Southern Appalachian Digital Collections

Western Carolina University (20) View all

Guyot's geographic notes on the southern Appalachians

  • wcu_great_smoky_mtns-10766.jpg
6 / 16
Item
  • poor food, "rattlebuga," and mountain dew. It waa my good fortune, not long ago, to find in the archives of the North Carolina Historical Commiasion, at Raleigh, a time-stained eopy of the original map made by this survey in 1799. It is an enormous map, drawn on a large scale. The line, where they left it, ends, on the westward, at a point markes as "high pinacle of the Smoky mn.," four miles west of the Pigeon River. This is easily identified today as Sharp Top, a oonapicuous landmark on the main divide northeaat of iiount Guyot. Early in the nineteenth century the name Great Smoky began, by common consent to displace that of Great Iron LIountainc although the latter continued to be mentioned as an alternative, or older name. In the summer of 1821 the State of Horth Carolina appointed William Davenport to run the line from where the McDowell commission had abandoned their effort and go on through to the Georgia line. This he did. For a long time tho field-book in which he kept his records waa lost? but in November 1910, it was found in a secret drawer of an old sideboard that formerly belonged to the surveyor, at his home in Caldwell County. I have an k exact tranaoript of that field-book. Davenport's record starte in the following words? "July the 19th, 1821, Begun at the Cattalucha tract to run tho line between ths State of Horth Carolina & Tennessee. Marked a rook there on Horth Carolina aide N. C. 1821 and on the other side T. E. I 1821." In June 1930, George Moos >asa and I found this rock in its original looation, olose beside the present rooky road xa that creases the Smokies above Mt. Sterling postoffioe and goea fcksxa over to Hartford, Tennessee. Surveyors for the U. S. G. S. had recently painted tlie anoient inscription white, to make xt them more llgible, and had put a bench-mark on the rock. Davenport, one hundred and nine years, ago, had an exceedingly arduous task, running that line over the baelcbone of the Smokies. Even today the oours© he ran is difficult to follow on foot and impossible em with horses. In his field-book he records that at three miles and 150 poles from the starting point he oame "to the top of the Smokey Mountains at a spring on the
Object