Chapter 25—The Sons of Grandfather Mountain

Samuel H. Kime

IT IS a far cry from the rolling hills of Michigan to the tumbled mountains of North Carolina. But there, in the high valleys between the Blue Ridge and the Unakas, where Daniel Boone and James Robertson pioneered, where the mountain men fought with the Indians, and whence they surged down to the crucial battle of the Revolution at King’s Mountain, there stands a memorial of our early history, the first Seventh-day Adventist meeting house in the South. And there remain a people, descendants to the third and fourth generation of them who heard the cry of the Second Advent angel, and the call to separate from Babylon, and the warning against the beast and his image and against receiving his mark in forehead or in hand. While the South contains more than one shrine of the early days, the account of which would fill a book by itself, I think it good to register at least this one high outpost in the southern sector of the battlefield.FOPI 208.3

We drove the hundred miles and more from the Asheville Agricultural School and Mountain Sanitarium, at Fletcher, to the Grandfather Mountain region, where was the beginning of our work in that section of the South. The mountain country of North Carolina, “The Land of the Sky,” is beautiful at all seasons of the year; but for all its charm of springtime, in the mass flowering of azalea, laurel, and rhododendron, and its ever-living beauty of high undulating skyline, leaping streams, and forested mountains, I think the autumn is its supreme glory, when the spectacles of its forests in all the hues and tints of the rainbow are hung up like God’s pictures against the sky. And this indescribable beauty was ours to behold on that sunny day in October, when we went to see the brethren at Banner Elk and Valle Crucis, with their churches and schools, and the aged shell of the old church, long since abandoned.FOPI 209.1

Along a. glorious, winding scenic drive we ascended to Gillespie Gap, first called Etchoe Pass. Here stands a pyramidal monument of stone, faced with a bronze tablet recounting the history. The first episode is featured by General Francis Marion, later called the “Swamp Fox” of the Revolution, but here high above the swamps. In the closing months of the Cherokee War, 1761, with thirty men, the advance guard of the backwoodsmen’s little army, he forced the pass against the Indians, losing twenty-one of the thirty, but opening the way-a Thermopylae in reverse. Through this Gap also, nineteen years later, poured the overmountain men, nearly a thousand strong, under Campbell, Shelby, and Sevier, to join McDowell in the Piedmont and sweep on to the climactic victory at King’s Mountain.FOPI 210.1

From the pass, 2,802 feet altitude, the road leads up and on to the high valley of Banner Elk, under Grandfather Mountain, and over Bower’s Gap, highest pass in the mountains, 4,115 feet, down, down into the Valley of the Cross, still three thousand feet high. Valle Crucis is so named because from a height its three converging streams and valleys make the rough outline of a cross. Grandfather Mountain gets its name from the rock formations on its face, where three great cliffs, from a certain angle, make the profile of an old man. As for Banner Elk, there was a first settler Banner and a river Elk, which was named for the many elk found grazing there.FOPI 210.2

The evening shades were deepening as, on our way to visit “the old one,” regretfully we passed the little church and schoolhouse at Banner Elk, for it was prayer-meeting night; but we had no other time for the visit. As we drove on through the deepening dusk we met and spoke with groups of the mountaineers-young people, fathers and mothers, and children carried on their backs-turning out like the Waldenses of old to the midweek meeting of the church.FOPI 210.3

The main highways of the mountain country are paved and smooth; but here we left them, and in the dark drove up impossible stony and often gullied roads, one after the other growing more fierce, negotiable only by the memory and the experienced eye and hand of Brother Jasperson. At last we fetched up against the barbed-wire fortifications of a log castle on the hill, dismounted, and by starlight and the surprising effulgence of a great electric light on the porch, climbed the steep ascent to the mountaineer’s home. Uncle Jake, his daughter, and his magnificently muscled, six-foot, twenty-year-old grandson greeted us, and we sat down to listen to the tales of the grandsire, oldest living child of the pioneers.FOPI 211.1

Here, as in New England, New York, and Michigan, we ran into a tangle of memories, reports, and legends. The first generation of Seventh-day Adventists are all dead, Harrison Clark, the last of them, passing away in 1942, at the age of eighty-eight. The last interview with him is included in an article by Marguerite Millar Jasperson, in The Youth’s Instructor, March 26, 1935. The sons and daughters are, for the most part, now old, their memories fond though their feet are feeble; in the words of Uncle Jake, “We go where our children and grandchildren carry us.” They give us varying accounts of the beginnings; yet a pattern may be wrought out of these. Doubtless the most competent witness is Elder Stewart Kime, son of Samuel H. Kime, though he is younger than Uncle Jake and perhaps than some of the other sons of the pioneers. This manuscript was submitted to him, in his far California home, and with the assistance of his younger sister Lydia, Mrs. Guy F. Wolfkill, of Pacific Union College, he edited it so far as his memory served.FOPI 211.2

No one is certain of the exact date of the first receipt of Adventist literature, but it was in the 70’s, probably 1874 or 1875. One of them thinks the sender of the literature was a Sister Brooke; another that it was Mrs. M. L. Hunt. This last may be identified as Miss Maria L. Huntley, the general secretary of the Tract Society, of whom certainly they would learn in those early times. It is certain, however, that the first Seventh-day Adventist minister to meet with them was Elder Charles O. Taylor, of New York. J. O. Corliss, after making a survey of the South, reported to the Review and Herald in 1880 his visit to this mountain country; and he says that the literature was sent by two sisters, one living in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the other in Mill Grove, New York. ^{136J. O. Corliss in The Review and Herald, December 16, 1880, p. 397} The latter place was the home of Elder R. F. Cottrell, a pioneer minister, writer, and poet, some of whose hymns we still sing. Elders Cottrell and Taylor were fellow laborers, and it is probable that the latter received word of the North Carolina spot of interest from the Mill Grove man.FOPI 212.1

In any case, in 1876 Elder Taylor hitched up his team; and he and his wife, leaving their little children there in their early graves, began their long trek to the South and their pilgrimage which ended only with her death. They are all united now in the same burial plot at Adams Center, the three small ones, who died at the same time in an epidemic, having their ages indicated by the respective heights of their low headstones: Gracy, Hiny, Tommy.FOPI 212.2

The two churches now in this North Carolina highland are Banner Elk and Valle Crucis, names as romantic as their stories. At Banner Elk the “old one” is Uncle Jake Norwood, nearing eighty; and another, somewhat younger and still vigorous son of a pioneer is Roby Hodges, whose father, L. P. Hodges, was the first ordained minister of the Seventh-day Adventist Church from the mountain country, and the first elder of the original church at Sands, six miles from Valle Crucis. At Valle Crucis lives Bert Fox, son of Lum Fox, who received literature along with the first, but postponed acceptance of the Sabbath until 1880, an event well remembered by the then four-year-old son. There also, up at the head of Clark’s Creek, above the old mill wheel, live Hardy Clark, son of a charter member, and his wife Zettie, a Townsend-and several of the Townsends were among the pioneers.FOPI 212.3

The tales vary also as to the way the literature was received. One account is that it was sent to a mountain preacher (Stewart Kime says, his father), who without examining it distributed it to his flock; and when they had read it and begun discussion of it, he himself became interested. Others say the literature came to several men, who belonged separately to the Lutheran, Methodist, and Baptist faiths. Two of these Lutherans were William Norwood, father of Jake, and Larkin Townsend, later Jake’s father-in-law. They studied and became deeply interested in the literature. Said Uncle Jake: “Of course they hadn’t no electricity in those days, no, nor coal-oil lamps. They made twists of pieces of cloth and dipped them in lard-they all had plenty lard, and lighted them for candles. My father laid on his belly night after night, studying those tracts by the light of the lard dips, and he got mighty shaken.”FOPI 213.1

So Norwood and Townsend posted off to their Lutheran minister beyond Boone, some twenty miles away. He told them there was nothing in that doctrine, and that he would come up and show them. But he did not come; so they made a second visit to him.FOPI 214.1

“I can show you in a roundabout way,” he explained lamely, “that Sunday is the day to keep, not Saturday.”FOPI 214.2

“We don’t want no roundabout way,” answered Bill Norwood. “We want the straight way. We want the truth.”FOPI 214.3

They tramped back home; and when they came alongside Townsend’s hog lot, where were fattening his prize porkers, they stopped and meditatively gazed at the pigs, unconscious then that the decision they were making would take away their swine as well as their Sunday.FOPI 214.4

At last Larkin spoke: “Bill, I’m going to keep Saturday for the Sabbath. That preacher don’t know nothing about it, and the Bible says it’s the seventh day, and I’m going to keep it.”FOPI 214.5

Said Bill, “Well, Lark, I will too.”FOPI 214.6

A number of others (though the list varies in different accounts) made up their minds, from reading the literature, that they would keep the Sabbath; and they surprised one another by their simultaneous announcements. There was a young man there named Samuel H. Kime, who was studying for the Methodist ministry. The discussion was so general and so warm in the community that he took notice. He told the interested ones that he could disprove the Sabbath argument in a very short time. To prepare, he set to work studying the Scriptures, but soon became convinced of the Sabbath truth and accepted it. (Attach this as you can to the tradition that he was the minister who first received the literature.) He was the first elder of their Clark’s Creek church, now Valle Crucis; and he became one of the first two Seventh-day Adventist licentiates from the mountain country, and was soon ordained. His son Stewart followed in his ministerial steps, and various of his kin are filling or have filled positions in the cause-ministerial, educational, medical-from America to the Far East. Dallas Kime, a nephew, is a missionary in the East Indies. Other families of this church are likewise represented in various phases of the cause.FOPI 214.7

Under Samuel Kime’s leadership, they formed a company or band, but organization as a church must wait for a certified minister of the Seventh-day Adventists. So they pleaded for help. And when C. O. Taylor came into the mountain country and opened a series of meetings at Shull’s Mill, some six miles below Valle Crucis, they trooped down to hear him. We have no sure testimony as to the date of this first evangelistic effort in the mountains; the present generation does not seem to know, and Taylor himself, while reporting voluminously on his labors in Georgia, mentions only that on the way down he visited interested ones in North Carolina and South Carolina. If we assume, what is altogether probable, that he called here on his way south, it was in 1876.FOPI 215.1

In any case, Taylor opened the evangelistic work in the mountains, though apparently both Kime and Hodges preached before ordination, in the 70’s. A church was first organized at Sands, and the Banner Elk and Valle Crucis believers belonged to it The Clark’s Creek church, now Valle Crucis, was organized in 1880; and both Valle Crucis and Banner Elk believers were included in its membership. Banner Elk as a separate organization was formed much later. J. O. Corliss, who in 1880 was sent by the General Conference to survey and foster the work in the South, reports that he ordained L. P. Hodges and licensed C. F. Fox and S. H. Kime. ^137IbidFOPI 215.2

But the most loved minister in this mountain community was D. T. Shireman (they call him “Sherman”), that great exemplar of the lay worker (he was later ordained) who, though a humble brickmason, carpenter, and general mechanic, was most of all a missionary. He went out with ministering hand and voice, first in his native Iowa, and then in the South, particularly North Carolina. They point out the spot at the top of Dutch Creek Falls, where he slipped on the rock and would have plunged over the brink had not he “felt the pressure of angel hands on his two sides, holding him up.” And they tell how he helped with his own hands to finish the little church up on Dutch Creek, which housed the Clark’s Creek company, the first Seventh-day Adventist church building in the South.FOPI 216.1

We drove up Dutch Creek to see it. It is across the little stream, close in to the shoulder of the rising hill. Opposite it, on this side, was the home of Larkin Townsend, now gone, but replaced by another large house, perhaps a replica, except for the ten-foot-wide fireplace where great hickory logs burned for days at a time. The church was then convenient to the believers, some of them, however, coming miles from Banner Elk across a gap in the shoulder of Grandfather Mountain, and others from other directions eight to ten miles away. But now, like the church at Washington, New Hampshire, it sits outside the center of things. Stewart Kime remembers that his father headed the project. Uncle Jake says it was begun in 1881 and finished in May, 1882, when he was fourteen years old. But Bert Fox says that though it was begun then, it was eight or ten years in being finished, and so thinks Elder W. L. Adkins, who preached the last sermon in it in 1910.FOPI 216.2

The picture of the church here given was taken twelve years ago; since then it has deteriorated greatly. But it was a bonny meetinghouse when it was first created. Larkin Townsend gave the land, and to build the church all the brethren came from far and near, “rising soon” and tolling till night. The framing timbers were all hewn from the forest, mortised and tenoned and fastened with wooden pegs. The clap boarding was sawed, but the flooring and ceiling boards were tongued and grooved by hand, and the pine shingles were first riven out and then smoothed and tapered by the drawknife; and the old square-cut iron nails that fastened them may still be found. Perhaps the truth is that they began worshiping in it as soon as it was enclosed, but that the inside finishing of ceiling boards on sides and overhead was delayed for some years.FOPI 217.1

They used to hold all-day meetings in it, nevertheless. At first they let the children play outside, but one Sabbath Samuel Kime, perhaps disturbed by the hilarity outside, said to his wife, “Ellen, they’ve got to come in.” And in they came. There was a class for the little ones, though the only text they had at first was a blue back Webster’s Speller which the children used at day school. The older people had a Bible class, and says Uncle Jake: “Stewart Kime was a little fellow, but he didn’t go in the children’s class. He was the brightest boy ever I see. So in he comes to the big folks’ class, and I see him there, his bare toes jest touching the floor, and the best scholar in the hull setup.”FOPI 217.2

It still sits there, the old church, but its days are numbered. The shingled roof shows gaps, some of the clap boarding is torn off, and the great old timbers, showing through in places, are rotting away. Inside, the platform and the preachers’ bench, both shaky with age, maintain their places despite the indignity of stored beans and potatoes; but the pulpit was taken away years ago to Fletcher, and there it perished in a fire. The present owner, not an Adventist, expects to tear the building down soon. “I wish,” said Uncle Jake wistfully, “that we could buy it and set it up somewhat, to remember the old days, and Samuel Kime, and Elder Sherman.”FOPI 218.1