April 18 1889 Western NC

Travel in Western North Carolina: Following Wagon Trains – 1890s Almond:

Fine spring rains. – Peaches plenty.—Garden vegetables look well.—General business lively. – Spring with her green carpeting, songs and flowers has come again. – The wood thrush has returned with his sweet notes. “The bird-of-the-gloaming,” the finest winged songster of the mountains, now sings his vernal prelude. More anon, Anonymous.”

– Swain County Herald (Bryson City), April 18, 1889
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April 18, 2013 Spring has brought her green carpet dotted with flowers to Brasstown, NC. It seemed like she was running late this year-but her beauty has made us forget all about her tardiness.

Tipper

*Source: Travel Western North Carolina

 

 

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20 Comments

  1. John T. Burnett was a Grand Uncle to James Burnett and me Don, he is also related to you as his mother was a neice of Eleanor Nellie Dehart Shearer. John served terms in the NC General Assembly around the turn of the 20th Century as well as serving as Postmaster to a small P.O. in Macon Co.

  2. Tipper,
    Somewhere between Canton and Clyde there is a painting of a Wood Thrush on the nest. I suppose it is still at my Aunts house somewhere, since she has long ago passed away. I did the drawing/painting for her when I was a youngster. She loved the Wood Thrush…I remember seeing it a few years later, framed and hanging in her house…I could’nt believe she liked it so much, and of course it made me very happy as a child!
    After we moved to the country, with similar hills and valleys, laurel and wildflowers I heard the sweet call of the Wood Thrush.
    Ours doesn’t sing until around the end of May or first of June..
    I hope my Aunt is hearing a chorus of them singing as she loved them so much!
    Thanks Tipper

  3. It is beautiful here in Maryland as well. Flowers and fruit trees blooming in abundance. Perhaps some of the bloom from the blooming idiot that we have as Maryland’s governor is rubbing off.

  4. Tipper,
    Tamela’s comment touched my heart!
    Maybe soon relief from the dought will happen..Maybe the bluebonnet pond is an omen of rains to come.
    Wouldn’t that make a beautiful name for a painting…”The Bluebonnet Pond”, sometimes one thinks of the name for inspiration for the painting…
    It is all Springy here this morning also…and I need to waddle and roll outside and try to plant some sunflower seeds by the fenced in chicken yard…The devil in me says, it will drive them crazy when they start coming up and can’t get to them, and they just keep growing and growning like giant greens…hee, hee, hee
    Thanks for this post Tipper,

  5. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a wood thrush, but after reading that description I’m curious enough to find a recording of it!
    Spring sure did take her time this year, but that just makes it more savory and precious!

  6. Spring is such a time of renewal for me — just seeing the blooms and greening awakens an energy (much needed)within me.

  7. We love Bryson City with its access to the GSMNP. We stay at the Fryemont Inn where our bountiful breakfast holds us for some serious hiking most of the day.

  8. Tipper and Miss Cindy – peaches were here WAY before 1889. Peaches were brought to the new world by Spanish Explorers.
    “Peach pits have been uncovered at early-seventeenth-century archeological sites in northern Georgia, southeastern Tennessee, and western North Carolina.”
    (from “Where There are Mountains – An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians” by Donald Edward Davis)

  9. While reading Tamela’s comment this morning I was touched by her Mother’s attempt to describe the bluebonnets. I think that a beautiful vista whether actual or if only in the mind is truly a thing to be cherished. Even her attempt was so poetic. Thanks for sharing this with us.

  10. Very timely entry, Tipper. Spring of this year is certainly later than last – thank goodness.
    For the next couple of weeks, the greatest show on earth comes to our neighborhood – wildflowers of spring blooming in the Smoky Mountains.
    The 1889 note you posted from Anonymous came from Judson, which was located a short ways below where Alarka Creek emptied into the Little Tennessee. A map made a little over 50 years before that (1837) indicates that a Shearer lived there – almost certainly some of the Shearers from which Mama descended. A little over 50 years later (1942), construction work on Fontana Dam began which would flood the peach trees, the vegetable gardens, the town of Judson and a way of life.
    The link you provided also had a note from John Burnett. Wonder if he is related to cousin Bill and cousin James? Seems likely, given the location.

  11. I love the picture, Tipper, it speaks of beauty and hope.
    There were peaches here in WNC in the spring in 1889?
    Yes, spring is here and it is a beauty to behold. I have sweet little maple leaves all over the tree just outside my window, hostas pointing through the ground,and all manner of green thing happening all around.
    I love that word gloaming, the time when it is not day or night, it is the time between.

  12. Dare you suggest that such a delicate
    descriptive rendering could have been conceived and birthed in a clutter of hovels as Bryson City is envisaged in bygone days? And in and about such a backwater as Swain County is and was thought to be? Dare you suggest that the populace was so literate as to grasp its purport? Beauty spawns beauty.

  13. As the result of a stroke, my mother has aphasia – she ofter has trouble getting out the words she intends. Some dementia is setting in too so it is often a challenge to figure out whether so is off in her own world or if she is trying to tell us something. The other day she seemed fixated on things having to do with water, repeatedly touching her water glass, saying drink but shaking her head no, something about the cows we finally figured out that she was trying to say that the bluebonnets covering the pasture looked like a pond. They really do. Due to the drought they are tiny little things but they are thick – and beautiful.
    On the other hand, those bluebonnets and spring are taunting us here in central Texas. 80% of the oats froze in a very rare after Easter freeze. Now another freeze is forecast for Friday – that on top of the ongoing drought has farmers in a squeeze. Please send your prayers this way.

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