WCHS Announces Kathryn Staley as 2024 Inductee to WCHS Hall of Fame

Adelia Daly
December 9, 2024

The Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) continues to expand its roster of Hall of Fame inductees for the year 2024, building on an initiative started in 2022 as part of Boone’s 150th celebrations. WCHS is delighted to announce that Kathryn Lynn Staley (born 1971) has been selected as one of this year’s inductees.

Kathy Staley was born in Detroit and later moved to Western North Carolina due to her family’s ties to Wilkes County. She graduated from Northwest Cabarrus High School in Concord, NC, in June 1989. As Staley’s education and career moved along, she attended UNC Chapel Hill with the goal of becoming an English teacher, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in Secondary Education with a concentration in English and a minor in Afro-American Studies. After visiting a historical site and realizing her interests lay in history, Staley moved to Boone to attend Appalachian State University (ASU) for her graduate degree. Her major focus was in Appalachian history and culture, and this lens informed her later projects.

Title page from Kathryn Lynn Staley’s second Master’s degree thesis. Image courtesy of Appalachian State University Library.

Staley started attending ASU during the late 1990s, earning a Master’s degree in Appalachian Studies in 1999 and a second Master’s degree in History in 2009. In between she worked as an archivist for the W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection at ASU’s Belk Library. The period of Staley’s attendance at ASU coincided with an era of LGBTQ student and faculty organizing. Several clubs and organizations had been created in the years preceding Staley’s arrival, both in the college and the community at large. The Sexuality and Gender Alliance club (SAGA), for example, hosted drag shows and promoted student activism. At the same time, Terry Taylor founded an AIDS support group and expanded it into a chapter of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Amidst the rise of these groups, Appalachian State University added LGBTQ people to their anti-discrimination policy and worked to expand the policy to the rest of the UNC System.

Upon Staley’s arrival, she quickly became involved with these organizations and the LGBTQ community as a whole. Working with groups such as SAGA, she helped plan early Pride events and participated in activism on campus. Her involvement increased after she was hired as an archivist at the Belk Library. From this position, she pulled together a group for LGBTQ faculty to build community and work towards workplace equality. She also served as the faculty advisor for the creation of TransAction, an advocacy and support group for transgender students at the university. Additionally, she served on the planning committee for the creation of the Henderson Springs LGBTQ+ Resource Center in 2008.

As an archivist at Belk Library, Kathy Staley conducted several oral history interviews designed to expand the demographic scope of the Appalachian State University Oral History Project that first started in 1973. She also worked to launch the Appalachian State Memory Project in 2006. At the same time as these oral history projects, she completed research on the Boone City Cemetery and assisted Dr. Susan Keefe in a study of the Boone Mennonite Brethren Church as part of documentation of the history of the Junaluska community. Staley did much of this work while also completing her History Master’s degree at the university.

Kathy Staley’s first school project was a study on the free and enslaved peoples who resided in Wilkes County. Through this project, she endeavored to uncover the names of a largely obscured group in Wilkes County’s history. This effort was informed by and furthered Staley’s interest in preserving the history of marginalized groups. When it came time for her Master’s thesis, she briefly considered doing a similar project for the free and enslaved peoples of Ashe County, before deciding to research the LGBTQ history of Appalachian State University.

Image showing Box 1 of the Appalachian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Oral History Project at the Special Collections Research Center at ASU’s Belk Library. Image courtesy of the Appalachian State University Library.

Staley researched LGBTQ history in the university because of her connection to the community and her prior experience with oral history. Due to the LGBTQ community’s marginalization, there were very few traditional sources, so Staley set out to document the experiences of various students, faculty, and community members. She interviewed a number of people, then used those interviews to write her Master’s thesis, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Life At Appalachian State University.” The work was finished in 2009 and continues to be one of the foremost studies on the LGBTQ experience at Appalachian State University. Later that year, she expanded this research with Mike Howell into the Appalachian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Oral History Project at the Belk Library.

Kathryn Staley’s groundbreaking contributions to the development and documentation of the LGBTQ community during its growth and healing in the wake of the AIDS crisis were extremely important. The preservation of this history has been vital in keeping alive the stories that may have otherwise been lost. Staley’s efforts are emblematic of the hard work of countless individuals who brought together a fractured, marginalized group and reignited their hope. But it is her history work that has recorded the names of these individuals and the obstacles that they faced for anyone who wishes to learn from their experiences. Although Staley has since moved away from Watauga County, we treasure her additions to Watauga County’s historical record and community.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County’s history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County’s history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County’s history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of WCHS as well as the public.

References

Daly, Adelia, and Sai Estep. “Interview with Kathryn Staley.” November 1, 2024.

Staley, Kathryn. “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Life at Appalachian State
University.” Master’s Thesis, Boone, Appalachian State University, 2009.

Staley, Kathryn, and Howell, Mike. The Appalachian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
Transgender Oral History Project. Appalachian State University, 2010.

WCHS Announces Agnes Jeter as 2024 Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Eric Plaag
November 5, 2024

The Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) continues to expand its roster of Hall of Fame inductees for the year 2024, building on an initiative started in 2022 as part of Boone’s 150th celebrations. WCHS is delighted to announce that Agnes Morgan “Jete” Jeter (1908-2005) has been selected as one of this year’s inductees.

Born on February 22, 1908, in the ancestral family home known as Flint Hill Plantation at Goshen Hill (sometimes referred to as the “Rice-Coleman-Jeter House”) near Union, South Carolina, Agnes Jeter was the daughter of Dr. Robert Russell Jeter and Agnes Morgan Coleman Jeter. She had three brothers and two sisters and was the fourth of the six children. “Jete,” as she was affectionately known for much of her life, grew up in Union, graduating from Union High School as an accomplished athlete. Jete then earned her bachelor’s degree at Winthrop College (now University) in Rock Hill, SC, where she was a standout athlete in field hockey, tennis, archery, track, bowling, and basketball, as well as captain of the varsity women’s basketball team in three of her four years. She graduated in 1929. Shortly thereafter, she completed a master’s degree at Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, then taught briefly in a Wilmington, NC, elementary school before serving for many years as faculty in the Department of Physical Education at Greensboro College and as a swim coach and head of physical education at the Out-of-Door School in Sarasota, Florida.

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Group shot of Camp Yonahlossee campers inside a camp building, June 17, 1953. Jeter is seated at far left in the front, while camp founders Margaret Kephart and Dr. Adam Perry Kephart can be seen in the front row at far right. Image courtesy of the Palmer Blair Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

While in attendance at Winthrop, Jeter signed on to spend a summer as a college student counselor at Camp Yonahlossee in the Blowing Rock vicinity in 1927. The camp for young women, which had been founded in 1922 by Dr. Adam Perry Kephart and his wife Margaret (known affectionately as “Kep” and “Keppie”), two popular educators from Greensboro, soon became a perennial and lifelong summer commitment for Jete in the six decades that followed. After serving for many years as a counselor, then head counselor at Yonahlossee by the mid-1940s, Jeter was regarded as a critical player in camp operations. In partnership with George and Jean McCord, Jeter purchased the camp in 1954, where she continued to serve as one of its directors until she sold the camp in 1980 to James and Elaine Jones, then retired from counseling in 1981, when the steepness of local trails proved too much for her aging body. In those final years, Jeter often stayed in an apartment in Boone instead of overnight at the camp, yet kept on agreeing to stay for “one more year.” To document the impact of her career on Camp Yonahlossee, a building known as “Jete’s Retreat” was built in 1981 and filled with her large photo collection of the campers who has passed through Yonahlossee over the years.

Camp Yonahlossee focused on outdoor recreation and served as a counterpart to Camp Yonahnoka, a boys’ camp located in Linville. Activities at the girls’ camp included canoeing, horseback riding, swimming, sailing, crafts, weaving, dance, theatre, music, fencing, archery, and rifle shooting. The friendships formed at Camp Yonahlossee often lasted a lifetime, and Jeter was seen as the essential influence to the building of those relationships among the campers she referred to as “my girls.” Perceived as the “heart and soul” of the camp, but also known as a stern disciplinarian, Jeter was renowned for teaching her students the importance of friendship, good character, and loyalty. As Vicki Steadman Clement, a 1940s camper, recalled in 1983, “You simply did not disobey Jete, but she always [won our obedience] in a loving way…. Jete had more influence on my life—other than my parents and church—than anyone. Ask anybody [who camped with Jete], they’ll tell you the same thing.” Margaret Barnes, who spent five summers at the camp as a child, echoed the sentiment in 1980, when she returned to Camp Yonahlossee to visit Jeter: “We all come back because of Jete. She meant more to us than almost anyone in our lifetime.” As Jane Welch, a reporter for the News and Observer, wrote in 1980 about Jeter, “She knows how to make homesickness go away. For the lonely girl, she offers friendship. For the spoiled girl, she offers a chance to mature.” Remembering Jeter in 2005, Tori Clement Garrett summed up the profound impact Jete had on so many lives: “My Camp Yonahlossee experience molded me, but Jete guided me. I was awed by her. I know I wouldn’t be who I am today without my Yonahlossee days.”

During her career, Jeter also served in various professional capacities, including as the recording secretary for the Southeastern Section of the American Camping Association in the mid-1950s. Following her retirement from Camp Yonahlossee in 1981 after 55 years of service to the camp, Jeter returned to her home in Union, South Carolina. She was admitted into the athletic Halls of Fame at both Union High School and Winthrop University and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Winthrop. In her retirement, she was also a committed member of the Grace Methodist Church and a volunteer with Meals on Wheels. Jeter passed away on June 11, 2005, in Union, SC, at the age of 97.

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Agnes Jeter with Peaches, while campers look on, June 1953. Image courtesy of the Palmer Blair Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Over the past three years, the WCHS has considered numerous nominations from the public for its Hall of Fame, but Agnes Jeter stands out as the only inductee to be nominated on multiple occasions by different parties—an apparent testament to the depth and breadth of her influence on those who camped with her at Camp Yonahlossee. Because of her prodigious influence on the lives of so many young women who passed through Camp Yonahlossee over her 55-year tenure, we are delighted to honor her with a well-deserved spot in WCHS’s Hall of Fame for 2024.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County’s history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County’s history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County’s history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of WCHS as well as the public.

Exploring the Collections with Gramm Coffman

Michael Gramm Coffman
April 9, 2024

When I arrived at Digital Watauga for my first training day in August 2023, I had no idea what to expect. Despite gaining experience in collections management, exhibit design, museum education, and other fields related to historical work, I had virtually no experience digitizing objects within a collection. This inexperience both thrilled and frightened me. However, once I began diving into the collections here at Digital Watauga, the fascinated curiosity of a historian overtook me, and the negative thoughts I carried at the beginning of the semester quickly faded.

On August 21, I embarked on my first collection, the second series of the Cecil Jackson Slide Collection. This series, which includes 102 slide images taken by Cecil Jackson during the 1970s and 80s, provided me with a growing sense of community that would be a staple of many of the collections I digitized that fall. Many of the images dealt with the Junaluska Community here in Boone, and although I knew nothing of this history beforehand, after its completion, the collection helped offer a genuine understanding of a community deeply rooted within the history of Boone and Watauga County.

My second collection, the sixth series of the Bethel Collection (which I digitized from September 7 to 25), showcased 192 images from various periods, locations, and people. The images and documents ranged from portraits and graduation/school photos to pictures of churches, community gatherings, animals, and the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Embedded within this collection’s sentiment of community, I discovered the life of Dorothy Virginia Farthing. Although I knew nothing of her when I began, I pieced together only a short strand of her life throughout my time with the collection. Images within the collection illustrate that Dorothy lived from 1921 to 1997, was likely a schoolteacher (multiple images show her posing for a class picture or taking school photos), and was active within her community.

One of several tintype images found in the Bethel Collection, showing an unidentified woman and likely taken between 1880 and 1910. Image courtesy of the Bethel Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Moving into the tenth series of the Bethel Collection provided many of the same discoveries as the Bethel Six. Working with this collection from September 26 to October 20, I found numerous newspaper articles and other documents that required more time to digitize, identify, and describe than its predecessors. One such newspaper article (Bet-Col-10-005) and a directory for the Oak Grove Baptist Church (Bet-Col-10-025) took considerable time to complete because of the nature of tracking down the many family and singular names that appeared on the documents. Comprised of 192 items, Bethel Collection Series 10 also included four unique tintype photographs (Bet-Col-10-141, 142, 143, 144). These were created around the turn of the 20th century and, while common at the time, are an exciting find today. The series also had four large family albums that revealed trips to Williamsburg and Jamestown in March and July 1960. These, along with others within the collection, once again helped to piece together life during the 20th century for people who lived here in Watauga County.

This image from the Historic Boone Collection helped Gramm make important connections between the original Echoes of the Blue Ridge vignette performances and the subsequent production of Horn in the West. Image courtesy of the Historic Boone Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

While each collection provided Digital Watauga with a unique understanding of life in the High Country, the most exciting and enjoyable collection was the semester’s last assignment, Series One of the Historic Boone Collection. Compiled from a dissolved historical organization within Boone known as Historic Boone, the Historic Boone Collection, especially Series One, is a page-turning and fascinating collection. You never quite know what you will find next. Long parked with our digital partners at DigitalNC (as part of an agreement that pre-existed the creation of the Digital Watauga Project), those original scans were of poorer quality and had associated metadata littered with errors and misidentifications; re-digitizing them and sharing them on Digital Watauga has been on the project’s task list for many years, so it was exciting to take on this important project. Within the 240 images and documents of the series ranging from the 1890s to the early 2000s, which I digitized from October 23 to November 29, were an Appalachian State University (ASU) sports brochure for basketball, wrestling, and swimming from the 1967-68 season, pictures of historic houses within the Boone community, photos of community leaders, and images of severe storms affecting the region.

The overall collection itself also tells a fascinating story. For a couple of years following the death of Historic Boone founder Dr. Gene Lewis Reese (1927-2001) and the disbanding of the Historic Boone group, portions of the collection sat in the sun in the window of a building in Downtown Boone, then got moved to a storage locker for safekeeping, during which portions of the collection appear to have “wandered away.” Concerned about the collection’s safety and preservation, Flavel Eggers (1928-2020) and Sarah Lynn Rives Blair Spencer (1927-2021) intervened to rescue the collection in 2004 (for more on this, see Watauga Democrat, February 23, 2005), then spent the better part of a decade cataloging and arranging the collection. Eggers and Spencer then turned to Phillip C. McGuire and Patricia Maddux—former members of the Historic Boone group—to formally donate the collection to the Watauga County Public Library in 2014. The first wave of digitization by DigitalNC occurred in 2014 before the collection became part of the Digital Watauga Project in 2015. Finally, under the protection of Digital Watauga and its rigorous security and preservation measures, the collection is gradually undergoing digitization, archival rehousing, and reorganization.  

Constance Shoun Stallings (1904-1982) is visible seated at left in this early 1950s image of various figures associated with the Horn in the West production. Seated to Stallings’s left is Samuel Sheldon. Standing, left to right, are Robert Edward Agle (1911-1981), playwright Kermit Hunter (1910-2001), Dr. Isaac Garfield Greer (1881-1967), and Dr. Daniel Jay Whitener (1898-1964). Image courtesy of the Historic Boone Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

As I worked to digitize these various collections during the semester, I took a graduate class at ASU with Dr. Andrea Burns. In this class, we worked with the Hickory Ridge Living History Site to create a new exhibit that would showcase the history of Hickory Ridge, the importance of the Horn in the West drama to tourism in the High Country, and the origins of the Daniel Boone Native Gardens. The members of my group received the Horn in the West section. I knew very little about the drama and even less about its obscure roots. However, digitizing images of the Echoes of the Blue Ridge drama from July 1949 found within Historic Boone Series One began to paint a picture of the drama's origins. Echoes of the Blue Ridge was a locally crafted series of historical vignettes that originally appeared in the 1949 Watauga County Centennial festivities. Inspired by the success of the Centennial event and two subsequent performances of Echoes, local leaders hired famed playwright Kermit Hunter in 1952 to write the first draft of Horn in the West, which opened that same year and has been a staple of High Country tourism ever since. Using the images within the collection as a foundation, my group created an exhibit that is now on display in the main hall at the Hickory Ridge Living History Site. Although we were unable to use images or documents from the Historic Boone Collection within our final exhibit, the collection helped our group connect pieces of history that had been severed for decades.

As the fall semester ended and turned into the next, and I continue to digitize new collections, it still fascinates me what people consider important enough to document and preserve. In other cases, though, it is interesting to see behind the images to tell a story many people may not always see. These kinds of images were the centerpiece for our Digital Watauga exhibit displayed at the Jones House this past March, whose theme of tourism behind the scenes showcased the workers, performers, and pioneers who labored behind the scenes to build the tourism industry of the High Country.

As my time with the project has passed, inexperience has turned into knowledge. Working with Digital Watauga has not always been what I first envisioned. Still, it has been a fulfilling and beneficial opportunity that has advanced my knowledge, future prospects, and love for history. 

Series 01 of the Historic Boone Collection is currently in metadata review and will likely be online in early Summer 2024. Series 06 and 10 of the Bethel Collection are already online.

WCHS Announces Arthel Lane "Doc" Watson as 2023 Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Eric Plaag
January 3, 2024

The Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) is delighted to announce that Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson (1923-2012) is the third of three inductees to the 2023 class of the WCHS Hall of Fame. Born on March 3, 1923, in Deep Gap, North Carolina, Doc Watson was the sixth of nine children born to General Dixon Watson and Annie Greene Watson. Before the end of his first year, Arthel began losing his eyesight due to an infection complicated by a vascular disorder. Doc’s father gave him a harmonica at a very young age, and by the time he was five, Doc was picking the banjo. His parents later sent him to the North Carolina State School for the Blind and Deaf (now the Governor Morehead School) in Raleigh, where he learned his first guitar chords. His first banjo was a fretless one made for him by his father when Doc was 11. Shortly thereafter, Doc purchased his first guitar with money he earned from chopping down dead chestnut trees on his father’s property and selling them to a local tannery as fuel.

Watson frequently claimed that he had never had a formal music lesson, relying instead on listening to the songs that family members sang and that he heard on the radio. In a 1969 interview, Watson revealed that he learned many of his covers of traditional folk songs by listening repeatedly to Eugene “Gene” Earle’s old 78-speed recordings of country and western, blues, and jazz performances. Other strong influences included the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. His earliest formal performances were probably walk-on gigs at fiddlers conventions. Watson often told the story that he earned his nickname at the age of 19, when the emcee at a radio gig in a Lenoir furniture store asked him what stage name he wanted to use, prompting a girl in the crowd to suggest, perhaps in reference to Sherlock Holmes’s sidekick, “Call him ‘Doc’!”

September 18, 1943, handbill promoting Doc Watson as part of the Hillbilly Jamboree on WDRS at the Appalachian Theatre. Image courtesy of the Paul and Ruby Weston Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

By the time he was 20, Doc was a fixture in downtown Boone, often busking on King Street and Depot Street, sometimes with his brother Linny. Locals immediately took notice. As part of Kermit Dacus’s bootleg radio shows out of the Appalachian Theatre in 1943, Doc appeared on stage on September 11 and 18 as part of a “Hillbilly Jamboree,” billed with his nickname as “the Blind Boy with the Million Dollar Voice.” In 1945, he appeared as “Dock Watson (the Blind Boy) and His Blue Ridge Hillbillies” in a concert at the Watauga County Courthouse and was billed as “Dock Watson, the man with the flying fingers” for a gig at Elkland High School in Todd the next year. From there, Doc appeared with other local groups and fronted another act, Doc Watson and the Watauga Wildcats, for a square dance at Boone High School in 1950. Meanwhile, Watson married his Deep Gap neighbor Rosa Lee Carlton before a Boone Justice of the Peace in 1946. The marriage produced two children, Eddy Merle (1949) and Nancy Ellen (1951). To earn a living in those early years, Watson tuned pianos and continued to busk on Boone’s streets.

Watson was featured in radio shows and television broadcasts as early as 1953, when he was touring with Charles Osborne and Frog Greene, and sometimes performing on electric guitar with Jack Williams’s country and western swing band in Johnson City. According to a 1969 interview with Watson, his first truly big break occurred in 1960, when Ralph Rinzler (1934-1994), an important folk musician in his own right, came to a Union Grove fiddlers convention looking for “oldtime musicians” and heard Doc playing in a pick-up band with noted folk musician Clarence “Tom” Ashley (1895-1967), prompting Rinzler to form a new group called “Clarence Ashley and His Friends” that included Watson. Shortly thereafter, Rinzler persuaded Doc to give a solo concert in Lafayette, Indiana, which went poorly, but the next night, Doc’s concert in Urbana, Illinois, secured his gig as a recording musician on Vanguard Records between 1961 and 1964, with Rinzler as his manager.

L to R, Jack Williams, Charles Osborne, and Doc Watson in October 1954. Image courtesy of the Palmer Blair Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

As a master of both fingerpicking and flatpicking, Doc’s smooth, seamlessly clean style gradually persuaded other folk artists that the guitar could be a lead instrument, supplanting the usual mandolin, banjo, or fiddle. By 1964, Watson was playing the folk festival circuit, showcasing his talents on the guitar, five-string banjo, mandolin, and harmonica, his son Merle frequently accompanying him. His performances prompted the New York Times that year to describe him as “one of the most inventive guitar players ever recorded” and “almost the object of a cult among folk music fans.” But it was Doc’s haunting, yearning baritone voice on folk song and blues covers like “Wayfaring Stranger,” “Little Sadie,” “The Cuckoo,” “Deep River Blues,” “Shady Grove,” and “Omie Wise” that tied together so many of his performances and kept audiences rapt. “Few singers out of the southern Appalachians,” the New York Times added in 1964, “are so able to evoke another time, another place, another set of standards.”

From the folk revival of the 1960s forward, Doc was an internationally recognized and highly respected performer. He frequently teamed with other folk and bluegrass artists on the circuit and in the recording studio, including Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Jimmy Martin, Vassar Clements, and Merle Travis. But Doc’s fame and immense popularity did not dissuade him from returning home, where he continued to give local performances, such as his 1965 concert at Appalachian State Teachers College and his headlining of the Bluegrass and Folk Jamboree sponsored by the Boone Jaycees at Watauga High School in 1968, where locals were comically urged to “be there early in order to get a good seat.” It was Doc’s pairing with his son Merle, however, that earned them continued fame in the 1970s and early 1980s, producing thirteen albums as a duo along with two Grammy Awards in 1974 and 1979. Merle’s death in a tractor accident in Caldwell County in 1985 was a devastating blow, prompting Doc to create the MerleFest music festival in Merle’s memory in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, in 1988, which Doc hosted until his death. Watson continued to perform and tour in his later years, often with his grandson Richard Watson or with longtime collaborators David Holt and Jack Lawrence.

Chancellor Herbert Wey (left) and Dr. Rogers Whitener are seen here awarding an honorary degree from Appalachian State University to Doc Watson (right) in 1973. Image courtesy of the George Flowers Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

In all, Doc Watson recorded nearly 30 albums and more than two dozen collaborations and compilations, and he earned seven Grammy Awards for his performances, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 2004. Other career honors included the 1986 North Carolina Award in Fine Arts, the highest civilian award given by the state; a 1988 National Heritage Fellowship; the 1994 North Carolina Folk Heritage Award; and the 1997 National Medal of Arts. He received at least two honorary academic degrees from Berklee College of Music and Appalachian State University. Watson was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2000 and the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2010. On June 24, 2011, the Town of Boone unveiled a life-sized bronze statue of Watson at the northeast corner of King and Depot Streets as part of the first Doc Watson Day celebration. Watson was also an important presence at the first meetings of the Appalachian Theatre Task Force in 2011, inspiring many of those present to work tirelessly together for the preservation and renovation of the Appalachian Theatre, which reopened in 2019. Watson died in May 2012 following surgical complications.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County’s history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County’s history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County’s history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of WCHS as well as the public.

WCHS Announces Palmer Sligh Blair as 2023 Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Eric Plaag and Susan Rebecca Blair
December 30, 2023

The Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) is delighted to announce that Palmer Sligh Blair (1922-1957) is the second of three inductees to the 2023 class of the WCHS Hall of Fame. Born on July 8, 1922, in Watauga County, Palmer Sligh Blair was the second of two sons among five children born to Henry Neal Blair and Martha Lee Sligh Blair. Palmer was raised on the 300-plus-acre working Blair Farm located on the southeast end of Boone, one of the few intact farmsteads remaining today within the town limits of Boone. Palmer was among the fourth generation of Blairs to occupy the farmhouse there, which dates to 1844 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural significance.

Palmer Blair grew up attending local schools, including Boone High School, where he played the drums in the high school band and graduated with distinction (and with the “Most Attractive Boy” superlative) in 1939. Palmer enlisted in October 1942 with the Army Reserves, apparently for his technical skills as a photographer, but does not appear to have been called to service. In 1943, while enrolled at Appalachian State Teachers College (or ASTC), he was the front person for “Palmer Blair’s Band,” which played at war bond drives and other community events during World War II. Palmer graduated as a history and science major from ASTC (now Appalachian State University) in 1945, the same year he met his future wife, Sarah Lynn Rives, a freshman from Jonesboro, North Carolina. They were married in October 1947.

Palmer Blair’s studio in the ground floor space of the Linney Law Office, circa 1952. Image courtesy of the Palmer Blair Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Palmer began exploring the world of photography and working in the field while a student in college. During that time he convinced his mother to allow him to set up a darkroom in a tiny room off of the kitchen’s back porch at the Blair home place. He opened his first photography business in 1946, eventually locating the operation in the basement of Wade Brown’s first law office at 766 West King Street (now home to 828 Real Estate). In late 1948, Palmer moved his business and studio to the Linney Law Office Building at 718 West King Street. By 1952, he had outgrown that building and relocated his business to 127 Depot Street, now Black Cat Burrito. Beginning in April 1953, the final home of “Palmer’s Photo Shop” was in the Qualls Block at 597 West King Street (then 125 East King).

Much of Palmer’s professional work involved consumer portraiture, stringer work for local and regional newspapers (including the Watauga Democrat, the Charlotte Observer, the Winston-Salem Journal, and the Asheville Citizen), and commissioned photography for family reunions, high school and college yearbooks (including ASTC), private parties, police investigations, insurance documentation, and corporate marketing. Palmer also loved all the creative dimensions of photography and shooting images in his spare time. Beginning in the late 1940s, after his father created Boone’s first airfield in 1947, Palmer began taking aerial flights for photography purposes. His several series of aerial images from the 1950s, many of which survive at the Digital Watauga Project, offer an astonishingly comprehensive view of outlying areas around Boone as well as Boone’s downtown and the ASTC campus. His “Workers of Boone” series, consisting of nearly 400 images of employees of various Boone businesses, captured the interiors of many of Boone’s businesses as well as portraits of many of Boone’s “regular folk,” whose images otherwise rarely made it into the newspaper during the period.

In this image from Palmer Blair’s 1952 “Workers of Boone” series, 79-year-old James Lyons hawks his wares from his hollowed-out bus shell doubling as a farmstand at the southwest corner of Appalachian and King Streets, now the site of Jimmy Johns. Image courtesy of the Palmer Blair Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Blair’s widow, Sarah Lynn Rives Blair Spencer (1927-2021), donated digital use rights to Blair’s extensive catalog to the Digital Watauga Project in 2016. Many of the negatives, prints, and moving image reels in the Palmer Blair Collection document his fascination with aerial photography, the use of infrared film, and his gorgeous compositions of snowy landscapes, which are often the most difficult scenes to capture on black-and-white film. While many of Palmer’s images—particularly from the late 1940s—were lost as a result of basement flooding in the Boone Chamber of Commerce during the early 2000s (when portions of his work were mingled with the George Flowers Collection then in the Chamber’s possession), his surviving catalog of news photography and portraiture nevertheless provides critically important documentation of Watauga County and Boone citizens during the 1940s and 1950s. Palmer also occasionally created transparencies (effectively “new negatives”) and prints from existing historic prints that dated as far back as the 1890s, capturing images of Boone and Watauga’s past that would otherwise be lost to the ages. His collection of surviving images has been essential to documenting several Boone historic landmarks and the buildings within the Downtown Boone Local Historic District. Without his photographic contributions, our understanding of Boone’s history and its people during the 1940s and 1950s would be greatly diminished.

During the period from 1947 to 1957, Blair was a prominent figure in the Boone business world, the community’s primary news photographer, and an active documentarian of the 1949 Watauga County Centennial Parade and similar community parades that followed. In 1953, Palmer established the Blue Ridge Camera Club as a community organization and served as its president, effectively teaching his community how to make great photos and develop them in the darkroom, and he served as a board member with the Boone Junior Chamber of Commerce in the late 1940s and the Boone Rotary Club in the mid 1950s. In February 1957, three of Palmer’s images were featured as part of the 1957 Convention Exhibit, North Carolina Photographers Association, Inc., in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he received second place in the News and Candid Photos division and third place in the Color Transparencies category. Other memberships included the Boone Merchant’s Association, the Appalachian High School Boosters Club, and the Southern Photographer’s Association.

In this 1953 self-portrait, Palmer Blair also photographs an infant in his studio. Image courtesy of the Palmer Blair Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Tragically, on March 21, 1957, Palmer Blair was killed in a plane crash doing what he loved—flying and capturing aerial images through his lens. That particular day was the first day that Palmer was using a recently purchased, state-of-the-art camera for his aerial work. He and his pilot, Hudson Claude Sisk, Jr., a cousin by marriage and a World War II bomber pilot who was also killed in the crash, were completing a contract project for a mining company operating the Ore Knob Mine in Ashe County. It was at least his second trip by plane to document the site in 1957. Palmer left behind a young wife, Sarah Lynn, and three small children, Palmer Sligh Blair Jr., Sharon Rousseau Blair, and Susan Rebecca Blair. Palmer’s young widow operated her husband’s business for the remainder of that year. She sold “Palmer’s Photo Shop” to George Flowers on December 31, 1957.

Following Palmer’s death, several of Blair’s friends established the Palmer Blair Memorial Scholarship at ASTC, intended for a Watauga County boy or girl based on “character, leadership, academic ability, and citizenship.” R. C. Rivers, Jr., editor of the Watauga Democrat, eulogized Palmer as “an upstanding citizen—a man of many fine qualities—understanding, generous, and kind. As time is measured, he’d been along [King Street] a short while, but was held in the highest regard by the people of the town and county, who were quick to recognize his abilities, his innate worth, and his uniform wholesomeness and gentility. We shall miss him.” The WCHS recognizes Palmer Blair’s continuing importance and enduring legacy for our community, nearly 70 years after his death, with his induction to the WCHS Hall of Fame.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County’s history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County’s history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County’s history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of WCHS as well as the public.

Portions of this blog entry are adapted from a brief biography of Palmer Blair written by Susan Rebecca Blair for the Digital Watauga Project.

WCHS Announces Virginia "Ginny" Stevens as 2023 Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Sai Estep
December 23, 2023

Introducing our next class of honorees, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) is building upon its Hall of Fame for the year 2023, an initiative started in 2022 as part of Boone’s 150th celebrations. WCHS is delighted to announce that Virginia “Ginny” Stevens (1935-2017) has been named one of this year’s inductees.

Born in Chicago to George Brahnam and Lydia Virginia Raleigh Storr Atkinson, Virginia “Ginny” Stevens grew up in Northfield, Illinois, before making her way to North Carolina to attend Duke University, where she was active in groups such as Student Government and the Women's Housing President’s Board. After graduation, she spent a number of years back in Illinois, where she had a career as an elementary school teacher. Upon returning to North Carolina with her husband David, Ginny gained her preservation chops in Raleigh, dedicating years of service to NC Preservation, the Mordecai Square Historical Park, and the Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina.

Ginny then took her energy, knowledge, and experience to Blowing Rock, where she and her husband David moved in 1985. Seeing a need to preserve and promote the town’s rich history, she quickly positioned herself to be a bastion for historic preservation in Blowing Rock right from the start. During that first year as a Blowing Rock resident, Ginny co-founded the Blowing Rock Historical Society, joining like-minded individuals to help preserve the history of the town. Often when people move to a new town, they take a backseat to the area’s activities, choosing to be passive occupants of the space. This was not the case with Ginny Stevens; she dove in headfirst by engaging the town and getting to work. 

The Edgewood Cottage before restoration. Image courtesy of the Blowing Rock Historical Society Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

When reviewing Blowing Rock Historical Society’s accomplishments over the years, it’s clear that Ginny played an important role in meeting many of these goals. Ginny helped lead the project to restore the Edgewood Cottage, the former home of famous artist Elliot Daingerfield. Working with other members in the town, Ginny championed the preservation, restoration, and repurposing of the structure. Former North Carolina House member and active Blowing Rock resident Cullie Tarleton remembers working closely with Ginny on the Edgewood Cottage as well as many other projects: “[Ginny] was a visionary leader, a good organizer, and a hard worker. She didn’t just excel at organizing; she rolled up her sleeves and did the actual work.” Tarleton credits Ginny with being a leader in negotiations with the Town of Blowing Rock to save as much of the original design and woodwork as possible in the restoration of the building. Many photos taken by Ginny of the restoration process can be found on Digital Watauga’s website, within Series 03 of the Blowing Rock Historical Society Collection.

This spirit of industriousness was also evident in Ginny’s presence at town council meetings, where Tarleton says she was often “right up front, speaking her mind.” ASU senior lecturer Trent Margrif echoes this sentiment, saying that without Ginny’s determination and vocal nature, Blowing Rock would likely look different than it does today. “Ginny would interview owners of buildings, trying to figure out what the histories were,” stated Margrif. Much of this information was useful for the book The Architectural History of Watauga County, published by the Watauga County Historical Society in 2009. By digging into the background of these buildings, Ginny and other members of Blowing Rock were able to lay the groundwork for stronger historical preservation efforts in the town, such as saving the Hayes House in 1993, as well as discovering that the Bollinger-Hartley bungalow was eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Throughout the process of widening of Highway 321, Ginny was among citizens to voice concerns, placing pressure on NCDOT to be as minimally invasive as possible. In a 1996 steering committee meeting of stakeholders and NCDOT members, the minutes state that, “Ginny Stevens of the Blowing Rock Historical Society commented that she was skeptical about the effectiveness of a traffic control program [and that] local merchants are concerned about their businesses remaining open and viable during the construction period. She stated that the community would disappear if traffic no longer passed through it, and that residents are concerned about the historic resources. She stated that she appreciated the constraints facing the study team, but she wanted the study team to understand how the locals feel.”

The Green Park Hotel, circa 1964. Image courtesy of the Bobby Brendell Postcard Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Today, when one arrives at Blowing Rock, vestiges of the town’s heyday of opulent hotels remain, evident in the historic Green Park Inn; it still stands partly due to Ginny being a bulwark against outside interests that wanted to see it demolished. In an interview with the Winston-Salem Journal in 2009 about the hotel going up for auction, Ginny stated, “Much of our legacy is the grand hotels that started this community, and we really need to keep those."

Other major accomplishments Ginny had a hand in include the refurbishment of the 1888 Museum–the last remaining cottage of the bygone Watauga Inn, where she spent many hours greeting and educating visitors; the Historical Marker Program, which was created in partnership between the Blowing Rock Arts and History Museum (BRAHM) and BRHS and has identified more than 125 spots in downtown Blowing Rock that are at least 50 years old; and also having the Green Park Historic District placed on the National Register of Historic Places, among many other projects. 

Ginny also contributed greatly to the documentation and promotion of the town’s history by helping publish the Volumes I and II of the popular Postcards of Historic Blowing Rock, as well as Green Park Historic District. Trent Margrif, author of Blowing Rock Revisited, was encouraged by Ginny to take on the project, which showcases a wealth of images of historic Blowing Rock, mostly from the late editor of the Blowing Rocket newspaper, Jerry Burns. All proceeds from the book go toward the Blowing Rock Historical Society. 

Doug Pegram, Virginia Stevens, and Lowell Thomas at the Edgewood Cottage, May 29, 2008. Image courtesy of the Blowing Rock Historical Society Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

In recognition of her extensive accomplishments, Ginny was the recipient of several awards, including Blowing Rock Rotary Citizen of the Year in 2001, Blowing Rock Woman of the Year in 2001, and the 2011 Woman of the Year Award for the High Country. She was also presented with the prestigious Order of the Long Leaf Pine in 2010, the highest civilian honor given to North Carolina residents.

A remarkable example of the impact one person can have on a place, Ginny Stevens managed a delicate balance between promoting the economic health of a town, while still being fiercely protective of the historic elements at the heart of Blowing Rock. While Blowing Rocket editor Jerry Burns earned the nickname “Mr. Blowing Rock,” Ginny Stevens is often affectionately called “Mrs. Blowing Rock,” thanks to her indelible presence in the town. Her legacy lives on through the ongoing work of organizations such as the Blowing Rock Historical Society, BRAHM, and passionate individuals carrying on the torch. Former Chestnut Drive that runs adjacent to BRAHM and Edgewood Cottage now bears the name Ginny Stevens Lane, due to the efforts of Cullie Tarleton, Marcia Quinn, and others to commemorate Stevens after her passing. BRAHM also has a gallery named after Ginny Stevens, further keeping her memory alive. Because of Ginny Stevens’s prolific accomplishments to the preservation of Blowing Rock’s history, we are delighted to honor her with a well-deserved spot on WCHS’s Hall of Fame for 2023.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County’s history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County’s history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County’s history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of WCHS as well as the public.

References
Thomas Sherrill, ”Blowing Rock Honors Virginia ‘Ginny’ Stevens,” Watauga Democrat, 11 January 2018, online, https://www.wataugademocrat.com/blowingrocket/blowing-rock-honors-virginia-ginny-stevens/article_842efb77-6429-56ef-9f83-123a2b97ef65.html.

H. Franklin Vick to Chrys Baggett, “Environmental Impact Statement of the Proposed Improvement of US 321 from SR 1500 to US 221,” North Carolina Department of Transportation, 3 August 1995, online, https://edocs.deq.nc.gov/WaterResources/DocView.aspx?dbid=0&id=120364&page=2&cr&cr=1.

Jan Todd, “Virginia ‘Ginny’ Stevens of Blowing Rock Passed Away December 6th,” High Country Press, 12 December 2017, online, https://www.hcpress.com/front-page/virginia-ginny-stevens-blowing-rock-passed-away-december-6th.html.

Tzar Wilkerson, “Ginny Stevens Lane Dedication Honors the Contributions of a Pillar of Blowing Rock Community This Sunday, June 16,” High Country Press, 13 June 2019, online, https://www.hcpress.com/front-page/ginny-stevens-lane-dedication-honors-the-contributions-of-a-pillar-of-blowing-rock-community.html

Legacy.com, “Virginia Stevens Obituary (1935 - 2017),” 10 December 2017, online, https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/newsobserver/name/virginia-stevens-obituary?id=11838911.

Monte Mitchell, (2009, July 18). “Going for Green: Blowing Rock Landmark Hotel to be Auctioned Off to Someone Who Will Preserve It, Town Hopes,” Winston-Salem Journal, 18 July 2009, online https://journalnow.com/going-for-green-blowing-rock-landmark-hotel-to-be-auctioned-off-to-someone-who-will/article_54ed7f99-3094-55c6-a481-e359bed57f3b.html.

Thomas Sherrill, “Virginia ‘Ginny’ Stevens Dies,” Watauga Democrat, 12 December 2017, online, https://www.wataugademocrat.com/community/virginia-ginny-stevens-dies/article_490ad1be-f074-5092-9edb-398b047df32f.html.

From Our Intern: The Jimmy and Margaret Lail Johnson Collection

Kristin Grau
May 6, 2023

Having built my digitization skills through Appalachian State University’s Belk Library Digital Scholarship & Initiatives (DSI) over the past summer, I became more interested in digitization initiatives. My later decision to apply to the Digital Watauga Project internship position came from my desire to expand on my digitization skills and a general interest in archives. What interests me about archives is that they reflect different perspectives and attitudes throughout history. Archival institutions are important sources of information for answering questions about the past and clarifying family history.

As an intern, one project that I have worked on is the digitization of Series 01 of the Jimmy and Margaret Lail Johnson Collection. This series consisted of the Teams family scrapbook, which contained images and documents related to the Teams, Johnson, and Greene families. This project was especially intriguing to me because it is an example of a curated collection of familial photographs and documents that reveal what the Teams family thought was important enough to preserve for future generations.

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Genealogical tracking sheet on William Fred Teams, from the Jimmy and Margaret Lail Johnson Collection, Digital Watauga Project (Jim-Lai-01-066).

This specific document surveys the life of William Fred Teams. What stood out to me here is the written notation that provides information on the death of William Fred Teams and Willie Harmon. Fred died from a suicide in Wilkes County while Willie died in the Korean War. Tracing the history of ancestors can impart patterns of hard times and offer a better understanding of the challenges that they faced throughout their lives. This document, and others like it in the scrapbook, led me to think about the importance of genealogical research.

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Class Roll, Boone High School, 1930. Image from the Jimmy and Margaret Lail Johnson Collection, Digital Watauga Project (Jim-Lai-01-009-a & d).

As a baseball fan, though, my most exciting discovery in the family photo album was Coaker Triplett’s name in a Boone High School yearbook. Coaker Triplett (1911-1992), a Boone native, was an American Major League Baseball outfielder that played for the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, and Philadelphia Phillies. Triplett is buried at Mountlawn Memorial Park and Gardens and has been inducted into the Appalachian State Hall of Fame and Watauga Sports Hall of Fame. Since baseball has always been a way for me to bond with family, make new friends, and reminisce with old friends, this finding served as a connection to the High Country’s past.

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Coaker Triplett’s statistical record can be found online here: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/t/triplco01.shtml.

Series 01 of the Jimmy and Margaret Lail Johnson Collection is currently in metadata review and should be live on Digital Watauga later this summer.

WCHS Awards Honorary Hall of Fame Spot to Dr. Eric Plaag

WCHS/Digital Watauga Team
February 22, 2023

For its inaugural class of 2022, The Watauga County Historical Society inducted twelve historical figures–-living and dead–-who have contributed to Watauga County’s history and/or literature, or to the preservation thereof. Nominations and voting were held by officers of the Watauga County Historical Society and the Digital Watauga Project Committee members, producing a diverse pool of deserving honorees. Perhaps because we cast the net far and wide, and were looking for the types of folks traditionally underrepresented in this type of recognition–-such as women and people of color–-our sights fell short of nominating the person who has pulled this effort (and so many others) together in the name of historical preservation: Dr. Eric Plaag.

Though his accomplishments and contributions to the fields of history and education are too extensive to list here, for the sake of brevity we will paint his background in broad strokes, with focus on his Watauga County contributions.

Born and raised in Virginia, Eric completed his BA in Religion and Philosophy at the College of William and Mary and an MFA in Fiction Writing at George Mason University. After spending the better part of a decade in New England, Eric moved to South Carolina, where he earned a PhD in American History at the University of South Carolina in 2006 and began his career in history, conducting research and writing on various topics. He is the owner of and principal historical consultant at Carolina Historical Consulting, LLC.

In 2011, he and his wife Teresa moved to Boone, and as WCHS president Bettie Bond affectionately puts it, “nothing’s been the same since.” Seeing a need for an organized approach to historic preservation in the face of the continual push and pull between interests of Appalachian State University, the town of Boone, and the county, Eric soon immersed himself in the history of Boone, with particular focus on downtown and its historical buildings and landmarks. His local contributions include the Comprehensive Architectural Survey of Downtown Boone, for which he dedicated well over 500 hours of volunteer service to complete. This survey includes highly detailed historical and architectural write-ups of various buildings in the downtown area.

Eric’s leadership roles with the Watauga County Historical Society and the Boone Historic Preservation Commission have provided needed energy and focus to local history, with a concentration on active progress. This culminated in the recent establishment of the downtown historic district and the protections afforded it. He has also served on the Appalachian Theatre Board of Trustees and was instrumental in the rehabilitation of that establishment. He frequently speaks at local marker unveilings and has conducted walking tours of Boone. Most recently, he was involved with the popular Boone Cemetery tours that took place last October, and wrote the Arcadia book, Remembering Boone, as part of the Boone 150 celebrations. All proceeds from the book go towards funding the Digital Watauga Project.

In 2014, Eric co-founded the Digital Watauga Project, WCHS’s primary effort, which aims to preserve the High Country’s archival memory through the digital capture and preservation of historic photographs, documents, and other materials. As volunteer and chairperson, he has guided a dedicated team of volunteers, technicians, and interns in creating an increasingly professionalized community archives initiative. Those who have been around the Digital Watauga team know how much each member contributes to this project, and there is now a framework for Digital Watauga to outlive its creators. Still, the project relies on the expertise of its guiding north star.

On February 25, 2018, Eric was honored by the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution with the NSDAR Historic Preservation Medal, the organization’s highest award for historic preservation efforts. In keeping with the timing of this award, we are making this Hall of Fame announcement near the official Eric Plaag Day!

As members of the WCHS and Digital Watauga, we would be remiss not to acknowledge someone who has been such a bastion of historical preservation, and we are thus awarding Dr. Eric Plaag (unbeknownst to him until now) an honorary induction into the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. We are grateful for his knowledge, passion, mentorship, and friendship–all of which make the place we call home that much richer.  

Nominations for other inductees to the 2023 Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame are still open, now through the end of March. To nominate a figure, past or present, visit: https://www.wataugacountyhistoricalsociety.org/hall-of-fame

WCHS Announces Velma Rose Combs Burnley as Final 2022 Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Sai Estep
December 27, 2022

As part of ongoing activities associated with the Boone 150 celebrations in 2022, marking the 150th anniversary of Boone’s official incorporation as a town on January 23, 1872, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) has established the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. Throughout 2022, WCHS has named twelve individuals or groups—one each month—as members of the inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame. For the month of December 2022, the WCHS is delighted to announce that Velma Rose Combs Burnley (1921-2019) has been named as the final inductee of this inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame.

Throughout the 150 years of Boone’s rich history, the town has been home to numerous influential women. From Constance Stallings to Roberta Jackson, these women helped shape the place we call home. One of the most significant among them is no doubt Boone’s first female mayor, Velma Burnley (1921-1019).

Velma Burnley was born on November 14, 1921, in Vilas, NC, to Rose and Charley Combs. After an early graduation at the age of 16 from Cove Creek High School, Velma moved to Charlotte and attended Queens University, then known as Queens College, and later returned to Boone, where she worked at Northwestern Bank on King Street, in the Watauga County Bank building. Working in our downtown’s heart, her position at the bank allowed her to get to know many of the townspeople and establish relationships as well as a reputation for being a kind yet diligent worker. One follower of Digital Watauga’s Facebook page recently commented on a picture of Velma, saying, “I enjoyed working beside Velma at Northwestern Bank in Boone in the 1970’s. She was a very kind and professional mentor.” Velma was also elected as the first woman vice president of Northwestern Bank, making it clear that she had a penchant for success and breaking glass ceilings.

Burnley was one of more than a dozen nominees for Centennial Queen during the 1949 Watauga County Centennial festivities. She is standing fifth from right in this image by Palmer Blair showing the various Centennial Queen nominees. Image courtesy of the Von and Mickey Hagaman Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Active in the community throughout her life, Velma served on leadership boards of various organizations, including the Rural Economic Development Division, and was only the second woman to be elected as president of the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. In the 1950s, the Watauga Democrat made several mentions of the Boone Credit Women’s Breakfast Club, where Velma served as president. The Credit Women’s Breakfast Club was created in 1930, in Portland, Oregon, to form a cohesive group of women who were in the retail credit profession. With the goal of personal and professional development, chapters quickly spread throughout the country and internationally.

In 1987, Velma was elected to Boone Town Council, and two short years later was elected as the first woman mayor of the town. Crediting her successful political career to her experience getting to know Boone’s people through her position at Northwestern Bank, she remained in her role as mayor until 2005. During her tenure as mayor, Velma oversaw a time in Boone’s history that was marked by economic vitality. There’s little doubt that her background as a leader of Northwestern Bank made her uniquely equipped to help foster this prosperous time. Her colleague and friend Lorretta Clawson–who also served as Boone mayor from 2005-2013, as well as many years on Town Council–remembers Velma Burnley as a “lovely lady, who led Boone during a time of tremendous growth,” and paved the way for other female leaders. Loretta fondly remembers many ribbon-cutting ceremonies with Velma and trips to Raleigh for meetings with the North Carolina League of Municipalities (a member-driven organization that is composed of representatives from various cities and towns in the state, dedicated to improving the lives of their citizens). Loretta stated that she and Velma were always warmly welcomed at these gatherings, since Boone was well-known throughout the state and admired for its development and beautiful location in the mountains.

In addition to her focus on the economic development of Boone, she also channeled energy to support causes rooted in compassion. Recognizing the need for an animal shelter in the area, Velma worked alongside Rachel Rivers Coffey and veterinarian Dr. Jack Martin to establish the Watauga Humane Society, with Velma serving as its first president. She also focused on establishing and protecting green spaces in Boone. Clawson-Burnley Park was opened and dedicated to Loretta Clawson and Velma Burnley in 2010, after they worked together to establish and protect this space at the Greenway. Not only a location for enjoying recreation and natural beauty, the wetlands at the park also provide vital ecological services, including filtering runoff water from impervious surfaces before returning to the South Fork of the New River.  Burnley was also an ardent public library supporter. As Velma’s daughter Lynn Kellem described in her obituary, “She was an avid reader, checking out four or five books from the library, reading them, returning them the next week.” A photograph of Velma as mayor still hangs in the southwestern corner of the Watauga County Public Library.  It is also clear that Velma was a lover of the arts and worked closely with Appalachian State University, serving on advisory boards for both the Appalachian Summer Festival and the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts. She was awarded honorary alumni status from the University in 2006.

Burnley can be seen at the center of this image by Jamey Fletcher as she is sworn in with Clyde Greene and Jim Smith at the Boone Council Chambers by Judge Charles Lamm, likely in the late 1980s. Image courtesy of the Historic Boone Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

When we think of a life well lived and a legacy that touches so many facets of a community, Velma Burnley serves as a shining example of what one person can accomplish to benefit the lives of others, long after her own came to an end. Always lighting the torch for those who followed her, we can think of no better inductee than Velma Burnley to help lead us into the new year! The WCHS is delighted to honor Velma Rose Combs Burnley for her important contributions to Boone and Watauga County’s social, educational, and cultural history.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County’s history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County’s history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County’s history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this inaugural class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of WCHS. Beginning in 2023, the WCHS will also consider nominations from members of the public, which in turn will be evaluated by the DWPC.

WCHS Announces Gertrude Tolbert Folk as Next Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Jennifer Woods
December 15, 2022

As part of ongoing activities associated with the Boone 150 celebrations in 2022, marking the 150th anniversary of Boone’s official incorporation as a town on January 23, 1872, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) has established the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. Throughout 2022, WCHS will name twelve individuals or groups—one each month—as members of the inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame. For the month of November 2022, the WCHS is delighted to announce that Gertrude Tolbert Folk (1892-1974) has been named as the next inductee of this inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame.

It is said that teaching is the profession that teaches all other professions. Although there is little information published about Gertrude Folk, we know from interviews in the community and the Junaluska: Oral Histories of a Black Appalachian Community book that people remember more than just a schoolteacher when they think of Gertrude Folk. They remember a woman who was involved in the community. A woman who gave piano lessons. An author of a number of obituaries. A well-dressed, stern woman. A well-mannered woman, always found at the community’s church.

Gertrude Tolbert Folk was perhaps most known to Watauga County as a teacher at the Watauga Consolidated School on Church Street. She was born to Jerry and Mary Tolbert in Jefferson City, Tennessee, in 1892. Gertrude was interviewed as part of the Black History Project conducted by Appalachian State University history professor Dr. Winston Kinsey in 1973, just a year before her death. According to her own oral history, her grandparents were enslaved, but not her parents. She attended the segregated high school, Nelson Merry School, and then two years of college at Carson Newman. After passing a verbal test, Gertrude started teaching at a school in Beaverdam, then later in Elizabethton, Jefferson City, and finally Cove Creek. Her story in Boone began in 1918, after hearing B. B. Dougherty speak at a conference searching for Black teachers to come to Watauga County.

Gertrude Folk originally taught in a one-room school building located nearby, but she later taught in this building on Church Street, the Watauga Consolidated School, which was constructed in 1937 with WPA funds and community contributions. It was converted into a duplex after construction of the new Watauga Consolidated School on Wyn Way in 1967. Image from January 2021, courtesy of Eric Plaag.

During her first year teaching in Boone, the classroom was just a one-room, log building divided in half by a curtain. The school was the oldest Black school in Boone, which was torn and replaced with the WPA-funded Watauga Consolidated School in 1937. Gertrude and her sister, Anna, actually lived just in front of the earlier school building on Church Street for a time. Stern and outspoken, she fought to bring on a second teacher for the school in the 1930s when the Black schools in Boone, Beaverdam, and Cove Creek consolidated. At the time, Gertrude would have been the sole teacher for all 62 kindergarten through eighth grade students. (Can you imagine the outrage a class size of 62 would elicit in the present day?) Gertrude taught them all, every subject. Students remember her humming while she walked up and down the aisles. Thanks to Gertrude, the school did eventually get a second teacher, one of her former students, Frazier Horton.

Horton wasn’t the only future teacher to come from Gertrude’s classroom. There was also Margaret Neal, who went on to North Carolina A & T, then became a teacher in Detroit. Another three students went to college to be teachers in Philadelphia, along with Gertrude’s daughter, “Mackie.” Ottie Folk, one of Gertrude’s sons, passed the teacher's exam, but ended up working at a music store. He quit teaching when students repeatedly came in with “paint [Blackface] and lips poked out,” looking to start trouble with Ottie to get him fired. Gertrude noted that Ottie heard a teacher at another school had expelled a student and was threatened when he didn’t let the student back into school. According to her, people came to the teacher’s house and beat and killed him. She indicated that was enough for him to choose a different profession.

Junaluska schoolchildren stand next to the first Watauga Consolidated School for Black students (right), located on Church Street. Image courtesy of the Junaluska Heritage Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Church was an important part of Gertrude’s life, and she was proud to have also taught two preachers. Although notedly Baptist, Gertrude attended Boone Methodist Episcopal Chapel after she married her husband in 1913. In her own words, there wasn’t a Baptist church in Boone for her at the time. Her husband Edward was a soldier during World War I. He worked as a cook at the Critcher Hotel on King Street, and then later at Carolina Pharmacy.

Beyond memories of her teaching in the classroom, people in the Junaluska community remember Gertrude as an impeccably dressed woman. She was always in a hat and gloves, with a matching purse. As relayed by Roberta Jackson, Lillian White remembered walking out of her house in a white dress with red trim. Upon meeting Gertrude on the road, both wearing the same dress, Gertrude immediately told her to go back in and change. And she did because people did what Gertrude told them to do, inside and outside the classroom.

Others remember the swing in Gertrude’s yard. Although it was much coveted, one was only allowed on it, or in the yard, by invitation. The same was true of her home, which was said to have been “well-kept and tidy, just as she was.” Her children remember working in the garden and the rows of canned vegetables in the basement of the house. A few of the neighborhood children recall that she would pay them five cents to go to the post office and get the mail for her, just enough to buy a soda.

By all accounts Gertrude was a powerful influence on generations of young people in the Junaluska community, who easily numbered in the hundreds, and thus an important figure in the history of Watauga County. Despite that, there is just a lone photograph and a scattering of mentions of her. Given racial tensions and segregation in the Boone community during her lifetime, it shouldn’t be surprising. It is disappointing, though. Who else did she teach? What other lives did she influence, and what did they go on to accomplish? What a legacy she left in just these few publications.

The WCHS is delighted to honor Gertrude Tolbert Folk for her important contributions to Boone and Watauga County’s social, educational, and cultural history.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County’s history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County’s history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County’s history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this inaugural class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of WCHS. Beginning in 2023, the WCHS will also consider nominations from members of the public, which in turn will be evaluated by the DWPC.

What's the Backstory on that Ghost Ad?

Eric Plaag
November 8, 2022

Our crack research team at Digital Watauga has received countless inquiries over the past couple of months about the “ghost ad” that was recently uncovered on the west wall of the Mast Store building (historic name: J. Walter Jones Building). Some have speculated that it is an old War Bonds ad from World War II, while others have assumed that it was something from even earlier in Boone’s history. After wading through our archives and doing additional research on past advertising trends, we believe we know what the “ghost ad” originally looked like, as well as when it was likely painted. But it is a complicated story.

First, we need to begin with a little history of the J. Walter Jones Building and the building immediately to the west of it, originally known as the Boone Garage and now part of the DiSanti, Capua, and Garrett law firm complex. The general area of this site once held a small, one-story, frame building (located a bit further west) that housed Dr. J. Walter Jones’s doctor’s office, and in 1919, Jones and his partners opened a drug store that eventually became Boone Drug Company, leading to inaccurate assumptions over the years that the Boone Drug Company began in the west building of the present Mast General Store. In actuality, Jones moved his frame building off the lot shortly after Walter Johnson purchased the land to build “a large brick garage,” with Dr. Jones committing to building “a brick business house adjoining the garage” to the east. This configuration of the buildings is visible in the 1928 Sanborn map of downtown Boone, an excerpt of which is below.

Detail crop of the 1928 Sanborn Fire Insurance Company map of Boone showing (L to R on the northeast corner of King and Depot) the Boone Garage (1922), the J. Walter Jones Building (1922), and the W. R. Winkler Building (1927). The latter building should not be confused with the W. R. Winkler Tire Company Building, constructed immediately west of the Boone Garage in 1929, after completion of this map. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Early tenants of the J. Walter Jones Building included a bank, the local telephone exchange, a furniture store, a lumber merchant, and a dentist. By the late 1920s, the first floor of the Jones Building was established as a department store space, with a series of tenants rotating in and out before the Belk-White Department Store rented the space in April 1935. Early tenants of the Boone Garage building included a series of garage and car sales operations (as well as a tiny, early iteration of Boone’s bus station), culminating in the mid-Depression purchase of the building by the Hodges Tire Company, also in 1935. Hodges also rented space in the building immediately to the west, originally known as the W. R. Winkler Tire Company Building (built 1929). You can see this general configuration of the buildings beginning at 9:23 in the 1936 H. Lee Waters Movies of Local People film of Boone, found at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSU1gTuPk84&t=563s. Note that there is advertising text visible on the stucco on the west wall of the Jones Building when viewed from the interior garage space of the Hodges Tire Company. The Boone Garage building merely anchored to the west wall of the Jones Building. It did not have its own east wall. This will be important later.

Screenshot from the 1936 H. Lee Waters film of Boone showing the Boone Garage, occupied by the Hodges Tire Company, with its south facade aligned with the south facade of the Jones Building to the east. Image courtesy of the Pilar Fotta Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Screenshot from the 1936 H. Lee Waters film of Boone showing the west and south elevations of the W. R. Winkler Tire Company Building at left, with the west wall of the Boone Garage at right. Image courtesy of the Pilar Fotta Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Sometime shortly before July 1938, the Hodges Tire Company removed the second-floor overhang and the garage bays of the Boone Garage building, trimming back the building footprint to a position slightly forward of the Winkler Tire Company Building to the west. They also covered the new façade with a native stone veneer that protruded forward of the Winkler Tire Company Building. This change is visible in a photograph that ran that month in the Watauga Democrat on July 7, 1938. Unfortunately, that photograph is framed in a manner that does not show us the west wall of the Jones Building. We do know, however, that Rufus Colvard bought the Winkler Tire Company Building and the Boone Garage in 1940, then added the Jones Building through transactions in 1941 and 1943. Guy Hunt, who began operating Hunt’s Department Store in the Jones Building also in 1943, announced substantial renovation plans for the Jones Building, including stuccoing the entirety of the building. We strongly suspect that this work would have involved applying a new layer of stucco over whatever surface coverings from the interior of the Hodges Tire Company were still applied to the west wall of the Jones Building. The uniformity of this stucco application is evident in a mid-1940s image of the Jones Building (including part of the west wall) visible at https://www.mastgeneralstore.com/boone.

Hodges Tire Company advertisement image, Watauga Democrat, July 7, 1938, with the Winkler Tire Company building at left and the cut-back Boone Garage with its new stone veneer at right. Image courtesy of DigitalNC.com.

In the years to follow, Colvard Tire Company (occupying the Hodges space in the Boone Garage and the Winkler Tire buildings after 1940) routinely painted advertisements on the west wall of the Jones Building, no doubt continuing the practice of painting on the stucco of that wall that had existed since the days when the Hodges Tire garage bays were still attached to the west wall of the Jones Building in the mid-1930s. We have a fairly lengthy catalog of images that show the changing advertisements on this wall, a sampling of which are below.

We also know that Colvard installed a brick veneer treatment over the Boone Garage remnant and the west wall of the Jones Building sometime between March 1960 and July 1963. One image (reproduced below) shows this work being completed during December, given that Christmas decorations are visible on the street poles. We know that the work could not have been completed earlier than December 1957 because of the Tweetsie Railroad bumper sticker on the car in the foreground (Tweetsie opened in July 1957). And we know that the brick veneer work was completed before the July 1963 Wagon Train, based on an image (also below) of the wagon train passing by the building. We initially misread the color in the 1960 Blizzard image below as representing brick, but we now believe that this represents a painting over (and possibly a re-application) of the stucco that was covered a short time later by the pre-1963 brick veneer. It is this pre-1963 veneer wall that was in danger of collapse at the time of the 2015 Downtown Boone architectural survey and that was ultimately removed under an emergency public safety order from the Town of Boone in 2022. We should note, too, that we did not have the benefit of observing the actual removal of the veneer walls on the west wall of the Jones Building and the south wall of the Boone Garage remnant. Any photo documentation of that work may confirm our conclusions outlined below.

Detail crop from an image showing children marching in the 1952 Boone Clean-Up Parade. Image courtesy of the Constance Stallings Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Detail crop from image of King Street looking east in 1953. Image courtesy of the Palmer Blair Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Detail crop from a slide image looking east on King Street from the Water Street intersection, circa early 1950s. Image courtesy of the E. T. Glenn and Lorena Lawrence Glenn Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Detail crop from a circa 1960-62 image taken around Christmas showing the installation of a brick veneer wall on the Boone Garage remnant and the west wall of the Jones Building. Image courtesy of the Paul Armfield Coffey Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

March 1960 image taken during the 1960 Blizzard (with a March 1960 processing date). We initially thought this image showed the brick veneer installed on the west wall of the Jones Building and the south elevation of the Boone Garage remnant, but we now believe this represents a painting over or re-application of stucco on both buildings. Image courtesy of the John Ward Family Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

This image of the July 1963 Wagon Train parade shows the Boone Garage remnant and the west wall of the Jones Building following installation of the brick veneer. Image courtesy of the Historic Boone Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

So, that brings us to the “ghost ad” that was unveiled as the work on the west wall of the Jones Building and the south wall of the Boone Garage remnant proceeded during the late summer of 2022. The image at the top of this post, taken by the author on September 16, 2022, shows the visible, surviving detail of the “ghost ad.” Several notable elements are visible outside of the ad itself. First, the concrete block work above the brick line on the Jones Building no longer shows most of the Shell advertisement that was painted on stucco above the brick line in the veneer installation photo from the very early 1960s, although a portion of the last “L” in “Shell” on stucco is still visible at the south end of the top of the west wall, covering an old boiler stack on the Jones Building. We believe this concrete block to have been installed during the early 1960s renovation on both the Jones Building and the Boone Garage remnant. It’s worth noting that this “Shell” ad was clearly aged by the early 1960s, and we suspect it was painted on the west wall of the Jones Building AFTER the cutting back of the Boone Garage building. Indeed, Hodges Tire Company was a Shell dealer at that location, as evinced by ads that appeared in the Watauga Democrat only in late 1938 and 1939. R. W. Colvard, the Shell agent for northwestern North Carolina in the late 1930s and early 1940s, also sold Shell products at this location, but the Shell ad was not visible on this wall after Hunt’s stuccoing of the Jones building in 1943. Second, the horizontal line of protruding bricks just above the “ghost ad” represent the roofline tie-in from the original Boone Garage building, perfectly framing the “ghost ad” within the original interior line of the Boone Garage. We know, however, that the bays of the original Boone Garage were only one story in height—ceiling elements are visible in the bays in the 1936 film—and we believe the second floor contained offices and parts storage for the company. This leaves us to conclude that “ghost ad” and the ”Shell” ad were painted on existing stucco after the July 1938 Hodges Tire reduction of the Boone Garage in order to beautify the exposed west wall of the Jones Building and obscure some of the damage caused by the removal of the south part of the Boone Garage. Indeed, the faint outlines of the “Shell” letters can be seen in the August 1940 image below showing flooding along King Street. All of this would have then been covered by the 1943 Hunt’s Department Store stucco job, which involved a new layer of stucco that also covered the protruding brick elements of the west wall.

The “Shell” lettering at the top of the west wall of the Jones Building can be seen in this detail crop of flooding on King Street during the August 1940 flood. Image courtesy of the David P. Wyke Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

As for the “ghost ad” itself, we believe that the drawing at the left side of the ad shows a modern battleship with a nineteenth-century clipper stacked on top and a Spanish galleon stacked on top of that. Decipherable text reads, “IF B--T-E---PS…THEYD BE…Armor—ber.” Additional text on the stucco fragment at far right appears to be cursive with the letters “-eler.” Using some logic based on the image, the proximity of a tire shop at that time, and our Wheel of Fortune skills carefully honed over many decades, we began playing with the visible letters and found the advertisement below for Kelly-Springfield Tires in the April 11, 1938, issue of Life magazine (link here and scroll down slightly: https://books.google.com/books?id=4UoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA67&dq=%22if+battleships+had+tires%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi1i-DuqIX7AhWVRDABHUM-BjQQ6AF6BAgHEAI#v=onepage&q=%22if%20battleships%20had%20tires%22&f=false).

Kelly Springfield Tires advertisement from the April 11, 1938, issue of Life magazine. Image courtesy of Google Books.

We have not been able to find evidence that Hodges Tire Company sold Kelly-Springfield Tires, but we knew that Colvard Tire Company was carrying them as early as 1941, placing this “ghost ad” in our window of 1938 to 1943, replete with war iconography suitable to the period. Careful examination of the “ghost ad” image indeed reveals portions of the word "battleships" kerned at the proper locations on what survives of the “ghost ad,” as well as the words "if," "theyd be," and part of the word "Armorubber"—again, all in the correct locations if visible kerning patterns are carried out. Curiously, we have not been able to find any instances of this particular ad slogan for Kelly-Springfield Tires outside of 1938, although Kelly continued to make Armorubber tires well into the early 1960s.

So, the short answer to our mystery is that we are confident that the “ghost ad” remnant shows a Kelly-Springfield Tires Armorubber sub-brand advertisement that was likely painted on a rough stucco layer between 1938 and 1943—after Hodges cut back the Boone Garage building and before Hunt’s renovations of the exterior of the Jones Building. The ad very likely would have been covered by a new layer of stucco in 1943, briefly uncovered in the very early 1960s when the brick veneer wall work was done, and uncovered again this past summer as that wall was removed.

WCHS Announces Alfred Thomas Adams as Next Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Eric Plaag
November 7, 2022

As part of ongoing activities associated with the Boone 150 celebrations in 2022, marking the 150th anniversary of Boone’s official incorporation as a town on January 23, 1872, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) has established the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. Throughout 2022, WCHS will name twelve individuals or groups—one each month—as members of the inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame. For the month of October 2022, the WCHS is delighted to announce that Alfred Thomas Adams (1911-2002) has been named as the next inductee of this inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame.

A Watauga County native, Alfred Thomas Adams was born to Tarlton Pulaski “Dock” Adams (1846-1922) and Mollie Isoline Tugman Adams (1877-1965) on December 3, 1911, in the Silverstone community. Alfred’s career-long interest in banking came naturally; his father was an early stockholder and director in the Watauga County Bank at Boone.

For all of those advantages, farm life appears to have played a significant role in Alfred’s education. The 1930 US Census, for example, indicated that he was a farm laborer rather than a student at age 18. A 1935 graduate of Cove Creek High School, Adams was 23 years old when he finally completed his secondary education. Nevertheless, Adams made the most of his high school experience and quickly secured a strong reputation as a leader. On April 13, 1932, Adams attended the annual Father-Son Picnic of the Cove Creek chapter of the Future Farmers of America, where he claimed first prize in a public speaking contest. His speech extolled the numerous, lifelong advantages of farm life over city life and was a huge hit with the people of Watauga County, particularly amidst the crushing weight of the Great Depression. By late 1932, Adams was vice-president of the Future Farmers organization and a frequent public speaker throughout the county. Following completion of his high school education, he attended Mars Hill College, graduating in 1937 with a degree in business.

This image shows a new car being awarded to Mrs. Lou Hopkins by the Boone Merchants Association on January 16, 1953, in front of the Mountain Burley Tobacco Warehouse No. 1 (present site of the Watauga County Library). Left to right are W. H. Gragg, Mr. Caudill, Mrs. Hopkins, Joe E. Coleman, and Alfred T. Adams. Image by Palmer Blair and courtesy of the Alfred and Daisy Adams Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

In 1939, Adams found employment in Shouns, Tennessee, as a bookkeeper at the Maymead Stock Farm, Inc. In 1941, he returned to Boone and married Daisy Virginia Austin (1916-2014), who went on to be a popular teacher for 32 years in the Boone community. Together, the couple raised three boys, all born in the 1940s. Adams, meanwhile, secured employment as a teller at the Northwestern Bank about 1943, and by 1946, he was assistant cashier for the bank. In 1950, he was promoted to cashier, and by 1963, he was assistant vice president. For much of the 1950s through the 1970s (when Adams retired from full-time work at the bank), nearly every residential and commercial development in Boone secured financing through the Northwestern Bank, and Adams was often at the center of those deals, guiding and advising on the best ways for those deals to succeed as he protected the bank’s invested assets. He spent the last thirty years of his career as the chief executive of the bank’s Boone and Blowing Rock offices, and he also served as a member of the North Carolina State Banking Commission. Near the end of his career, Adams was inducted as a member of the 50 Year Club in the North Carolina Banking Association. He was still serving as chairman of the bank (by then First Union Bank) in 1993.

Left to right are Alfred Adams, Carolyn Austin (behind door), Bernard Dougherty, and James Marsh standing in front of the teller door at the Northwestern Bank (now Farmer’s Hardware) at the southwest corner of Depot and West King Streets in January 1956. Image courtesy of the Palmer Blair Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

By 1945, he was also Acting Secretary of the Boone Chamber of Commerce as well as chairman of the local War Savings Staff responsible for selling Victory Bonds to the local community. In 1946, Adams secured election as treasurer of the Boone Chamber of Commerce, a position he held for many years; he remained active with the Chamber well into the twilight of his professional career, serving as chairman of the Chamber’s board in 1989. He was also active in the Board of Directors of the Boone Merchants Association during the post-war years, serving as chairman of its finance committee. As Boone came to grips with the post-war tourist trade and sought to capitalize on those economic development opportunities, Adams again played a key role, functioning as the treasurer for the Boone Tourist Association beginning in 1950. Throughout this period and the decades that followed, Adams occupied a highly visible and strategically important position in bringing together the political and economic leaders from Appalachian State Teachers College (later University), Watauga County, and Boone to guide the economic development of Boone and Watauga County from the 1950s into the 1990s. He was at the heart of countless development projects, including serving as a founding director of Horn in the West in the early 1950s, as a founding director of the Boone Golf Club in the late 1950s, and as chairman of the board of the Watauga Medical Center, overseeing the construction of the Watauga County Hospital on Deerfield Road in the 1960s. In recognition of his powerful influence over the local business community, he was a frequent speaker in banking classes at Appalachian State University, saw the naming of the university’s Alfred Adams Chair of Banking in 1995, and was named as an Honorary Alumnus in 2001. Over the years, the Chamber of Commerce created at least three awards in Adams’s honor, including the Alfred Adams Business Leadership Award in 2000.

Left to right are Dr. William Howard Plemmons, Glenn Andrews, Alfred Adams, Dempsey Wilcox, Jerry Coe, Stanley Harris, Watt Gragg, and Herman Wilcox. The men were standing on a hill just south of present-day Rivers Street with downtown Boone and Howard’s Knob visible behind them, circa 1960. Image courtesy of the Alfred and Daisy Adams Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

For all of his beneficial contributions to the community, however, Adams also sometimes found himself on the wrong side of political issues. From the 1940s well into the 1980s, for example, Adams was a fierce advocate for keeping Watauga County “dry” by keeping liquor sales out of the community. As co-chair of the Citizens for Boone’s Best Interest, an anti-alcohol group opposing Boone’s 1986 alcohol referendum, Adams helped orchestrate more than 1,400 voter registration challenges to try to keep ASU students from voting to allow beer, wine, and liquor sales in Boone. It was the first major student voter challenge in Boone, and although the challenge failed, it ultimately initiated a cascade of similar legal challenges in the decades to follow. That strategy also likely backfired, as students turned out in droves the next month—voter participation was 58 percent for the local referendum in March 1986—resulting in a landslide victory to allow Boone to go “wet” that year.

Adams was active in dozens of community activities throughout his lifetime, far too numerous to describe in detail here. As a mere sampling, he served in the leadership of the local Boy Scout troops from the early 1940s, and was a frequent leader in community Red Cross drives and served as their treasurer as early as 1945. He also served as the treasurer of the Watauga Hospital Equipment Fund and as general treasurer of the United Nations “Crusade for Children” campaign during the late 1940s. He was active in the First Baptist Church of Boone as well, serving as superintendent of the Sunday School program there; he later served as deacon and chairperson of the church’s Finance Committee. Adams was also an active and highly regarded collector and restorer of antique cars for much of his life. He was also an amateur historian of Boone, often entertaining friends and local luminaries with stories about the early twentieth-century history of his adopted community of Boone.

The WCHS is delighted to honor Alfred Thomas Adams for his critically important contributions to Boone and Watauga County’s history.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County's history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County's history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County's history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this inaugural class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of the WCHS. Beginning in 2023, the WCHS will also consider nominations from members of the public, which in turn will be evaluated by the DWPC.

WCHS Announces Sandra Marie Hagler as Next Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Sai Estep
September 27, 2022

As part of ongoing activities associated with the Boone 150 celebrations in 2022, marking the 150th anniversary of Boone’s official incorporation as a town on January 23, 1872, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) has established the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. Throughout 2022, WCHS will name twelve individuals or groups—one each month—as members of the inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame. For the month of September 2022, the WCHS is delighted to announce that Sandra Marie Hagler (1948-2021) has been named as the next inductee of this inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame.

Embodying the image of nurturer, Sandra (Sandy) Marie Hagler made her mark on the Junaluska community and greater Watauga County through her many years of nursing and the strength of her community ties. This innate sense of kinship and interest in history served Sandy well as she took up the charge to preserve the culture and history of the Junaluska community through the Junaluska Heritage Association, which she co-founded.

Along with her twin sister, Andrea Louise Goins, Sandy was born on May 21, 1948, in Bristol, Tennessee. She, her twin, two other sisters, and two brothers grew up in the Junaluska community, where she described an atmosphere of warmth in her oral history conducted by Appalachian State University in 2010. While enjoying a sense of community in the all-Black Watauga Consolidated School, Sandy described herself as a serious student and said that most of her classmates were also serious and competitive when it came to school performance. However, she and her sister Roberta Jackson have both stated that there were issues for Sandy once she attended the newly integrated Watauga County High School, as the abrupt change was a shock to students who had no prior experience with integrated classrooms.

Sandy’s life in nursing started upon enrolling in Caldwell Community College’s nursing program, where she earned her associate’s degree. From there she was employed by the nursing home at Glenbridge (then known as Glenstone), and then at Appalachian State University, where she worked in Student Health. She attained her RN to BSN degree through Winston Salem State University’s satellite program in Boone, which was operated by Phoebe Pollitt. Phoebe remembers Sandy fondly from her days of instructing her, and describes Sandy as an all-A student, who was “kind, intelligent, and dedicated” with a “good sense of humor, and open to new ideas.” This embracing of new ideas is illustrated in Sandy’s oral history statement in which she describes the changing technological landscape, and her acceptance of the ubiquity of computers in today’s work: “I don't know how anybody could make it these days without a computer, and the access [to] your work, there's just so much less paperwork. The paperwork--it would be crazy if you had to do it all by hand the way we used to do. That I love. I don't know how anybody could live without a computer.”

Sandy went on to work at the Watauga County Health Department, where she stayed until her retirement in 2010. It is thought that Sandy was likely one of, if not the first Black public health nurse in the Appalachian District Health Department. Her important role as one of a few public health nurses of color in the area provided much needed representation of the Black community in healthcare. Roberta Jackson also shared that Sandy’s medical knowledge came in handy to her family members and friends in Junaluska.

Sandy’s caring nature went beyond the medical field and was also exemplified in her active role in the Junaluska community. In addition to opening her home up to friends and family that she welcomed in and cooked for, she also ensured that no one in the neighborhood wanted for anything, providing “Meals on the Hill” (a name that plays off the nationwide “Meals on Wheels” program). The Hill is what the Junaluska Community is sometimes referred to, due to its location on steep terrain above Boone. Sandy’s involvement at the Boone Mennonite Brethren Church included singing in the choir as an accomplished soloist, and also forming the Lydia Society with Roberta Jackson, an all-women missionary group that focused on community outreach. Roberta stated that the Lydia Society, “was there to help people, and to be there for people when they needed something.”

Hagler Family Portrait, L to R: Roberta Hagler Jackson, Mary Ann Hagler, Sandra Marie Hagler, Kathryn Margaret Wilson Hagler, Robert Hagler, Jr., and Louise Hagler, circa 1990s. Image courtesy of the Junaluska Heritage Association Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

A keen interest in the subject of history–and a talent for preserving it–led to Sandy and her sister Roberta being nominated as 2013’s High Country Women of the Year by All About Women Magazine for their efforts in preservation. Roberta thinks that Sandy’s motivation to document Junaluska’s history began around the time of their uncle's death. At the funeral, many folks came from all around to pay their respects, sparking Sandy’s interest to find out, “where did we all come from?” From there, her genealogy efforts led her to co-found the Junaluska Heritage Association with its aim to preserve their culture. Using sources such as courthouse deeds and Ancestry.com, Sandy was instrumental in the research conducted for the Boone cemetery marker, which lists Junaluska residents buried there. She was often referred to as the “neighborhood historian.”

Her historical interests encompassed not only documenting family trees, but also included uncovering hidden stories and narratives that weren’t readily known by Boone’s residents. For example, in Susan Keefe’s book Junaluska: Oral Histories of a Black Appalachian Community, Sandy shares that she was interested in writing a drama about the lynching of two Horton men in 1932, which included warrantless searches of Junaluska homes. “I would like to write a drama about the Horton incident…It was horrible for the people in this community. It shows how Black people were separate from the rest of the town, and [White] mobs came and searched through homes and scared people. Women and children were screaming…It’s a part of history that has never been told. There was an account in the newspapers, but of course they were speaking from the White point of view.” One thing that makes Sandy’s story so remarkable is not only having a gift for nurturing and kindness, but also the unflinching strength it takes to speak up about the darker parts of Boone’s history, while also celebrating her community’s place in it. Her willingness to address the stories that have been buried by others is commendable. We couldn’t say it better than she did herself when stating, “It’s one thing to want to believe this or that, but when you see the actual truth, you have to just take it in.”

Sadly, Sandy passed away on September 2, 2021, and while she is dearly missed by her loved ones, her legacy lives on through her lifetime of community activism and efforts as culture-keeper for the Junaluska community. Her sister Roberta fondly remembers Sandy as “a very strong woman; and I loved her to death. You could depend on her.” The WCHS and Digital Watauga will always be grateful to Sandy for her valuable contributions to the project, and will treasure the fact that her work with the Junaluska Heritage Association will live on for future generations to enjoy and better understand the history of this unique community. Still, the author of this post would’ve loved the chance to meet Sandy and try her punchbowl cake.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County's history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County's history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County's history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this inaugural class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of the WCHS. Beginning in 2023, the WCHS will also consider nominations from members of the public, which in turn will be evaluated by the DWPC.

WCHS Announces Blanford Barnard Dougherty as Next Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Eric Plaag
August 26, 2022

As part of ongoing activities associated with the Boone 150 celebrations in 2022, marking the 150th anniversary of Boone’s official incorporation as a town on January 23, 1872, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) has established the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. Throughout 2022, WCHS will name twelve individuals or groups—one each month—as members of the inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame. For the month of August 2022, the WCHS announces that Blanford “Blan” Barnard Dougherty (1870-1957) has been named as the next inductee of this inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame.

Blanford Barnard Dougherty was born to Daniel Baker Dougherty (1833-1902) and Ellen Carolina Bartlett Dougherty (1845-1876) on October 21, 1870, at Boone. In his youth, he lived in a home on the south side of King Street that had once been Jordan Councill, Jr.’s store and post office, and which was later incorporated into the Greene Inn. His education at Boone was in a one-room, log schoolhouse near Boone Creek, then at the Boone Academy, a two-room building later briefly used in the early days of Appalachian State University’s history as the Watauga Academy. His high school training was limited to less than a year, involving training at the New River Academy, located well east of Boone, as well as Lenoir High School and the Globe Academy. By 1888, Dougherty managed to pass the required teacher certification exams, then became a teacher at community schools in Shulls Mill and Blowing Rock, despite his lack of any significant, formal education. Other posts quickly followed at the Zionville School, the Globe Academy, and the Hamilton Institute. After abbreviated college education forays at Wake Forest College and Holly Spring College, Dougherty returned to the Globe Academy and served as its principal for two years.

Dougherty then enrolled at Carson-Newman College in Tennessee, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1896. He taught briefly at Holly Spring College before enrolling at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he earned a degree in pedagogy in 1899. That fall, Dougherty and his brother, Dauphin Disco Dougherty (1869-1929), established the Watauga Academy at Boone, funding the teacher training institute primarily through private subscription and their own resources. In early 1903, seeking to secure state support for the academy, Dougherty approached local attorney E. F. Lovill about drafting a bill for this support. Narrowly passed in March 1903, the Newland Bill established the Appalachian Training School and provided significant state funding for its high school operations. Name changes followed in 1925 (Appalachian State Normal School), when the school became a two-year, degree-granting college that offered demonstration schools run jointly with Watauga County, and again in 1929 (Appalachian State Teachers College, or ASTC), when the school began offering bachelor’s degrees. Dougherty, who had served as co-principal and then superintendent to that point, was named president of the school in 1925.

Meanwhile, Dougherty also served as the superintendent of county schools (1899-1916), leading a major building campaign in the early twentieth century that dramatically improved county schools. He was later awarded two honorary doctoral degrees for his accomplishments in education. For much of the early twentieth century, Dougherty was also keenly attuned to the county-to-county educational funding inequities that prevailed during the early twentieth century, whereby the children of wealthier counties enjoyed better educational opportunities than children living in poorer, more rural counties like Watauga. Dougherty advocated for more than twenty years for a tax and education equalization scheme, politicking with legislators and major business leaders, the latter of whom were most directly impacted by and thus resistant to the scheme, to embrace what became known as the Hancock Bill (despite Dougherty’s authorship of the bill). This legislation was intended to equalize (white) educational opportunity throughout the state by forcing wealthier, more populous counties to pay higher taxes to help fund the educational needs in poorer counties. Passage of the bill in 1929 finally resulted in a standardized nine-month school term (the old term in Watauga had been four months) and highly trained teachers who were dispersed throughout the state.

Dougherty occasionally proved to be forward thinking on Black education late in his career, once appointing a committee of ASTC educators in 1941 to work with committees from Asheville College and Western Carolina Teachers College on “studying and discussing methods of improving the educational conditions of the negro race in the mountains of North Carolina.” He also reportedly advocated during the 1950s for equal pay for all teachers regardless of race, despite the state’s slow action on this front. Unfortunately, Dougherty’s legacy on racial matters is tarnished by several events covered in the local press during his lifetime. First, as a young teacher at the Globe Academy in May 1891, Dougherty took part in a debate that was part of the school’s closing exercises program. At issue was a resolution affirming “that the introduction of the negro into America has been productive of more good than evil.” Dougherty was one of three orators that the Watauga Democrat said “seemed to take a delight in representing the negative,” which reportedly carried the day. While such views might easily be explained as the indiscretions of a young man who had been raised by a Confederate veteran, expressed at the height of the Jim Crow era’s influence on racial views in the South, such considerations do not explain Dougherty’s well-documented penchant—late into his adult years as president of ASTC—for regaling the ASTC faculty and their families with “negro stories” at social events. When confronted in 1935 over how he obtained funding for ASTC’s power plant without a state appropriation being made for that purpose, Dougherty replied with a “negro story” that included dialect as part of the punchline. Indeed, the two “special hobbies” attributed to him following his death were “soil conservation and improvement” and “talking with Negroes.” Also troubling were reports in 1933 that Dougherty was “especially provoked…that the State was compelling him to maintain his Appalachian college for the training of white teachers on a per capita basis of $40 while it was allowing the Winston-Salem college for the training of negro teachers a per capita cost of $119.”

Blanford Barnard Dougherty seated at his desk, circa 1950. Image courtesy of the Historic Boone Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Outside of their educational work, the Dougherty brothers used their operations at the Appalachian Normal School to improve living conditions for many of the residents of Boone. In 1915, they established the New River Light and Power Company, whose electrical service was originally intended to serve only the school but was almost immediately extended to some local residents. Blan Dougherty also served as the county campaign chairman for the War Savings Stamps Campaign during World War I. More significantly, Dougherty was a fierce advocate for bringing a railroad to Boone, and in 1917 and 1918, he played a direct role in securing rights of way from property owners between Shulls Mill and Boone for the extension of the Linville River Railway to Boone. After World War I, Dougherty also lobbied strenuously for the Good Roads campaign designed to bring improved automobile access to the “Lost Provinces” of northwestern North Carolina. His direct action with local citizens led to the paving of the Boone Trail Highway from Yadkinville to Boone in 1931. In later years, his efforts also helped secure the extension of US 321 into Tennessee in 1957. Dougherty also played a key role in the “Watch Boone Grow” campaign of the 1920s, which took advantage of the arrival of the railroad and its ability to import heavy freight to completely transform both Boone’s downtown and the ASTC campus. In 1931, Dougherty also partnered with Dr. H. B. Perry using WPA funds to construct a new Watauga County Hospital on the ASTC campus (today known as Founders Hall), which served the community for nearly three decades.

Citing ill health, Dougherty retired at age 83 as president of ASTC in 1955. In addition to his long period of service at ASTC, he also served as the president of the Northwestern Bank in Boone from 1947 to 1957, and he served on numerous state commissions, including the State Textbook Commission (1916), the State Board of Equalization (1927-1933), the State School Commissions (1933-1941), and the State Board of Education (1941-1943, 1944-1957). He was also a member of the Boone Baptist Church, and he and his brother’s family provided the land for the present site of the church as well as its former parsonage. He was named to the North Carolina Education Hall of Fame in 1962.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County's history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County's history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County's history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this inaugural class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of the WCHS. Beginning in 2023, the WCHS will also consider nominations from members of the public, which in turn will be evaluated by the DWPC.

Watauga County Historical Society Announces Rachel Rivers-Coffey as Next Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Eric Plaag
July 23, 2022

As part of ongoing activities associated with the Boone 150 celebrations in 2022, marking the 150th anniversary of Boone’s official incorporation as a town on January 23, 1872, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) has established the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. Throughout 2022, WCHS will name twelve individuals or groups—one each month—as members of the inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame. For the month of July 2022, the WCHS is delighted to announce that Rachel Ann Rivers-Coffey (1943-1999) has been named as the next inductee of this inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame.

Rachel Ann Rivers was born to Bonnie Jean Lewis Rivers (1910-1991) and Robert Campbell Rivers, Jr. (1899-1975) on May 4, 1943, in the Hagaman Clinic at Boone. Her parents offered little in the way of fanfare about her birth, posting a brief item in the “Local Affairs” column of the Watauga Democrat to announce her birth and her initial given name of Bobbie Jean Rivers. For reasons that are not clear, her name was later adjusted in the North Carolina Birth Index to Rachel Ann Rivers, a change confirmed by newspaper accounts as early as 1945. While the ancestral Rivers home was still standing at the southeast corner of King and Water Streets at that time, Rivers actually spent most of her childhood in the R. L. Clay House on the south side of the present intersection of Burrell and Rivers Streets, where the Rivers family lived beginning in early 1945.

During her childhood, Rivers was frequently seen riding her pony Patsy along King Street, typically feeding the parking meter for her horse when she stopped to enter a business. At age 11, she began writing for the Watauga Democrat under the guidance of her father, Robert C. Rivers, Jr. (1899-1975). The paper was originally founded in 1888 by Joseph Spainhour, then acquired by Dauphin Blan Dougherty and Robert C. Rivers, Sr. (1861-1933)—Rivers-Coffey’s grandfather—in 1889; by the end of that year, Rivers acquired Dougherty’s interest in the business. Rivers-Coffey’s father inherited the paper following the death of Rivers, Sr, in 1933. In addition to her hands-on education in the family’s trade, Rachel completed her high school education at Appalachian High School—now Chapell Wilson Hall at ASU—then earned a journalism degree from the University of Missouri. During her time there in the early 1960s, she served as a guest editor for the Tri-County News (King City, Missouri).

Left to right are Bonnie Jean Lewis Rivers, Robert C. Rivers, Jr., Rachel Ann Rivers, and her sister Lucinda Jane Rivers, circa 1951, in the R. L. Clay House on Rivers Street. Image courtesy of the Jones House Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Rachel returned to work for the Democrat full-time as a photographer in 1965, occasionally writing articles and columns as well. Upon her return to Boone, Rachel married Paul Armfield Coffey (1934-2007), the son of Paul Arch Coffey and Margaret Linney Coffey and brother of Frank Linney Coffey, on May 1, 1965. Rachel is reported to have worked an average of 70 hours a week during this period, during which the operations of the Rivers Printing Company also included the Blowing Rocket and the Avery Journal. In 1975, Rachel became the third-generation owner of her family’s Watauga County newspaper empire following the death of her father. She also published two books in the 1970s: A Horse Like Mr. Ragman (1977) and The City Man (1978).

The headquarters for the Watauga Democrat and the Rivers Printing Company was located from the beginning of the Rivers family’s tenure in a series of three distinct buildings located on or near the site of the building presently housing the Ransom Pub on West King Street, which was built for the Rivers Printing Company in 1937. In 1987, Rivers-Coffey and her husband moved printing operations for the Watauga Democrat to the Watauga County Industrial Park, and they sold the paper in 1994, when the paper’s offices also moved from King Street to the industrial park. Meanwhile, Rivers-Coffey served as president of the North Carolina Press Association (NCPA) in 1994 and 1995. From the mid-1960s through Rivers-Coffey’s death, the NCPA honored the Watauga Democrat with more than 190 awards for excellence in community journalism.

Rivers-Coffey was a founding member of the Watauga Humane Society (WHS) in 1969, and she and her husband continued to be staunch supporters of the WHS up until her death. Rivers-Coffey also served as a member of the Watauga Medical Center’s board of trustees, as well as on the hospital’s foundation board. Aside from her passion for protecting abused and neglected animals, Rachel was also a fierce advocate for the preservation of local history, culture, and literature. In addition to her service on the boards of Historic Boone and the Watauga County Foundation, she helped launch Boone’s first Firefly Festival based upon the Southern Farmer’s Almanac’s designation of Boone as the “Firefly Capital of America” in 1993, and she was active on the board of the Doc Watson Festival as well. Along with her sister Jane, Rivers-Coffey also sponsored a professorship in creative writing at ASU. For all of her public visibility, however, Rachel was widely regarded as a fiercely private person who offered little comment on her life outside of publishing and community action.

Late in her life, Rivers-Coffey played a pivotal role in creating the Doc and Merle Watson Mountain Folk Art Museum at the former Cove Creek High School, which opened shortly before her death. The Rivers House remained in the family until 1998, when Rachel and her husband donated the house and related, adjacent family lands to the Town of Boone with a deed restriction limiting use of the property to “recreational purposes, green space, [utility easements], flood mitigation, a wildlife sanctuary, and historical purposes.” The property is now the site of Rivers Park, where the Daniel Boone Monument—reconstructed there with its original carved tablets as a result of Rachel and her husband’s advocacy—has stood since 2005. Perhaps her boldest move, however, came in 1999, just weeks before her death, when she led the other trustees of the historically White section of the Boone Cemetery to claim ownership over the long-neglected, historically Black section of the cemetery, then convey that section to a new cemetery organization responsible for the cemetery as a whole. Her actions laid the critically important foundation for the acquisition and eventual preservation of the entire cemetery by the Town of Boone beginning in 2014.

An avid and accomplished equestrian, Rivers-Coffey died shortly after a tragic horseback riding accident along Sherwood Road near US 421 in Cove Creek on August 24, 1999. She is buried in the Boone Cemetery alongside other members of her family. Rachel and Armfield had only one child, Robert Campbell Coffey, who died at birth in September 1967. The WCHS is delighted to honor Rachel Ann Rivers-Coffey for her important contributions to Boone and Watauga County’s history, literature, and heritage, as well as their preservation.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County's history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County's history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County's history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this inaugural class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of the WCHS. Beginning in 2023, the WCHS will also consider nominations from members of the public, which in turn will be evaluated by the DWPC.

Watauga County Historical Society Announces the Lyons Brothers As Next Inductees to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Eric Plaag
June 30, 2022

As part of ongoing activities associated with the Boone 150 celebrations in 2022, marking the 150th anniversary of Boone’s official incorporation as a town on January 23, 1872, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) has established the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. Throughout 2022, WCHS will name twelve individuals or groups—one each month—as members of the inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame. For the month of June 2022, the WCHS is delighted to announce that the Lyons Brothers—Leslie, Clarence, and Earl—have been named as the next inductees of this inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame.

Best remembered as master stone masons who constructed numerous homes and institutional buildings throughout Watauga County during the 1930s and 1940s, the Lyons Brothers (who frequently spelled their last name interchangeably as “Lyon”) were three of the six children of William Coy Lyons and Martha Victoria Hodges Lyons of Boone. Little is known about the education or early careers of the brothers. Leslie McDonald Lyons (1900-1957) appeared in the 1920 Federal Census as a timber worker, but his whereabouts and those of his brothers—Clarence Manleth Lyons (1903-1981) and Earl Jones Lyons (1912-1984)—for much of the 1920s are unknown. By 1928, however, all three men were in Durham, North Carolina, where they remained during the late 1920s and early 1930s, completing masonry work on Duke Chapel (cornerstone laid 1930, completed 1932) as well as other buildings at Duke University. During this period, the Lyons Brothers appeared in local directories and the 1930 Federal Census under variations of the Lyon/Lyons name and at various times as laborers, stonemasons, stonecutters, and stone setters. Coverage of Earl’s marriage in January 1932 indicated that he returned to Boone that month, shortly after completing an unidentified “stone church in Ashe County during the late fall and early winter” of 1931. Leslie and Clarence also appear to have returned to Boone about 1932.

The US Post Office in downtown Boone, completed in 1939-40, was another major stone project by the Lyons Brothers. Image courtesy of the Constance Stallings Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

The Lyons Brothers are perhaps best known, however, for their masonry work throughout Watauga County at the height of the Great Depression and after World War II, often for local contractors Wiley Gordon “W. G.” Hartzog and Perry Greene. While stonemasons of Italian and Spanish descent completed much of the stonework along the Blue Ridge Parkway under the supervision of Joseph Troitino of Troitino & Brown (Asheville, NC), much of the stonework along the Parkway within Watauga County, which was funded by Works Progress Administration (WPA) funds, is widely attributed to the Lyons Brothers. Other major works by the Lyons Brothers included the 1939 US Post Office in downtown Boone, as well as Cove Creek High School, completed in 1941. Both were WPA projects that are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). The Boone post office was also declared a Local Historic Landmark in 2016.

The cut stone garage and massive chimneys of the Watauga Handicrafts Building, a WPA project completed in 1938, were the work of the Lyons Brothers. Image courtesy of the Palmer Blair Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

Another WPA-funded project in Boone attributed to the Lyons Brothers was the garage building and the massive stone fireplaces of the log Watauga Handicrafts Building on Hardin Street (1938). Other WPA projects suspected to be the work of the Lyons Brothers include the Valle Crucis Elementary School (1937), the Courthouse Annex in downtown Boone (1938), and the Faculty Houses (1938-40) on the ASTC campus (no longer present). Stone and brickwork also attributed to the Lyons Brothers includes the Boone Bus Depot (1946), the Blowing Rock Public Library (1948), and the Parkway Elementary School (1952).

The Lyons Brothers also worked on dozens of private homes throughout the county, including the Roby T. Greer House in Deep Gap (1933), their brother Hardy Lee Lyons’s home in Boone (1934), the Dwight Edmisten residence near Sugar Grove (1934), the Owen C. Wilson House in downtown Boone (1934), the Perry Farthing House in Bethel (1935), the Bert Mast House in Mabel (1938), and the Benjamin O. Ward House near the Ward Dam in the Valle Crucis vicinity (1939). Clarence and Earl also built stone residences for themselves in the Oak Grove community. Other residences a bit farther afield included the stunning stone house and outbuildings known as Mary’s Grove (1934) in Lenoir, Caldwell County, which were listed on the NRHP in 2001. Indeed, the Lyons Brothers also worked extensively in Caldwell County throughout their careers, producing residential, commercial, and institutional buildings too numerous to name here.

The Boone Bus Depot, completed in 1946 by contractor W. G. Hartzog, featured native stone masonry completed by the Lyons Brothers. Image courtesy of the Palmer Blair Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

While Boone was often their base of operations, each of the Lyons brothers ventured afield from time to time, suggesting that their masonry work with one another was more of a loose affiliation than a fixed family trade. In 1942, for example, Clarence Lyons and his family were reported to be in living in Kingsport, Tennessee, although this appears to have been short-lived, perhaps to facilitate a masonry construction contract on the Holston Ordnance Works. In 1949, Earl and Leslie were both reported to be working on an unidentified project in Winston-Salem during the week and staying with their families in Boone over the weekend. As for their private lives, Leslie married Falie Lewis, probably about 1922. Their marriage produced two daughters. Clarence married Lela Mabel Moretz, probably about 1927 or 1928. Their marriage produced seven children. Earl married Doris Wilcox of Ashe County in December 1931. That marriage produced four children, two of whom died in infancy.

The Lyons Brothers appear to have remained in the masonry business into the mid-century period. Leslie, for example, was active on the building committee for the Vance Memorial Presbyterian Church on Howard Street in 1940 and the Presbyterian Manse on Grand Boulevard in 1951. He was still listed as a brick mason in the 1950 Federal Census, although at the time of his death in January 1957, Leslie was described as a “retired brick mason” and the owner and operator of the Lyons Motel on Highway 421 near Boone. Clarence was also still listed as a brick mason in the 1950 Federal Census, with his 19-year-old son Charles listed as a mason helper, suggesting Clarence was still engaged in masonry operations, probably for the Taylor Construction Company out of Lenoir. He retired about 1970. Earl was still working as a mason as late as 1954, likely also for Taylor Construction; he eventually retired and was operating a retail furniture store in Boone when he died in 1984. All three men are buried in Mountlawn Memorial Park.

Stone and brick work on numerous other buildings in Watauga County, such as the ASTC Faculty Houses, seen here about 1940, is suspected to be the work of the Lyons Brothers. Image courtesy of the Historic Boone Collection, Digital Watauga Project.

The WCHS is delighted to honor the Lyons Brothers for their important contributions to the architectural history and heritage of Boone and Watauga County. Their highly refined stonework remains an essential component of some of the most architecturally and historically significant buildings from the early twentieth century that still survive in Watauga County.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County's history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County's history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County's history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this inaugural class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of the WCHS. Beginning in 2023, the WCHS will also consider nominations from members of the public, which in turn will be evaluated by the DWPC.

Watauga County Historical Society Announces Constance Stallings as Next Inductee to WCHS Hall of Fame

May 31, 2022
Eric Plaag

As part of ongoing activities associated with the Boone 150 celebrations in 2022, marking the 150th anniversary of Boone’s official incorporation as a town on January 23, 1872, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) has established the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. Throughout 2022, WCHS will name twelve individuals or groups—one each month—as members of the inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame.

For the month of May 2022, the WCHS is delighted to announce that Constance McBride Shoun Stallings (1904-1982) has been named as the next inductee of this inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame. Born in Neva, Johnson County, Tennessee, to Minnie B. McBride Shoun and Andrew Henderson Shoun, Constance Stallings was the fourth of six children. Raised in Neva, she secured her higher education through degrees earned at Carson-Newman College and Vanderbilt University. By the late 1920s, she was teaching science, history, social science, and English at Cove Creek High School, where she also coached students on their dramatic productions and sponsored the Nature Study club. As evidence of her insatiable interest in history and culture, she ventured to Europe for ten weeks on an eleven-country tour in 1938, a rare feat among her contemporaries, particularly as a world war began to break out on the continent. In 1940, she married Bernard William “B. W.” Stallings, owner of the Stallings Jewelry Store that was located for many decades on King Street next to the Appalachian Theatre. Their first home together was the apartment above the jewelry store, now home to the Appalachian Theatre of the High Country offices. They operated the landmark jewelry store together for more than three decades until Constance Stallings became the sole owner in 1971. She sold the business in 1973. The Stallingses had two children: Bernard William Stallings, Jr. (who was killed in a tragic automobile accident at age five) and Andrew Haywood “Andy” Stallings, who still lives in Boone.

Once she became a resident of Boone in 1940, Constance Stallings expanded her social and community roles. During and after World War II, she was active with the Order of the Eastern Star (a Masonic organization), served as chairwoman of the Watauga County division of the North Carolina Good Health Association in 1946, and served as president of the Worthwhile Woman’s Club (WWC) beginning in 1945. She was also active in the WWC’s club on gardens by 1946, beginning a long and highly regarded avocation that would shape the landscape and history of Boone in the decades to come. As a promoter of local flower shows through her charter membership in the Blue Ridge Garden Club, Stallings was unrivaled. The 1952 Boone Flower Show, for example, which Stallings co-chaired, was awarded the purple ribbon for best in the nation at the national convention of the National Garden Club. Over the course of her life, she won countless awards for her lilies and daffodils, served frequently as a flower show judge throughout the country, and helped establish the Model Mile highway beautification program in North Carolina. Garden afficionados throughout the state held Stallings in such high regard that they honored her with a life membership in the North Carolina Garden Club in 1959 and with the Palmgren Silver Pitcher as Director of the Year in 1960. She was later awarded a life membership in the National Council of State Garden Clubs.

Stallings was also active in the Boone Chamber of Commerce, and in 1951, she persuaded her peers in the Chamber to recruit Kermit Hunter—a highly regarded playwright of outdoor dramas such as Unto These Hills, The Trail of Tears, and Honey in the Rock—to author a new outdoor drama on the history of the High Country. Inspired by the success of Unto These Hills in drawing tourists to Cherokee, North Carolina, Stallings argued that a similar production in Boone would anchor the burgeoning, postwar tourist trade to the mountains, thus expanding Boone’s postwar economy. Her predictions proved to be visionary and transformative for her community. Writing at the conclusion of the 1952 season, Watauga Democrat editor Rob Rivers credited Stallings for the concept and proclaimed that Horn’s debut “will be a kind of reckoning point, a place to ‘date back to’ for years to come.” Stallings continued to remain active with the Southern Appalachian Historical Association (SAHA) in the decades to follow, holding several officer positions, but her influence exceeded mere titles. In 1959, for example, when the Tatum Cabin was added to Daniel Boone Park, SAHA turned to Stallings to deliver a talk on the history of the cabin at the dedication ceremonies.

To prepare the town for the influx of tourists with the opening of Horn in the West in 1952, Stallings also organized and promoted a “Paint-Up, Clean-Up, and Fix-Up Campaign” that culminated in a popular parade themed around the idea of a “Cleaned Up” Boone. Stallings continued to revisit the Boone Clean-Up theme in the decades to follow, insisting that a cleaner, more appealing appearance to Boone would benefit everyone, businessowners and residents alike. These initiatives sometimes created conflicts for Stallings, who was also a fierce advocate for protecting and preserving Boone’s older trees; when some local residents called for these trees to be cut down or cut back to “clean up” Boone’s appearance, Stallings pushed back, insisting that even diseased or dead trees should be replaced with mature saplings that could grow up in place of any removed trees for generations to follow.

Stallings was a major force in the 1958 push for a community recreation center at Daniel Boone Park, including a clubhouse, canteen, concession stand, swimming pool, playground, and memorial garden. When Stallings’s tireless campaign as chairperson of the Park Committee failed to bring the full recreation center plan to fruition, Stallings pivoted the following year to her successful advocacy for the creation of the Daniel Boone Botanical Garden on the same parcel where the recreation center had been planned. Designed for the explicit purpose of conserving native plants and shrubs, the Daniel Boone Botanical Garden was funded by the Garden Club of North Carolina with cooperation from SAHA, Appalachian State Teachers College, and the Wildflower Preservation Society. She was awarded the Garden Club of North Carolina’s Maslin Award in 1968 for her conception and promotion of the Daniel Boone Botanical Garden.

Among the many other organizations Stallings was involved in were the Boone Business and Professional Women’s Club, the Rhododendron Book Club, the Boone Parent Teacher Association (PTA), the Appalachian High School Boosters Club, the Boone Planning Board, and the Boone Beautification Committee. She also served for two years as president of the Band Parents Association. A devout Baptist, she was active in church leadership, too, teaching Sunday School at Boone’s First Baptist Church for more than ten years, serving as president of the Women’s Missionary Union, and participating as a member of the Church Council, the Training Union, and the planning board for her church.

Stallings is perhaps best remembered, though, for her persistence. As another Boone luminary privately observed of her a few years ago, Constance Stallings didn’t accept failure. “She was someone you just didn’t say ‘no’ to,” this individual recalled. “She was always going to get what she wanted, one way or another. Her persistence and her tireless energy were intimidating and impressive.” Stallings was certainly appreciated for that during her lifetime, too. In a countywide vote held in 1961, Watauga County residents selected her for the county’s first “Woman of the Year” award, sponsored by the Boone Business and Professional Women’s Club.

The WCHS is delighted to honor Constance Stallings for her prodigious contributions to the preservation of Watauga County’s and Boone’s history and heritage, as well as her inspiring and selfless commitment throughout her life to bettering her community for all.

The WCHS Hall of Fame honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County's history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County's history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County's history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this inaugural class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of the WCHS. Beginning in 2023, the WCHS will also consider nominations from members of the public, which in turn will be evaluated by the DWPC.

Watauga County Historical Society Announces John and Faye Cooper as Next Inductees to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Eric Plaag
April 27, 2022

As part of ongoing activities associated with the Boone 150 celebrations in 2022, marking the 150th anniversary of Boone’s official incorporation as a town on January 23, 1872, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) has established the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. Throughout 2022, WCHS will name twelve individuals or groups—one each month—as members of the inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame.

For the month of April 2022, the WCHS is delighted to announce that John Earl Cooper, Jr. (b. 1945), and Faye Bolick Cooper (b. 1947) have been named as the next inductees of this inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame, which honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County's history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County's history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County's history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this inaugural class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of the WCHS. Beginning in 2023, the WCHS will also consider nominations from members of the public, which in turn will be evaluated by the DWPC.

John and Faye Cooper left careers in Winter Park, Florida, in 1980 to reopen the original Taylor General Store (built 1883) at Valle Crucis, known after 1913 as the Mast General Store. The store had closed in 1977, shortly after its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, and the Coopers acquired the landmark in October 1979. Through the diligent efforts of the Coopers, the Mast General Store came roaring back to life as the heart of the Valle Crucis community. In 1982, the Coopers expanded into the Watauga Supply Company building (1909) a short distance to the east, today known as the Mast Store Annex and Candy Barrel. In 1989, the Coopers also moved the original Little Red Schoolhouse, one of the county’s early high schools (1907) that was once located behind the Valle Crucis Methodist Church, to the area behind the original Mast General Store in order to save it from demolition.

The Coopers’ commitment to the preservation of Valle Crucis’s rural character and heritage has been impressive for decades. The Coopers played a hand in the establishment of the Valle Crucis Community Park in 1985 and the Valle Crucis Historic Preservation Commission in 1990, and since that time, they have donated nearly 22 acres of land along the Watauga River in Valle Crucis to the Blue Ridge Conservancy and played a critically important leadership role in the nomination of the Valle Crucis Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. In 2017, the Coopers were honored for these efforts as the inaugural recipients of the Stanback Conservation Leadership Award. As a testament to their continuing commitment to Valle Crucis’s preservation and landscape conservation, in 2020, a new Valle Crucis Community Park trail opened across the land previously donated by the Coopers.

At Boone, the Coopers have also played a key role in the community’s preservation. Their acquisition and rehabilitation of the J. Walter Jones Building (1922) and the W. R. Winkler Building (1927) in 1987 for expansion of the Mast General Store franchise culminated in the successful preservation of two key buildings in Boone’s historic downtown. In 2012, John Cooper also took the reins as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Appalachian Theatre of the High Country, leading the initiative to rehabilitate, preserve, and reopen the Appalachian Theater (1938), including the restoration of its iconic Art Deco façade, which won a North Carolina Main Street Award for Best Façade Rehabilitation of 2017. The theater reopened in 2019 as an innovative movie theater and performing arts venue and is once again the hub of Boone’s downtown entertainment.

The Coopers have also long been supporters of music, theater, and dance initiatives through Appalachian State University, earning them the ASU Alumni Association’s Honorary Alumni Award in 2016. Beyond this, they have given selflessly to many community initiatives too numerous to list in their entirety here. For example, John was a founder of the North Carolina High Country Host, was elected to serve as a member and vice-chair of the Watauga County Commissioners, and served on the board of Hospitality House. Faye has served on the capital campaign for Hospitality House and on the boards of Appalachian Summer, Western Youth Network, and the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. She was also a founder of the Appalachian Women’s Fund. In 2017, the Coopers received the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, North Carolina’s highest civilian honor, for their decades of service to the Watauga County community.

The WCHS is delighted to honor John and Faye Cooper for their impressive contributions to the preservation of Watauga County’s, Valle Crucis’s, and Boone’s history and heritage, as well as their inspiring and selfless commitment to rejuvenating the local communities in which they have lived and worked for the past five decades.

Watauga County Historical Society Announces Roberta Jackson as Next Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Ellie McCorkle and Sai Estep
March 29, 2022

As part of ongoing activities associated with the Boone 150 celebrations in 2022, marking the 150th anniversary of Boone’s official incorporation as a town on January 23, 1872, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) has established the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. Throughout 2022, WCHS will name twelve individuals or groups—one each month—as members of the inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame.

For the month of March 2022, the WCHS is delighted to announce that Mrs. Roberta Hagler Jackson (b. 1946) has been named as the next inductee of this inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame, which honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County's history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County's history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County's history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this inaugural class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of the WCHS. Beginning in 2023, the WCHS will also consider nominations from members of the public, which in turn will be evaluated by the DWPC.

The daughter of Kathryn Margaret Wilson Hagler and Robert Hagler, Jr., Roberta Hagler Jackson was born in Dr. Len Hagaman’s clinic on Water Street. She grew up on North Street in the Junaluska Community during Boone’s post-World War II economic boom at a time when Boone remained a racially segregated town. Having been raised in a close-knit community where everyone took care of each other, Jackson fondly recalls that her home was the center of social life for teens in the area, as they had a record player in their living room. Jackson went to college after graduating in 1964 from the segregated Watauga Consolidated School, located in the building that now houses the Western Youth Network, only to return to Boone after becoming ill. She later attended classes at Appalachian State to obtain her Bachelor’s Degree in Education while working there. Roberta married Cecil Jackson (1947-1996) in 1966, and together they had a son and two daughters, one of whom has taken up the family tradition of learning and preserving the heritage of Junaluska. After going to school for her Master’s Degree in Education for a year, Jackson decided to stop pursuing that degree once her husband Cecil passed away.

Jackson became involved in the preservation of her community’s heritage due to her sister, Sandra Hagler’s, love for history. Jackson attributes the roles of researcher and documentarian to her sister, who passed away in 2021. An active member of the Junaluska Heritage Association, Jackson has quickly become the go-to person for inquiries about the history of the Junaluska community, but she remains humble as ever. When asked how she would define herself, Jackson said that she is most proud of being a “vehicle for the community.” The message Jackson hopes to share with her community as things change and people move away is to remember that “we are strong people, and we are trying to pass that on to our children.”

Roberta has been closely involved for many years with numerous efforts to preserve the history of the Junaluska community and Boone more broadly. She has worked since 2011 as a founding member and facilitator for the Junaluska Heritage Association, helping to preserve the community’s rich history and coordinate the annual Junaluska Jubilee heritage event, and she has served since 2014 on the Digital Watauga Project Committee. She is a frequent contributor to research efforts of the Boone Historic Preservation Commission and the Watauga County Historical Society, and she played a critically important role in the Town of Boone’s efforts to acquire, preserve, document, and interpret the Boone Cemetery on East Howard Street. She also helped lead the initiative to secure a Boone historical marker honoring the Junaluska community in 2021. She was previously honored in 2013 by All About Women magazine as a “High Country Woman of the Year” for her work in “preserving mountain heritage.”

The WCHS is delighted to honor Roberta Hagler Jackson for her impressive contributions to Watauga County’s and Boone’s history, as well as her inspiring commitment to guiding and preserving the Junaluska community.

Watauga County Historical Society Announces Reverend Ronda Horton as Next Inductee to the WCHS Hall of Fame

Eric Plaag
February 20, 2022

As part of ongoing activities associated with the Boone 150 celebrations in 2022, marking the 150th anniversary of Boone’s official incorporation as a town on January 23, 1872, the Watauga County Historical Society (WCHS) has established the Watauga County Historical Society Hall of Fame. Throughout 2022, WCHS will name twelve individuals or groups—one each month—as members of the inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame.

For the month of February 2022, the WCHS is delighted to announce that the Reverend Ronda David Horton (1895-1986) has been named as the next inductee of this inaugural class of the WCHS Hall of Fame, which honors individuals, either living or dead, who have made significant and lasting contributions to Watauga County's history and/or literature, including those whose efforts have been essential to the preservation of Watauga County's history and/or literature. Honorees need not have been residents of Watauga County. The WCHS is particularly interested in honoring individuals who meet the above criteria but who may have been overlooked in traditional accounts of Watauga County's history and literature, including women and people of color. Selections for this inaugural class were made from nominations submitted by members of the Digital Watauga Project Committee (DWPC) of the WCHS. Beginning in 2023, the WCHS will also consider nominations from members of the public, which in turn will be evaluated by the DWPC.

A Boone native, Ronda David Horton was the eldest of three children of June Horton and Bettie (Grimes) Horton. In oral history interviews from the 1970s and 1980s, Reverend Horton reported that his paternal grandmother had been enslaved in Caldwell County, while his mother was the descendant of Native Americans and Whites who had been in the Watauga County vicinity for at least two generations.* As a child, Reverend Horton was initially educated at the Boone Chapel, a Black Methodist church on the Junaluska hillside, by Ralph and Frazier Horton, as well as Reverend Coy Williams. When the Mennonites established a school at the Elk Park orphanage, around 1910, Horton boarded there and continued his education. When the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren Conference began holding services in the Junaluska community’s Black schoolhouse on Church Street (then African Street) about 1917, Horton returned to Boone and joined the new congregation. Their new church building was completed the following year.

As a teenager, Horton worked as a day laborer on a farm during the summers and in the coal fields of Virginia at other times of the year. He also worked on the original Watauga Democrat hand press as an ink roller. Horton served briefly with the 155th Depot Brigade at Camp Lee in Petersburg, Virginia, toward the end of World War I. Thereafter, he returned to Boone and found work hauling and laying gravel on the streets of Boone. In the early 1920s, he was contracted to grade South Depot Street during the “Watch Boone Grow” campaign. Later that decade, he contracted out his horse team to log for the Dewey Wright Lumber Company and others along the New River, and he also drove for the Gardner Livery Stable in Elk Park that decade. From the late 1920s through the 1940s, Horton served on the school committee for Boone’s Black schools. In the 1930s, Horton also served as assistant to the Reverend Peter Siemens at the Mennonite Brethren Church in Elk Park and began preaching in 1932. Horton then substituted for Siemens as Moderator for four years beginning in 1934, during which time he started the Cove Creek Mennonite Church in Vilas. After Reverend Siemens’s return in 1938 and subsequent resignation due to ill health, Reverend Horton took over Siemens’s position as Moderator of the North Carolina District Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, serving in that role from 1955 to 1986.

At Boone, Horton also worked briefly at the Daniel Boone Hotel before starting his own ice and coal business on North Depot Street, at the base of the Junaluska community, serving both Black and White patrons and earning Horton a town-wide reputation as a savvy and successful businessman. He was also a renowned and respected fox hunter who kept hounds on his property on the Junaluska hillside. But it was his leadership in the Mennonite Brethren Church that made Reverend Horton stand out most. Known as the “Moses of the Mountains,” Horton baptized many in the Junaluska community and elsewhere in the county, prompting the current pastor of the Boone Mennonite Brethren Church, the Reverend Mike Mathes, to call Reverend Horton the “heartbeat of the community” for his leadership, service, and mentorship to Boone’s Junaluska residents. He has been publicly credited by dozens of Junaluska community members for keeping the community strong and cohesive while serving as a role model for the community’s youth during the difficult years of segregation and racial injustice in the mid-twentieth century.

The WCHS is delighted to honor Reverend Horton for his innumerable contributions to Watauga County’s and Boone’s history, as well as his lifelong commitment to guiding and preserving the Junaluska community.

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* For a compilation of these interviews, see “The Rev. Ronda Horton,” Junaluska: Oral Histories of a Black Appalachian Community, Ed. Susan E. Keefe, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2020), 49-57. Much of the information about Horton’s life in this press release is taken from this source.