Search
586 Search Results for "george ellison"
Fine features of a familiar footpath
Published: 2014-06-06 18:17:11An ancient Chinese philosopher once admonished his listeners to “Study the familiar!” Ancient Chinese philosophers were always admonishing people to do one thing or another. That was their job. Sometimes they even knew what they were talking about. ....
Read MoreDoin’ Puc Puggy proud
Published: 2014-05-28 15:12:48The Tennessee Valley Authority, in 1984, found itself with an extra $14,000 lying around. The money was available for outreach projects across the Southeast. Well, we all know how frivolous the federal government and/or quasi-federal organizations (TVA i...
Read MoreThe black sheep of the blackbird family
Published: 2014-05-21 14:43:492014 seems to be a banner year for cowbirds. I saw them in large numbers in southeastern Arizona two weeks ago. And this past weekend they were also prominent around Bryson City and along the Blue Ridge Parkway here in the Smokies region. Some folks can...
Read MoreA not too shabby second
Published: 2014-05-14 14:45:07May 3 and 4 were the dates for this year’s 30th annual edition of the Great Smoky Mountains Birding Expedition. This trip began in 1984 as the brainchild of George Ellison, Bryson City resident, author and naturalist; Rick Pyeritz, M.D., who had a prac...
Read MoreA few poems as spring awakens the mountains
Published: 2014-05-07 15:24:36Since the year 2000, I have written going on 750 Back Then “columns” for The Smoky Mountain News. I am enormously proud of that association. Many of the “essays” in my books have been filtered through SMN to their benefit. Even though I have alwa...
Read MoreBehind the ballad of Kidder Cole
Published: 2014-04-23 14:19:01Judge Felix E. Alley (1873-1957) was a native of Whiteside Cove, near Cashiers and Highlands. During most of his legal career as an attorney and superior court judge, he resided in Waynesville and served, on occasion, as the attorney for Swain and other ...
Read MoreRegional historians and ‘piglets from heaven’
Published: 2014-04-09 14:47:06“Eagles, as they still do, lived on the creek. One day in the 1890s, an eagle dropped a piglet into the yard of Orville Welch, who was living on Ecoah Branch on Eagle Creek. He kept this strange gift from the heavens, not knowing where the eagle had go...
Read MoreAnother storyteller to add to the list
Published: 2014-03-26 14:43:41For years I’ve been enjoying and sometimes writing about a group of old-time Western North Carolina storytellers I think of collectively as “The Mountain Humorists.” These weren’t professional storytellers in the sense that they made formal appea...
Read MoreA bear hunter for the ages
Published: 2014-03-12 13:37:28John Baker (Little John) Cable Jr. is one of the prominent figures in Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders (1913; revised and expanded in 1922). He steals the show in Chapter 4 (“A Bear Hunt in the Smokies”), which most everybody — including...
Read MoreBringing in the new year naturally
Published: 2014-01-08 15:07:42Some musings on the New Year, from one who never cared much for noisy midnight celebrations of any sort, but I have always enjoyed New Year’s ceremonials. . As usual, on New Year’s Day Elizabeth and I and family members dined on black-eyed peas, hog ...
Read More
