Ruralite Cafe: Published 08/16/01

By Lynn Hotaling Associate Editor

Terrell terms Centennial experience invaluable

The veteran journalist plans to share his memories of that experience and of Jackson County's weeklong Centennial celebration tonight (Thursday) during a 7:30 p.m. talk at Sylva's Golden Age Center.

"Everything I learned out there in Sylva proved useful," Terrell said. "Mr. (J.A.) Gray and Mr. (J.M.) Bird taught me how to write. I can't say enough about Mr. Gray and Mr. Bird - they even taught me how to handset type."

Though he had been working at the Citizen for a couple of years before coming back to Sylva to assist with the Centennial edition, Terrell said that summer was when he really learned "journalistic style."

"That was a summer of pure magic," Terrell said. "Everybody ought to have a summer like that during their growing up years."

Terrell had written for The Sylva Herald before 1951. He began his 40-plus-year newspaper career at his hometown paper in the fall of 1945 and continued while a student at Western Carolina Teachers College (now Western Carolina University).

His first story was about a football game, Terrell said.

"They paid me 50 cents a story no matter how long or short it was. Sometimes when I covered a football game I would break it up into five or six stories."

One of his tasks while preparing for the Centennial edition was to go through old copies of the Jackson County Journal. While looking at a paper from July, 1911, Terrell said he read a newspaper account of a story he'd heard all his life.

"I found where my great-grandfather was gored to death by a bull, and my great-grandmother broke a switch off an apple tree and beat the bull off his body," Terrell said. "I always thought that was a great act of bravery."

His great-grandfather was Houston "Hute" Queen of Buff Creek, and his great-grandmother's name was Dorcas, Terrell said. His grandfather, W.E. Bryson, and an uncle, Ode Bryson, were hoeing corn just over the hill and came running when they heard Dorcas's cries for help. "They carried him to the front porch where he died about 30 minutes later," Terrell said.

The toughest story he dug out that summer was the tale of 19 convicts who drowned while constructing the Cowee Tunnel near Dillsboro. Newspaper accounts of the 1880s tragedy were not available, Terrell said, so he had to track down the information through railroad records. Convicts provided the labor both to build the Western North Carolina Railroad and cut the tunnel through the mountainside, Terrell wrote in the Herald's Centennial edition, and hundreds were ferried across the Tuckaseigee each day from their camp on the east side of the river. "The Tuckaseigee below Dillsboro is a swift mountain torrent," Terrell wrote, and the convicts were transported in a "dilapidated flatboat." A steel cable prevented the boat from being swept downstream. The prisoners who drowned were regarded as the camp's most dangerous and were kept shackled in chains 24 hours a day.

During the crossing, the boat began to take on water and some 20 terrified prisoners made a sudden rush for the front of the boat. According to Terrell's story, the stern "came out of the water," and the boat capsized. Only the guard, Fleet Foster, and one convict survived. Great pains were taken to ensure the accuracy of the many stories prepared for the Centennial edition, Terrell said.

"It was absolutely exhausting research," he said. "We tried to be as accurate as we could. We checked and rechecked our facts."

When it came time to print the 40-page edition (Sylva Heralds averaged about a dozen pages per week at that time), Terrell said he remembers Clyde Rector hand-feeding sheets of newsprint into an old flat-bed press.

Jackson County's Centennial summer was "hot as the dickens," Terrell said. One of the most enjoyable parts of the celebration for him was the "Brothers of the Brush," a club for the county's men. Anyone who didn't grow a beard or mustache was thrown in jail, Terrell said. He still has his Brothers pin and plans to wear it for tonight's program.

While Terrell enjoyed being a "Brother," he said his father, Frank Terrell, a Sylva mechanic, couldn't stand growing a beard during that steamy summer.

"My father grew a thin mustache just to get by," Terrell said. "One morning while he was still half-asleep, he shaved off part of it. He went for a week with half a mustache."

Among the interesting things he learned during his summer's research, Terrell said, was that land in Jackson County once sold for as little as $5 for 100 acres. He also discovered that the 1883 coming of the railroad finally linked Jackson County to the world. Terrell tracked down the story of Albert Teester, a Holiness preacher who was bitten by a rattlesnake during a 1934 church service on Cullowhee Mountain. It's interesting that in retelling the Teester tale, Terrell was following in the footsteps of another famous Jackson County journalist - the late John Parris. Parris's big break came when national wire services picked up his initial report of Teester and the snake. Hungry for more details, the big-time correspondents flocked to Sylva, but the preacher would talk to no one except Parris. It's easy for me to understand Terrell's pleasant memory of a summer spent in delving into Jackson County's past. During the summer of 1989, I found myself immersed in many of his stories as I worked on the special section the Herald published in honor of the centennials of Sylva, Dillsboro and Western Carolina University.

Come September, The Herald will publish another commemorative edition in honor of our county's 150th birthday, and we're all learning more about Jackson's proud heritage through this summer's reading and research.

Terrell's talk will give all of us a chance to say hello to an old friend and great writer. And it should be a great way to catch some sesquicentennial spirit.

Go to the Golden Age Center tonight if you possibly can - Bob Terrell has some great stories to tell.

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