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2003 Season
 Timothy Silver is professor of history at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. His previous publications include A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800.
Mount Mitchell & the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America (2003)
A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800 (1990)
Preface
Mount Mitchell & The Black Mountains:
An Environmental History of the Highest peaks in Eastern America
"Write what you know." It is an author's truism and one that I took to heart in writing this book. I cannot remember a time when I did not know something about North Carolina's Black Mountains. As a toddler I spent a restless night bundled in blankets on the backseat of a 1953 Ford sedan, camping (as we called it then) with my family at Carolina Hemlocks, a U.S. Forest Service campground along the eastern flank of the range. Family lore also has it that I awoke before daylight and demanded that my sleepy parents take me to see the South Toe River that flowed nearby. On that or some other such outing, my parents probably told me that Mount Mitchell, one of the peaks looming over the campground, was the highest mountain east of the Mississippi River. If they said that, I have no recollection of it. My earliest Black Mountain memories are of summer afternoons spent wading in the South Toe, the distinctive crackle of campfires at twilight, and the not-quite-musty smell of our gray-green canvas tent.
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