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Ghosts in the woods
Despite the headline, this is not a Halloween story.
Instead, it’s the tale of a perfect fall day spent learning the history of a part of Swain County cut off from the outside world by the 10,000 acres of water that comprise Fontana Lake.
Taking advantage of a guided Hazel Creek hike offered by the National Park Service (for more information on such events, visit online at www.nps.gov), some 25 of us spent six or so hours trailing our guides – Rangers Tom Robbins and Brad Free – through the watershed that once was home to 1,000 people.
Employees of the Ritter Lumber Co. stack and sort some of the 30-inch board that were commonly sawn from the massive forests that once covered the southern Appalachians. Ritter’s operation was near the town of Proctor, on Hazel Creek in what is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. During its 18-year operation, Ritter extended its rail lines almost to the crest of the Smokies and sawed more than 200 million board feet of lumber. – Photo courtesy of the National Park Service
After a 30-minute boat trip from the Fontana Marina, we began our journey through quiet woods that once echoed with the shrill blasts of train whistles and sounds of children at play. Only one intact building and one set of crumbling brick walls remain of the town of Proctor, but the signs of its former human habitation abound in the area’s wide roads, cemeteries and lonesome chimneys. To help our imaginations, Tom brought along lots of laminated period photos to show us what the town had once been like: a school that educated more than 200 students, churches, stores, post offices and railroad lines.
Though Proctor’s population swelled considerably during the 18 years Ritter Lumber Co. operated one of the largest timber operations ever to take place in the Great Smoky Mountains, the town was a thriving community before the loggers and steam-powered equipment arrived in 1910.
The 44,000 acres that include Proctor and the Hazel Creel watershed were added to Great Smoky Mountains National Park as part of the Fontana project.
While the area had been used by the Cherokee for centuries, the first settlers of European descent, Moses and Patience Proctor, arrived on Hazel Creek around 1830. Surprisingly, the Proctors made their way through the Smokies from Cades Cove in Tennessee, using hunting trails established by the Indians. Moses Proctor obtained his land through a North Carolina land grant for which he paid 5 cents an acre. Tom and Brad were up on all the local lore, telling us how Moses had told his family he wanted to be buried in the front yard, causing them to establish the hillside cemetery we visited first. Its centerpiece is a U-shaped gravestone that marks the final resting place of Moses (1794-1864) and Patience (1801-1870) Proctor, the pioneers that gave the future sawmill town its name.
Heading upstream, Tom showed us the site of the town’s Baptist Church, marked now only by crumbling posts that once provided the building’s foundation. He pointed out where a railroad trestle had crossed the creek and passed around a picture of the church.
Moving along another quarter-mile or so, Tom paused by what appeared to be an abandoned field that had been taken over by poplars and pines.
“This is where the sawmill was,” he said as he pointed to the right.
He showed us more photos:of the log pond that kept the fallen trees moist and washed some of the dirt from their bark; of the boiler that produced enough steam to power the saws and enough extra to light up the town; of the drying sheds; and of the temporary barracks that housed the unmarried loggers.
Tom was a history major at Mars Hill and Appalachian State, and his love of the past is evident in the way he made the long-departed lumber operation come alive through vivid descriptions of how the raw logs were turned into finished lumber, with the piles of sawdust the sawmill created as a by-product going to feed the boiler fire to make the steam that kept the saw turning.
He also told us about the “lingo” of the time – the way the loggers and mill hands created their own vocabulary to label the various jobs and men who performed them.
The man who stayed behind in camp all day – often one either too young or too old to work in the woods – was called a “lobby hog,” while the head logger was the “woods boss,” or “bull of the woods.”
Loggers and sawmill hands, always ravenous from the long, hard days, termed the cooks the “gut-robbers” and referred to their most common meal – beans and biscuits – as “firecrackers and catheads.”
The day was not without its share of natural history as well: fall colors, two bears and an unwelcome patch of poison ivy.
But all in all, the hike was for reflecting on the past and imagining an earlier time. And the ghosts – friendly spirits for the most part – seemed to surround us in the now-silent woods that once rang to the noise of their axes and saws.
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