When I was about ten years old, I stumbled onto an old homesite in a hollow near my home in Bryson City — just a small stack of stones where a chimney once stood, with daylilies and mock orange growing where the family once lived. Beneath a deep layer of leaves, I found a child’s shoe, preserved by time.
The lost object sparked something in me. How far had that child walked to school or church in that shoe, I wondered? How much corn had they hoed in the nearby fields? How many times had the shoe been worn to a burial in a nearby cemetery? I so badly wanted to know.
It would be more than 20 years before I pursued my simmering curiosity, finding that cemeteries are the most direct and meaningful link we have to the people who once called these mountains home. Some graves are marked with carved stones that tell us names, dates, and relationships, and others only by simple fieldstones, leaving us to wonder.
Through careful research — combining cemetery records, photographs, old documents, oral histories, and onsite visits — it is possible to bring many of these intrepid individuals and their stories back to life.f