Free Republic

Last month, two friends and I backpacked for a week in the Sierra Nevada. We hiked through meadows dotted with wildflowers, slept beneath snow-draped peaks and met plenty of other hikers: the dad and son whose Green Bay Packers caps sparked a conversation about our mutual ties to Wisconsin; scientists from UC Santa Cruz studying flowers and rock formations; five recent college grads from Kentucky who were hiking the John Muir Trail before they scattered to begin their adult lives. But as the days passed, I grew increasingly troubled by the people we didn’t meet. There were a few...

A cloud that looked like a spaceship settled on Mount Shasta in the north state Wednesday morning, and then in the next hour spread out with a trailing edge to the south that looked like an exhaust plume. At Lake Tahoe in the central Sierra, after a crystal, cold morning with azure skies, wispy thin clouds, almost unnoticeable at some 30,000 feet, were cast like streamers. In both cases, the clouds predicted the weather to come. Nature has many crystal balls. If you want to know local weather on your adventures, look to the clouds. There are other signs as...

The State of Tennessee was pure Backcountry, untainted by Cavaliers or Puritans in colonial and early American times, and so a large proportion of its settlers lived in log cabins. . . . Tennesseans are proud of their log-cabin heritage and there are accordingly many surviving examples of this Backcountry architecture in the state. [Contemporary photographs of 20 log cabins]

"Casual visitors learn nothing about the true character of the mountaineers, nor can anyone be trusted to portray them if he holds a brief either for or against this people." Horace Kephart, Our Southern Mountaineers (1913). The images in this article are taken from various public domain sources. The descriptions are from the writings of Kephart, who lived in a cabin on the North Carolina side of the Great Smoky Mountains from 1904 until 1907 and who had a good eye for the folkways and a fine ear for the dialect of the Backcountry folk of this place and time.

Originally published in Field & Stream magazine in 1909, this is the second part of an article written by Horace Kephart, a Pennsylvania-born writer and outdoorsman who moved to a cabin in Hazel Creek in the Great Smoky Mountains in 1904. Best known for his book "Our Southern Highlanders" (1913; rev. ed 1922), Kephart loved the mountains and the mountaineers and wrote using accurately-rendered Appalachian English.

Originally published in Field & Stream magazine in 1909, this article was written by Horace Kephart, best known for "Our Southern Highlanders" (1913; rev. ed 1922). A "come-here," Kephart loved the mountains and the mountaineers. "Bear Hunting in the Smokies" is a delightful story complete with accurately rendered Appalachian English, tall tales, and howling gales.

Vintage settler's cabins are rare finds, as most of them didn't survive very long. Many thousands of these shelters were built during the early history of the Backcountry, constructed quickly and simply of peeled logs, often with no windows. The cabin depicted here was located in the Rich Valley of Virginia and was photographed in 1880. [Picture is linked because of claimed library restrictions]

Joshua Shaw was born in England in 1776 and was already noted as an artist and painter of landscapes when he came to America as a young man. In 1818, Shaw traveled down the east coast to Georgia, sketching and painting as he went, and then trekked into the mountains of Appalachia to make the journey back to his home in Philadelphia. The landscapes which resulted from that trip are the earliest such works featuring scenes in the early-American Backcountry and provide a rare glimpse into a world in which settlers had but recently put down roots.

Travelers in the early Backcountry often had to make do with campsites and lodgings in private homes, but the volume of traffic soon resulted in the construction of inns and taverns. With the development of better roads, there came stagecoaches and inns to accomodate coach travelers who needed a respite from the challenges of Backcountry transportation. [Vintage pictures]

The Shenandoah Valley -- an expanse of rolling countryside located between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Allegheny Front -- absorbs the new slowly. The people and places in this article were photographed during the first part of the 20th century, up to 1941, at which time automobiles had begun to replace horse-drawn buggies (but not quite), mail was delivered at a log post office, fields were still plowed with draft-horse power, and a steam engine powered a portable sawmill.

As isolated as the Virginia Backcountry was from the coastal colonies, travelers were eager to tour and enjoy the wild country. Among the early tourists was Thomas Jefferson, who trekked across Rockfish Gap in August of 1767 and found himself entranced by the Natural Bridge. [Eight 19th-century paintings and engravings of Natural Bridge]

This article features a single cabin which is perhaps the most primitive example of such a habitation you'll ever see. But it is the real McCoy -- a one-room, round-log Backcountry settler's cabin, the kind of structure that was thrown together quickly by tens of thousands of immigrants in the mountains of Southern Appalachia during the colonial years. Previously I would have been confident in stating that not one of these structures had survived much past the time of the Civil War -- but not only was this one still standing when it was photographed in 1902, it was the...

Kentucky lays claim to the most famous of log cabins -- the one in which Abraham Lincoln was born. In the early days of Kentucky, log cabins were abundant throughout the state, and a few of these survived to be photographed in the early 20th century. Also in this collection of vintage images -- two log cabins under construction in 1940 in East Kentucky, where the old ways die hard.

Tennesseans are proud of their frontier heritage and have preserved quite a few vintage log cabins and farm buildings. After the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in the 1930s, mountain communities were displaced but some of their habitations were preserved. This article presents an archive of monochrome photographs which documented these historic structures.

Life in the mountains of East Kentucky has been demanding since the early days of European settlement. In the many isolated valleys and hollows, it is a hardscrabble life, even today, yet many of the mountain folk wouldn't trade that life for the city, even when they could -- isolation and self-sufficiency being primary reasons why the first settlers came here to put down roots.

The Blue Ridge Railroad was chartered and funded by the Virginia General Assembly in 1849 in order to build a rail link between the Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley. After rejecting a route across Swift Run Gap, the state turned to French-born engineer Claudius Crozet, one of the founders and the first Commandant of the Virginia Military Institute, determined that a series of four tunnels could be built at reasonable expense at Rockfish Gap. [archival images.]

Two major Federal projects, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Tennessee Valley Authority, brought the outside world irrevocably into the Tennessee high country, displacing whole communities from ancient abodes and altering forever the way of life that had endured from the Colonial period. Among the archives from that time are a scattering of photographs which recall an independent, hardy, resourceful, and industrious people, worthy descendants of the Backcountry settlers of long ago. [Many vintage photographs.]

Stack cakes, go-devils, and Abner, the wild monkey of the Smokies.

The Virginia Frontier Culture Museum's 1740s log cabin is displayed as a work in progress. The cabin is a typical peeled-log, saddle-notched settler's cabin of the kind favored by Scotch-Irish moving into the wilds of the Backcountry. The construction was simple and required few tools. The museum's replica is built with one door and no windows -- a common practice which led to laws requiring homesteader's cabins have at least one window.

Beginning in the late 17th century, an estimated one million Germans pulled up stakes and went looking for better places - - including more than 120,000 who migrated to the American colonies. The Frontier Culture Museum's German Farm, originally built in the Rhineland-Palatinate, exhibits their way of life and the timber-frame construction of houses and barns.