Blue Waters Mountain Lodge

The site of the ancient Cherokee town of Cowee is in a hollow among the hills a dozen miles north of Franklin.  There is a whisper of a path leading down from the valley road to a swinging bridge over the Little Tennessee and into a flat green plain out of which rose...

The old house is only a memory, but the ghosts of a man and a maid – and a boy who became president – are still around to haunt historians.  To those who knew the house, it was a part of the story of Abraham Lincoln and the myths that have grown out of his obscure...

In the hills, March is a woodpecker drumming in a new season.  It’s the liquid trill of tree frogs and the plaintive notes of peepers heralding the return of spring. Its wild geese winging their way northward over the Smokies and blue jays chattering of new days to...

They don’t make fighters like John Denton any more.  As a rough and tumble battler, he was the fightin’est man who ever threw a punch in these parts.  He was a giant of man, strong as an ox and tough as a hickory.  He stood six-feet-five and a half, with hands like...

The old mountain practice of trying fortunes seems to be a lost art.  About all that remains is a memory of the strange but popular practice.    Every mountain community had at least one granny who knew no end of ways to try fortunes.  Back then as soon as girl or boy...

It’s an old man with snow in his beard and an old woman with starlight in her frosted hair. It’s sleet peppering the roof with buck-shot and rain shedding tears on the windowpanes. It’s icicles hanging from the eaves like so many crystal daggers. It’s the brilliance...

The stars hung low in the night over the Indian village of Sand Town where a Cherokee chief lay in death.  His widow, hugging her grief unto herself, sat staring into the fire.   There were only the cries of the whippoorwills and the requiems of the tree frogs that...

Back in the day, it was custom here in the mountains for the groom to give a reception to the bride and the bridal party after the wedding.  This was called the infare.   The wedding usually took place at the home of the bride.  The ceremony was performed on the porch...

Now comes star nights when the stars lean so close that the tall peaks of the Great Smokies have to fold over to keep from bumping them.  The Great Bear is down on the horizon and the Little Bear hangs by his tail from the North Star. To the South is Orion the Hunter...

Mountain men with imagination and a sense of humor named the peaks and creeks, ridges and branches, gaps and coves of the Great Smokies.  The names they left upon the map tell a story of the life and times of a virgin region, a rough country, a land of make-do or...