Western Carolina University WCU University of North Carolina Asheville UNCA

Southern Appalachian Digital Collections

Western Carolina University (21) View all
University of North Carolina Asheville (6) View all
WCU - Great Smoky Mountains - A Park for America

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

items 7 of 12 items
  • wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11121.jpg
Copyright Download
Item 1 - Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11115.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_06_01_01
Item 2 - Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11116.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_06_01_02
Item 3 - Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11117.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_06_01_03
Item 4 - Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11118.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_06_01_04
Item 5 - Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11119.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_06_01_05
Item 6 - Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11120.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_08_01_01
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11121.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_08_01_02
Item 8 - Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11122.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_08_01_03
Item 9 - Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11123.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_08_01_04
Item 10 - Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11124.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_08_02
Item 11 - Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11125.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_28_01_01
Item 12 - Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11126.jpg

Correspondence: George Kephart to Michael Frome

GSMNP_10184_28_01_02
Item
?

Item’s are ‘child’ level descriptions to ‘parent’ objects, (e.g. one page of a whole book).

  • at ease with itself in any emergency by flood or field.; Then you feel that'you have red blood in your veins, and that it is good to be free and out of doors. It is one of the blessings of wilderness life that it -shows us how few things we need in order to be perfectly happy." I While it would have had no significance for me at 'that time, I find it oddly coincidental^now.to learn that .this erstwhile, indirect counselor had been a librarian at an earlier" stage of his life and, more remarkable still", a cataloger for the Cornell University Library I Horace Kephart was born in East Salem, Pa'., in 1862, of Swiss descent. His father was a minister, who moved his family out to Towa for a few of-the years of Horace's boyhood, then returned east, settling finally in Dayton, Ohio. Horace went to Lebanon Valley College, and. "then came to Cornell University for post-graduate work in the years' 1880-1884. Simultaneously with his studies, he worked as a catalog librarian for Willard Fiske in the University Library, and in the library_ of President Andrew D. White, under-White's secretary, George Lincoln Burr. For the next two years, he was in Europe as secretary and companion to Willard Fiske, nn/l t>\cr< c:-.: sfjed in. acquiring books for White's collection, as Burr requested. Upon his return, he married Laura Mack of Ithaca, to whom he had become engaged during his Cornell years, and took a job as Assistant in the Yale University Library from 1886 to 1890. Then, for thirteen years he was the Librarian of the St. Louis Mercantile Lib- ■ rary. Horace and Laura had six children: tbr^c boys, thrpe- girls. In 1903, in the throes of a nervous breakdown, he left librarianship and settled in remote, backwoods country, separated - though never estranged -* from his family, and devoted the next twenty-eight years to "wilderness life", to first-hand research in the sociology and speech of the "hill-billies", and to work as "a writer. The transition sounds much more abrupt than it probably was in reality; for Horace Kephart's knowledge^ and experience as a woodsman had begun in boyhood and steadily accumulated thereafter; he had always been a "student", with,the. interests and attitudes of the research scholar; and hJ^%^b=^e^t daughtershas commented that she cannot remember a time when her.father was not' writing something: "he was always writing." . In deciding where'to settle, Kephart looked for the wildest and least populous area within a reasonable distance, and • found that it seemed to be the Great Smoky Mountain region of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. When he sought buttT.th&Uiiterature about this area and found that there apparently was none, this determined it! In his book, "Our Southern Highlanders," he mentions a quaint phrase referred to by another writer as used in certain remote parts of Ireland, that so-and-so lives "off away_at the Back of Beyond"; and Kephart continues: "When I went south into the mountains I was seeking a Back of Beyond. This for more reasons than one. With an inborn taste for-the wild and romantic, I yearned for a strange land and a people that had the charm of originality. Again, I had a passion for early American history; and, in Far Appalachia, it seemed that I might realize the past in the present, seeing with my ov/n eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ances- • tnrs of a cpntnw ot> Awn airn. Besides. I wanted to
Object
?

Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).

Related items

Part of Collection

Great Smoky Mountains - A Park for America

This digital collection was created to contribute to the public's understanding of the forces and ideas that led to the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934. The most vi...

View collection Read introduction
panzoom image
wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11121.jpg