Photo by J. Baylor Roberts |
The Lacey Company still owed Tom $600. He asked to be paid with the company’s camping equipment at Three Forks Creek, and the company agreed. Tom later wrote, "I suddenly found myself in the tourist business, the owner of an outfit of tents, cots, mattresses, and cooking equipment, already in place beside one of the finest trout streams in the Southern Appalachians, even if only the most dedicated fishermen could actually get to it." Seizing the opportunity, Tom began leading camping and fishing expeditions into Three Forks.
Three years later, Tom and Judy leased a farm in the Cataloochee Valley inside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They opened the original Cataloochee Ranch there in 1933. The government proved too restrictive, and the second Cataloochee Ranch emerged in 1939, this time on Fie Top Mountain, outside the park boundaries.
Tom Alexander died in 1972, followed by his wife Judy in 1997. The Cataloochee Ranch, famed for its home cooking, square dancing, horseback riding, and skiing, is now operated by their descendants.
The basis for Mountain Fever was an unfinished manuscript written by Tom Alexander, Sr. His son and daughter-in-law, Tom and Jane Alexander, edited and expanded that manuscript, inviting sisters Alice Aumen and Judy Coker to contribute memories of their parents. After retiring from distinguished journalism careers in the late 1980s, Tom and Jane Alexander moved back to the Cataloochee Ranch, to a log house they built from timber hewn on the property.
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