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Will you come to the Mountains, "The Land of the Sky,"
Where a banquet of glory is spread for the eye,
Where scenes of encbantment enravish the soul.
And reason to rapture surrenders control.
Where the mountains do rear their summits above
The storm and the cloud, to the regions of love;
Where waters go dashing down rocky declines,
And the hills are covered with evergreen vines.
Where boasting musicians are wont to retire
When the bird of the mountain tunes his sweet lyre,
And lends to his melody wings that can fly,
To scatter his song through "The Land of the Sky."
Where fountains are gushing from every hill-side,
All sparkling and cold as a health-giving tide;
An elixir of life more tempting to sip
Than the cup that presses the Bacchanal's lip.
Where the air is freighted with sweetest perfume
Wafted from the flower when full in its bloom,
And the breezes that float o'er mountain's tall peak
Give back the invalid the rose to his cheek?
Ye seekers of pleasure, oppressed by the heat,
Come to this region, 'tis a pleasant retreat;
Ye ones that are feeble, why linger and die,
Come up to this beautiful "Land of Sky."
-A. M Dougherty
The valleys of the Watauga, the Holston and the Nolichucky, in East Tennessee, have been productive in great warriors and statesmen. At Greeneville, in this territory, Andrew Johnson, though born in North Carolina, began the political career that culminated in the presidency of Here was born and reared Thomas A. R. Nelson, the able jurist, who, soon after the War between the States, wrote the prophetic poem on East Tennessee beginning with the following beautiful lines:
East Tennessee! secluded land
Of gentle hills and mountains grand,
Where healthful breezes ever blow,
And coolest springs and rivers flow;
Where yellow wheat and waving corn
Are liberal poured from plenty's horn--
Land of the valley and the glen,
Of lovely maids and stalwart men;
Thy gorgeous sunsets well may vie
In splendor, with Italian sky;
For, gayest colors deck the clouds,
As night the dying sun enshrouds,
And heaven itself doth wild enfold
Its drapery of blue and gold,
And, pillowed in the rosy air,
The seraphs well might gather there,
And, in the rain-bow-tinted west,
Be lulled by their own songs to rest!
Thy bracing winter, genial spring,
The ruddy glow of rapture bring;
Thy summer's mild and grateful heat,
From sweltering suns gives cool retreat;
While frosty autumn, full of health,
Fills crib and barn with grainy wealth,
And challenges the earth to dress
Its leaves in richer loveliness!
Enchanting land, where nature showers
Her fairest fruits and gaudiest flowers;
Where stately forests wide expand,
Inviting the industrious hand,
And all the searching eye can view
Is beautiful and useful, too;
Who knows thee well, is sure to love,
Where'er his wandering footsteps rove,
And backward ever turns to thee,
With fond, regretful memory,
Feeling his heart impatient burn
Among thy mountains to return!
In this fertile valley, Colonels Sevier and Shelby collected and marshalled the troups which were joined by Colonel Campbell and his men from Virginia in winning the glorious victory over the British at Kings Mountain, October 7, 1780.
On the left bank of Doe River, within the corporate limits of Elizabethton, stands an historic sycamore that concerns the patriotism of all American citizens. Its beautiful bark always brightly spotted by the partial dropping of its annual incrustations, looks as though it were mantled in the robes of the leopard. Even its parting boughs seem to have been passed through the cased arms of skins from that carnivous beast.
Beneath its umbrageous foliage within the mirthful sound of the laughing Doe River, where every breeze was sweet with the odor of neighboring cedars, Andrew Jackson (Old Hickory), the royal hatter of John Quincy Adams, held the first Court ever convened in the great Commonwealth of Tennessee.
Three miles below the place of the great soldier's sylvan court were born and reared the Taylor brothers, Bob and Alf, who, being rival nominees for Governor in 1886, reproduced "The War of the Red and White Roses." In this political unique, Bob proved to be of the House of York, even for a second term, and the House of Lancaster, though defeated for the gubernatorial chair, has since been twice elected to Congress and following the World War, served one term as Governor of Tennessee. I cannot better continue my description of the Watauga Valley than by quoting the magnanimous oration which Landen C. Haynes, the maternal uncle of the Taylor brothers, delivered under the following circumstances:
At a grand banquet given to members of the bench and bar, during a session of the Supreme Court, held in Jackson, Tennessee, soon after the war between the States, General N. B, Forest arose and said: "Gentlemen, I propose the health of the eloquent attorney from East Tennessee" (turning to Haynes), a country sometimes called the God-for-saken."
Mr, Haynes responded as follows:
"MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN: I plead guilty to the soft impeachment. I was born in East Tennessee, on the banks of the Watauga, which in the Indian vernacular means 'beautiful river,' and a beautiful river it is. I have stood on its banks in my childhood, looked down through its glassy waters, saw a heaven below, then looked up and beheld a heaven above, reflecting, like two vast mirrors, each in the other its moons and planets and trembling stars.
"Away from its banks of rock and cliff, hemlock and laurel, pine and cedar, stretches a vale back to the distant mountains as beautiful and exquisite as any in Italy or Switzerland.
"There stand the great Unaka, the great Roan, the great Blacks, and the great Smoky Mountains, among the loftiest in America, on whose summits the clouds gather of their own accord, even on the brightest day. There I have seen the great spirit of the storm after noontide go and take his evening nap in his pavilion of darkness and of clouds.
"I have then seen him aroused at mid-night as a giant refeshed by slumber and cover the heavens with gloom and darkness, awake the tempest and let loose the red lightenings that ran along the mountain tops for athousand miles swifter than an eagle's flight in heaven.
"Then I have seen them stand up and dance, like angles of light in the clouds, to the music of that grant organ of nature, whose keys seemed to have been touched by the fingers of Divinity, in the hall of eternity that responded in notes of thunder resounding through the universe.
"Then the darkness drifted away beyond the horizon, and morn got up from her saffron bed like a queen, put on her robes of ligh, came forth from her palace in the sun, 'stood tiptoe on the misty mountain top,' and while Night fled before her glorious face to his bed chamber at the pole she lighted the green vale and beautiful river, where I was born and played in childhood, with a smile of sunshine.
"Oh, beautiful land of mountains with thy sun-painted cliffs, how can I ever forget thee!"
Mr. Haynes had a countenance as broad and brilliant as the land of his birth, and a voice as sweet and musical as Watauga's murmuring tide. If he had lived in the days of Greek or Roman triumph, and had displayed his silver-tongued eloquence at the foot of Helicon or in the valley of the Tiber, his countrymen would have dropped a wreath of glory upon his brow and proclaimed him first of the nation.
It is most probable that he had never seen the Grandfather, through whose ferny filters trickle the first sparkling streamlets of the pellucid river that he immortalized, for if he had ever beheld its beautiful clouds "looping their wind-swung folds" around the giant arms of the majestic balsams high on the mountain-top, he would have set it as a gem in the exquisite eulogy on his native land.
The passenger-train that curls its of smoke through and beyond the beautiful vales of the Watauga is called by the quaint but appropriate name of the stem-winder, because, in winding the many graceful curve of the road where brooks pouring down over the rocks throw spray in at the windows, and the pasing glaes blossom with the sweet ordors of the woods, it bears a marked resemblance to the tempered steel of a timekeeper in playing its part within the glittering gold, and intricate movements of the best jewelled stem-winding watch.
Six miles above Elizabethton, the stem-winder stops at Hampton, a handsome station, beside a clear and unusually voluminous limestone spring, which is the nearest calcarous neighbour to the free- stone fountains of North Carolina.
One mile beyond Hampton it dashes through one of the five tunnels on the line, and bursts into a grand canyon called the Gorge. Here the Doe River, a rumbling, tumbling, rollicking, frolicking stream, in dancing and dallying along the countless ages of time, has cut its way down through the Azoic rocks to the depth of a thousand feet, and so nearly perpendicular are the walls on either side that a suspension bridge could be constructed, with usual decorum, across the chasm at the top. Through this unique and beautiful gateway to North Carolina, the road-bed has been prepared, for the distance of four miles, by cutting a niche out of the rocks, about fifty feet above the river, on the left bank; and as the stem-winder "wheels its droning flight" through crag and canyon, by rushing rapids and foaming falls, through bracing. air and views sublime, it passes by great towers and walls, and temples, and cathedrals, and castles of stone, ornamented. with spires and domes and turrets and battlements, and enriched with a profusion of wild pinks that grow in the crevices and impart a glowing harmony to the gray columns and pilasters and obelisks and pinnacles and porticos of stone behind them. Passing this collossal structure of Nature's masonry, the stem winder follows the rumbling waters of Doe to Roan Mountain station and hot which are connected by a road with the bald of the great Roan Mountain, twelve mile away.
Leaving the banks of the Doe, the train winds through the alternating valleys and vines of Shell Creek, crosses the state line an passes through Elk Park, Cranberry, Newland, Montezuma, Pineola, Linville, Linville Gap, Foscoe and Shulls Mills to its terminus at Boone, N. C. Such are the agencies that have driven the crouching panther from the mountains, and the rhododendron blooms that waved over his lair now drop their crimson petals upbn the heads of fair men and maidens who sit beneath the shades and woo the sweet flowers to the rescue of their love-stricken hearts.
The State-line highway parallels this railroad from Elizabethton, Tennessee, to Elk Park, North Carolina, where it conncts with highways leading to all summer resorts, fishing waters, schools, and business places at or near Heaton, Banner Elk, Valle Crucis, Boone, Newland, Pineola, Linville, Blowing Rock, Shulls Mills, Foscoe, Crossnore, Altamont, Linville Falls, Minneapolis, Plumtree, Spruce Pine, Little Switzerland, Altapass, Ashford and Bakersville. At Cranberry has been the the greatest mine of magnitite in the South.
Elk Park is a good stopping place for all travelers passing through it to or from any place in North Carolina or Tennessee. It is headquarters of the Elk River Falls Fishing and Country Club, and is only four miles from the famous Elk Falls which is the second finest cataract in the Grandfather Mountain region.
When there was no railroad across the Blue Ridge east of Asheville, in North Carolina and Tennessee, and the talk of one was the hopes of the people, our friend Mr. A. M. Dougherty, uncle of the Dougherty brothers of the Appalachian State Teachers' College of Boone, produced the following, which is the most descriptive railroad poem ever written:
There's news on the wind, 'tis wafted from the shore
Like a faint voice from the ocean's mighty roar:
The iron horse is coming, oh, tell it once more.
On the Atlantic coast the iron horse will start,
And dash through the mountains like a winged dart;
Through the old North State and the State of Tennessee
The iron horse will travel and travel in glee.
Yes, the iron horse is coming, and that's good news;
It will cure hard times and drive away the blues,
Awake from your slumbers, ye good mountaineers,
You'll hear the mighty whistle in two or three years;
Ring the bells of welcome, let your cheers go round,
Our wealth will come forth, our wealth is in the ground.
What a resurrection of ores to the sight;
And our gems will sparkle like stars of the night.
And joy will kindle in the good farmer's eye
When' he can buy so cheap and sell so high.
His cabbage, potatoes, his turnips and fruits,
His bacon, beef, butter and milk from his brutes,
His cider and wine, and his kraut in his kegs,
His honey and feathers, and poultry and eggs,
And everything he grows, his grain and his hay,
Will bring good prices, and prices that will pay
And everything he buys from a railroad store
Will come much lower than he ever bought before;
His clothing and coffee, his sugar and flour,
Will all testify to the iron horse's power.
And all the day long. through the hot summer days,
While out in the field, 'neath the sun's burning rays,
The farmer will whistle the iron horse's praise.
And in front of his door the bird in her bower
Will tune her sweet lays to the iron horse's power;
How the merchant will smile when the railroad comes
And brings cheaper gdods to his customers' homes;
When he gets connected with the business world,
He'll hang out his sign like a flag unfurled:
"Come one and all, great and small, rich and poor,
Everything is first-class in my railroad store."
And the laboring man, the abused of the earth,
By cheap labor kept poor, and poor from his birth,
The only man that knows what money is worth,
Can rejoice when he hears the iron horse neigh.
"One dollars instead of fifty cents a day."
The iron horse is coming, he's a steed that's fleet,
He'll trample hard times 'neath his great iron feet.
Methinks I hear the train dashing o'er the plain,
Roaring and thundering like the mighty main.
On through Carolina's undulating hills,
Now through the deep cuts and now along the fills,
Across each swamp and river by trestle or bridge,
And on to the foothills of the great Blue Ridge,
And panting and climbing and leaping its spurs,
And fretting and foaming in his cast-iron gears
And snorting and groaning his burden to bear,
And prancing and puffing and snuffing the air,
At length he reaches the top of the mountain,
And slakes his thirst in a cold crystal fountain;
Nor ever did steed of iron or of flesh
Quaff water from a fountain more cooling and fresh;
Nor ever did hills that echoed to thunder,
Present more romance and grandeur and wonder.
On dashes the steed as fast as a pigeon
Through a rugged, rich, and beautiful region;
And the passengers glance with wonder-bleared eye
At the hill-strewn landscapes, as backward they fly;
That deck so profusely this land of the sky.
The steed dashes on with thrilling locomotion,
Piling up mountains 'tween him and the ocean;
And the breath from his nostrils rolls back on the air
And hangs like a cloud quite pensively there,
Or shoots up a column all curling and black,
That winds like a serpent far over the track.
On dashes the steed as fast as he can run,
His head-light gleaming like the noonday sun,
Through forests unmeasured, trees without number
Millions of trees made a-purpose for lumber.
And now the iron wheels clank and clatter and roar
And press the rich beds of East Tennessee ore.
Ip the county of Johnson, where the steed now runs,
The hills are swollen with millions of tons,
What wealth has slept since the dawn of creation,
Awaiting the hand of this generation!
Awake from your slumbers, ye good mountaineers
You'll hear the mighty whistle in two or three years
Ring the bells of welcome, let your cheers go round.
Our wealth will come forth, our wealth is in the ground.