Bill Carson

Partial Transcript: Dad signed up for the task. Went to class and was seated alphabetically, Carson next to Converse, and a friendship developed. When the next set of classes started, they were still interested in each other. But my mother lived with an old maid aunt of ours, who felt her job at East Tennessee State was to protect the innocent young ladies from the evil intentions of the male students. So there was never a chance to be alone anywhere but in her parlor. So they devised a code, and Dad would go stand outside the gym—the ladies’ gym—and sing at the top of his lungs a song that she would hear, and that meant they were having a date that night someplace. And the song was “Life is Like a Mountain River.” So one thing led to another, and they were married. And that song has a lot to do with my being here, and therefore of the orchard being here and being used like it is. So my favorite song, “Life is Like a Mountain River.”

Partial Transcript: Well, my name is Bill Carson, and I am a retired, reformed but unrepentant rocket scientist. Helped put men on the moon in the ‘60s, and GPS was my program in the ‘80s. And we retired to Little Switzerland right down the road here, and I was never going to work again. I taught myself to weave, and I was making rectangles at a furious pace on my loom. Sister came to visit from Cary, North Carolina. She watched me weave for five minutes. I thought she’d come to be family. She got bored with that, said I was the only left-brained, type-A weaver that she’d ever seen. And so she got bored, read the Spruce Pine Newspaper, saw the ad for the Orchard at Altapass.

What you see here is a view from the Orchard at Altapass. Now, this place has quite a history to it. Harley Jolley, history professor emeritus at Mars Hill University, said this is historically the most active place on the Blue Ridge. And the reason is, there is a low gap on the Eastern Continental Divide at the edge of our property. And the trail that settlers would use to come across the mountain to settle the interior of the continent—from European settlers—that was the Yellow Mountain Trail, and this was where the history was. But we found a spear point near here that dates back clear to the end of the last ice age. So we know this crossing has been used as long as there have been people on the continent. Well, it became developed, and it started as an orchard by the Clinchfield Railroad, 107 years ago now. And the Clinchfield—you can make out against the mountain over here—to come up from the north fork of the Catawba River to cross the continental divide to get to the coal fields in Kentucky, comes here. The name of the orchard and the name of the location, Altapass, was given to us by the railroad. The railroad high point is right here at Altapass. And in order to come up from the Catawba River to cross the continental divide, there are eighteen tunnels around us, and just thirteen miles of track to go three miles from the valley to the last tunnel, the edge of our property, through the continental divide at Altapass. So there’s a lot of history here.

We bought the place by accident because when my sister got bored of watching me weave, she saw the ad for this place in the Spruce Pine Newspaper. Comes out one day a week: Wednesday. If she’d come any other day of the week or any other week of the year, we would not own the orchard, and it would likely be a development now instead of what you see.

After two hours of what I call due diligence, we decided to the buy the place. Runs for two miles along the Blue Ridge Parkway, right up there, from the crest of the Blue Ridge down to the railroad tracks down below. And it was 277 acres. And our concern was if we didn’t buy it and buy it quickly, a developer might, and all this would disappear. So after two hours of what I call due diligence, we called the number in the paper, bought the farm on the phone, only to find out later we were the fifth caller. The first four callers went on his answering machine. The fifth caller was ours. One of the first four callers has a development that is on land that was never owned by the orchard, right up here, and he had already done an aerial survey and a landscape architect, and had laid out 140 lots across the crest of the Blue Ridge. Heartbroken that he didn’t even get a chance to bid on this land. Offered us as much for 5 acres as we paid for all 277. We said no, our dream was different from your dream, and it is to preserve the land.

Well, working with the conservation trust for North Carolina, almost everything you can see in the view here has now been preserved—under permanent easement, under fee simple—and the last piece was our orchard here. And this last year, we signed with the conservation trust to put all this land under permanent easement. So we’ve accomplished one of the missions that we had here.

But lo and behold, we found out there was a lot more to this place than just its beauty, and its history has been very important to us. And a piece of the history, of course, is the flood of 1916. In 1916—

Partial Transcript: Yeah. Okay. Well, right up here, the gap in the continental divide is called McKinney Gap, named after the first settler here. Charlie McKinney was the first to own this land. Charlie was the first to bring apples to the mountains. And of course, our apple orchard has no longer any of his apples but is a remnant of his idea. But he was best known because, with his four wives, they produced forty-eight children. In the course of my hay ride, you would learn that he had all four wives at the same time, in four separate houses along this road here. But old Charlie was a churchgoing man. He collected all the wives and children and went to church every Sunday with them. At church, the historian that writes about him says there weren’t nothing said about the way he lived in church. He was probably the whole church, with his family. But in any event, they’d come home after church, and wherever Charlie was staying, that’s where the whole family gathered for Sunday dinner. And at the Sunday dinner, the man that wrote—
They’d come home from church, and wherever Charlie was staying, that’s where they had Sunday dinner. The whole family would collect. And the man that wrote the epitaph for old Charlie McKinney—Uncle Jake Carpenter was his name—said, “Charlie Forty, I knowed him. At church, weren’t nothing said about the way he lived. Afterward, they’d go home, and the whole family got together and got along so well together, there weren’t never no hair-pulling.” I’ve assumed that “never no hair-pulling” was not intended to be a double negative.

Anyway, Charlie was the forbearer of many, many of the people in this community. There are six or seven names that come from the time of the settlement here, but none more robust than old Charlie McKinney.

Partial Transcript: Well, old Charlie probably needed all those children. He had 1400 or 1500 acres here, and you can see a lot of it is pretty steep land. And so there would be flat spots and meadows, and he would farm all of the land that he could. And one thing about Charlie that was different from the model of infidelity in the time was that Charlie, instead of starting a family and abandoning it, Charlie kept all four of his families together on the land that provided for them right here. So it wasn’t just a case of some old man having too much fun on the mountain. Charlie was a serious member of the community.

Partial Transcript: Well, of course, we are right now on the continental divide. And it’s downhill in both directions off of the continental divide. You can find your way all the way through the Smokies on the river. Well, frequently the storms that come through here, when they reach the high land here, the high mountains along the Blue Ridge will dump their load. Now, just recently—in 2004, for example, we had two hurricanes in a row that converged here, Ivan and Frances. And one came from the Gulf of Mexico, one came from the Atlantic Ocean, just like what happened in 1916. And when that occurs, it isn’t the wind so much, it’s the water that is really the danger here. On many of the floods, we see landslides that are caused by loosening of the soil and gravity. And so the mountains really are never free from fear of hurricanes and big rainstorms. So 2004, when Ivan and Frances came, here at the Altapass, north on the parkway, the parkway was broken by the floods. South from here, the parkway was broken by the floods. And those are not too uncommon set of events. It took a couple of years to get both of those washouts fixed. And so during those two years, traffic was minimal on the segments of the parkway that were open. During that time, our Altapass orchard here ran on hard times, because a lot of our customers come down the parkway. So fear of storms is present in the winter, in the summer, and it is a lot of water and can cause a lot of damage in these mountains.

Partial Transcript: Well, we have a lot of people that come through the orchard, and I love to tell them the stories about the place. And here at Altapass, one of the premiere stories is what happened in 1916. In 1916, two hurricanes in a row came through here in a week’s time. First one from the Gulf of Mexico brought ten or twelve inches or rain and rained for several days. And within a week, one came from the Atlantic Ocean, following basically the Catawba River basin all the way up. And that one was the one that set the record here at Altapass. Altapass held the record for rainfall in twenty-four hours for the whole United States for several years: 22.22 inches of rain fell in one twenty-four hour period measured here at Altapass by the orchard manager and the railroad manager, J.S. Moan. And it was the only accurate rain gauge measurement of the flood at that time.
So I like to tell the stories of the flood of 1916 to the people that come through the orchard. And we had a group from Avery County called the Lunch Bunch. The requirement to be in the Lunch Bunch: you had to be ninety years old—or older. It’s a pretty small group. Well, I started to tell the Lunch Bunch about some favorite flood stories, and I was interrupted by a little old lady from the back named Dolly Vance, who raised her hand. I called on her, and she said, “Sonny, I’m going to tell you about the flood of 1916.” She told this story.

She was a little girl, five years old when the flood happened. She lived with her family in the deepest part of the valley below us, where the water got the highest. In some places, it was fifty, sixty, seventy feet above flood stage. You could see water, she said, from the far mountain, Linville Mountain, clear back to the Blue Ridge, in the lake in the valley down below. She said on the night of the big rain, her daddy was concerned. They lived right along the North Fork. He went up behind their house, and on a hill behind their house, he built a lean-to. And he came down into the flood, and he woke everybody in the family up. And Dolly Vance, this girl of five, remembered hanging on to Daddy with one hand, Mommy with one hand, being half carried and half dragged through water that was deeper than she’d ever seen before. She said when they got to the hill and started up the hill, the rain was coming so hard, it was in her eyes and ears and nose and mouth. It was about like being underwater.

She said, “When we got to the top of the hill, we were under the lean-to, but I was soaking wet and cold and shivering, and the wind was blowing. And Daddy took pity on me like daddies will do and mothers too for their youngins, and walked down the hill into the flood one last time, looking for fire.”

Dolly said, “He came back with a shovel full of fire. We built a fire that night at the lean-to, and I was warm and nearly dry in the morning when I woke up. And when I looked out, I was frightened. During the night, the water had come up all sides of that hill, and now it was an island. And the water was rising. And it wasn’t like water rising in a bathtub. It was splashing higher and higher like rapids, tearing away chunks of the hill.”

She said, “The water stopped before it got to our lean-to, and then it started down in a big rush also.” She said, “When it got down low enough, we could look down the hill and see where our house used to be. It was gone. We had nothing left but the clothes we were wearing. After a day or two, we came off the mountain and met our neighbors, the McGees, who were looking for three lost children.”

Dolly said, “We found the first one in the mud along the North Fork River.” Dolly said, “We couldn’t find the second one until the butterflies led us to the body of the second child.” The third was a baby sleeping on a mattress, and the mattress carried the baby away before anybody could save him. And now they were looking downstream for the baby or the mattress or whatever. And way up in the top of a big old tree, where the highest water had put it, was a wad that could have been the mattress. A man climbed the tree, got above the mattress, opened the corners of the mattress, and there was the baby, alive. They saved the baby’s life. It was a miracle, right here at Altapass.

Well, they went a little further downstream, and way on the top of another big old tree was a figure waving to them. And Dolly said, “We got close enough to recognize the figure, and it was my granny in the tree. And we got close enough to talk to Granny. She was right cross with us. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been in this tree for three days. Nobody came looking. You didn’t think about me. You don’t love me. You don’t—’” Well, Dolly didn’t tell me this part, but I picture the adults having a little discussion before they decide to get Granny out of the tree. But they did, and when they did, she didn’t say thank you. She didn’t say, “Bring me something to eat or drink.” She said, “Somebody bring me my snuff!” She’d been three days without it, and she was mean.

Dolly came back the next year, and I asked if I could tell her story to her group. She said I could, so I did. She corrected me.

She came back a third year. She’d remembered even more of that story. And we worked it up into—or I worked it up into a little story that I put in a book called Stories of Altapass, put a picture of Dolly and a description of how we got the story and of Dolly’s experience. A joy of mine was to present that book to Dolly before she died. She got to see her story and her picture in print.

You know, as time has passed and I think about these events, it put in perspective to me Ivan and Frances. They were nothing compared to what Dolly lived through, or what could happen again in these mountains the next time the hurricanes come calling. And you know, it makes me think too about the other stories that I tell, about the people who lived in the past and who survived hardships that I don’t know if I could survive. And it brings a perspective to my life, and I hope to others. And that’s why I tell the stories of Altapass.

Partial Transcript: Well, I have two—you probably have—I meant to bring them—two printed pieces. One is by a man who apparently was an official in the railroad, who described being marooned in Marion. And it took him six weeks or more. As far as the railroad is concerned, I have been amazed that all the damage that was done was repaired within five weeks. And I think about what we do and how long it took to repair Ivan and Frances’s damage of two years, and their lives depended on the railroad getting back in place again. And so everybody worked on repairing the railroad. It didn’t matter if they worked for the railroad then, but everybody who could handle the equipment was out working on clearing up the railroad. And of course, the people who lived in the community were devastated. I have only guessed at how serious their lives were changed by this.

A lot of people have come to me now as I tell these stories and added little bits and pieces to the principle story. I’ve often wondered why it was that three children got away from that one house without anybody saving them. And what I found was, there was a big cookpot in the front yard, and the flood rose and carried the cookpot away. And that was an important part of their lives. And the parents went to chase that down, not realizing that right behind that was a huge amount of water coming. And so the children were lost when the parents were out trying to save the cookpot.

Partial Transcript: Well, Marion, for example, was a crossroads of two railroads. A lot of damage was done on both of them, but the one that has been documented the most was the one on the Southern—a lot of pictures in a book about that. But what happened is neither railroad worked, and all the roads and bridges were out, and people were isolated in Marion and had to look out for each other to even eat and survive. And so there was tremendous energy focused on getting one or both of the railroads so food could be brought in, help could be brought in. And the railroads were like—

Partial Transcript: During the nights of the hard rains in 1916, the folks that worked here at the orchard—the orchard was a viable business. It was about as important as the railroad was in terms of income for people. And the eyewitness accounts of the time talk about people that lived off the edge of the mountain. But the landslides roared by and made so much fear in them that they walked in the storm to the top of the mountain, so they might be safe from being captured by the landslides. Those days of fear are gone, but they shouldn’t be. That’s going to happen again. And people are going to say, “Oh, well, it’s not that serious. Surely they’re kidding about this amount of water that’s going to be coming.” And a lot of people will die.

Partial Transcript: I don’t think we’ve learned anything because rather than plan on things like that—yes, there’s planning. Yes, there are volunteer fire departments. There are people that spend a lot of their energy helping and saving folks. But they are a small piece, and they’re overwhelmed by big events like these. And we have become dependent on other people, in terms of emergencies, to be there—a grocery store, fire department, someplace to go, Red Cross or somebody to come in and take care of the situation. And in a bad situation like this, they can’t. And so expectation of this happening again is always put to the back of our minds, but it’s going to happen again.

Partial Transcript: Well, I guess the last big worry we had turned out to be a false alarm, which was Y2K. And the idea was there, it wasn’t going to be a flood, but it was going to be the things that we depend upon for our existence—electrical things and grids and service to stores so we have food. That’s a continuing kind of a threat, maybe more serious even than the flood of water now. And I think we need to—if I had any lesson to learn from this, it wouldn’t be that there’s something we can do to be better prepared for a flood. I think it’s something that we could be better prepared to do, because there are so many of us now, and we are so dependent on things that we don’t even understand until they’re gone. We would be largely helpless if we were five weeks without food. We would really not know what to do if we didn’t have our electric generators to back up the power system if the power were out for weeks instead of hours. We’re too many people, and the overpopulation of this earth is leading us to more and more larger-scale disasters, in my opinion. So if there’s a lesson, it is we are not immune, and how we prepare is neglected.

Partial Transcript: They, the people who lived in the community. First of all, they weren’t up here at the top. It’s only us recent arrivals that want to have a spot on the top of the mountain with a waterfall. Of course, those two are sort of mutually exclusive, but we don’t think about that so much. In the past, people had their own spring cellars, and they would have apples and they would have vegetables that they’d raise stored in the spring cellars. And they could survive because they were used to—what could I harvest from the mountains? What could I get from my garden? And how could I take care of my neighbor? Those skills have passed us by, for the most part. And so how do we prepare for that next stage? Smarter minds than mine are going to have to figure that out. I can point out where the problems are. The landslides will come. The food chain will be gone and broken. The water will not be coming out of a pipe, purified. And how do you survive? Modern folks can’t.

Partial Transcript: Well, I think to me, the lesson that I draw more than anything else is they lived through hardships that I don’t know if I can survive. And so to me, the reason for keeping those memories alive is as a warning that says maybe we have it too easy. But our ancestors were pretty tough, and they found a way to survive. So some of their values should be carried forth. Some of their values of independence should still be with us. And in most instances—even mine, for example—they aren’t. I’m as dependent as anybody else on the amenities of modern life. And I’m hoping that that will still—that we’ll find a way to make that come to pass. I don’t think—the day is coming when we may not.

Partial Transcript: Well, every little flood is a surprise and a hardship. Every little hardship is, “Why me?” The survival of our ancestors through hard times shows that we aren’t entitled to survive easily, that we’re going to have to push ourselves in ways of self-survival that are lost if all you know is the computer and the Internet. It’s hard to eat the Internet.