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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview K-0249, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Although Stan Hyatt, the North Carolina Department of Transportation's resident engineer on the I-26 project, has helped open Madison County to new residents and industry, he is worried about the effect of opening the area to change. Nostalgia and balance dominate this interview: Hyatt remembers growing up in idyllic rural Madison County, but while he misses the past, he sees the corridor construction as a painful but necessary cure for the county's economic ills. He hopes that the environmental damage I-26 brings will not alter too drastically the environment tourists will drive there to see. This interview, like many of Rob Amberg's interviews, is more of a conversation than a question-and-answer session. Later in the interview, however, Hyatt speaks at length about the I-26 project in Madison County. Researchers interested in this subject should look to this interview for essential background on the project as well as construction details.
Stan Hyatt, the North Carolina Department of Transportation's resident engineer on the I-26 project, misses the past but sees the corridor as a cure for Madison County's economic ills.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
( ), the resident engineer from the DOT, North Carolina Department of Transportation, and we are in his office at Forks of Ivy. Stan, could you just maybe introduce yourself? I basically want to do a sound-check and make sure that we're getting everything okay.
Okay, well it's good to have you here, Rob. I am Stan Hyatt, resident
engineer over this I-26 project here in Madison County. [Recorder is turned off and then back on].
Stan, how long have you worked with DOT?
I started working in the summers while I was going to college, in 1967.
Wow. And what is your age, if you don't mind my asking?
Fifty-four.
Fifty-four? Okay, well I'll be fifty-three next month, so we're right on target here. Same generation. Did you go to NC State?
No, I ended up going to Ohio University. We moved away from here when I was a teenager. My dad was living in Ohio—in Cleveland, Ohio—and ended up going to Ohio University.
I went to University of Dayton, so there's another point of contact there. We were probably in school about the same time, I'd say. But you grew up in this area.
Yes.
You were telling me the other day you grew up in Barnardsville?
Yes, Barnardsville, Dillingham area. Just underneath the Blue Ridge Parkway. North end of Buncombe County.
Was your family from there? Were your family's roots from that area, too?
Yeah.
And how long had your family been in the community?
Two generations before me.
And what kind of work did your dad do?
My dad did a lot of things. The last work he did before he retired in Cleveland—he worked in a musical instrument factory, making instruments. Brass instruments.
But what did he do when you were in Barnardsville?
He did a lot of things. He just moved around from job to job. One of the last things he did in Barnardsville was work with his brother in a country store.
Was there farming in your background at all?
My grandmother had farmland and leased it out, and I helped with the tobacco chores and gardening and growing corn. Things like that—feeding the pigs and feeding the chickens, milking the cows—when I was growing up with her.
So you had all of those things. And would you classify your grandma as somewhat self-sufficient on the farm?
She was extremely self-sufficient. She lived after she raised six kids of her own. I lived with her a while, and she would have me go out to the woods and get roots and things out of the ground that she made medicines out of. I hunted; I would bring squirrels and fish back, and rabbits. My grandmother could fix anything. When her husband was still alive she cooked for a sawmill up there in Dillingham area. She was the most self-sufficient woman that I ever knew.
Wow. That's pretty remarkable. So she made her own medicines, then.
Some of them. I'm not saying she made everything, but she had an understanding, having been raised in the mountains back in the Depression era days and before, of self-reliance. She lost all that she had in the Depression. She and her husband had accumulated five or six thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in those days, and she lost it all. One day it was in the bank; the next day she went to Asheville and it was gone.
So that must have really tested her in terms of her self-sufficiency and self-reliance.
It did. And about that same time her husband died, and so she had to raise six kids as a widow woman with no real income except off of the farm.
For you growing up, then, as a child and before you all moved to Cleveland, did you have a sense that this was in a way the perfect childhood? Or was it something that you felt you wanted to get away from?
No, I never wanted to get away from Western North Carolina. We were poor,
and I realized we were poor, but it didn't bother me at all. I had the
woods and the creeks, and the mountains to climb. I was the happiest kid
in the world growing up, and had nothing [Laughter]
My father-in-law just died—actually this last week—and he was a person I
would have considered—like, this is the person I would like to get lost
with in the woods, if I had to get lost. I'd want my father-in-law with
me, because I knew we'd get along all right. We'd probably live pretty
well, and I'm curious as to whether you had a mentor or
We had family. I had uncles that took me bear hunting and things—fishing, and to the lakes and things like that—but most of the time I just roamed on my own. It was nothing when I was eight years old to get on the bus and go to Asheville, and go to the movies and bring groceries back for my grandmother or mother. It was nothing for me to take a .22 rifle when I was just a little kid and get going to the woods, and stay most of the day. Just have a good time in the woods by myself. So it's a lot of self-sufficiency there, but there were also adults for guidance in the family.
Did you all raise a lot of tobacco?
My grandmother probably had in her allotment a couple acres of tobacco, which she leased out to people living in that Dillingham area. As I said, it was a family unit thing. We all pitched in and helped. Even though it was leased out, it was expected that the kids would help. When it was time to hoe tobacco, the teenagers got their hoe and got out there with the people—with the kids of the person leasing the tobacco—and it was just a family effort.
Did you have a sense when you were growing up, you know, "Gosh, I'd really like to farm. I'd like to stay on this place and continue this lifestyle and be a farmer."?
I wanted to stay in the area and stay on the land, but I didn't ever
really have a strong desire to be a farmer. I loved to garden back then,
and I still garden now—small gardening—but to work on the land all day
long—I realized at an early age it was hard work [Laughs]
I understand. It took me moving here for that to happen. Actually, did you ever know a person named Mack Davis, who lived over in Democrat for a while?
I'm aware of that person; I don't know him well.
His was the first tobacco I ever worked down there, and then quite a bit after that, and rapidly learned that I wasn't cut out to farm at all. It sounds like you learned a lot of that self-reliance, self-sufficiency. My sense is that this is probably stuff that stayed with you your entire life.
You're correct about that. It did, and I tried to teach some of that to our daughters. I think people in this era that we live in are not self-reliant enough. I don't think people should just be hermits and hibernate, and go up onto the mountain and live all unto them selves. We have to live as a society and interact with each other, but I think there's too much reliance this day and time. People—kids growing up—are not taught things by their parents. Mothers taught their daughters how to sew and cook and things like that; dads taught their boys how to farm and how to make a living of some kind, whatever their trade was. And you don't see that. People are so busy now, they're not passing down that self-reliant nature like they had to do to survive in the era before this time.
Are you on your family land now? Is that where you're living?
No, I have—I looked for land over near the family land. As it turned out,
the land that my dad had went to his brother, and he's presently living
there. After my mother died, that was a necessity. He didn't have the
money to keep the land up himself, so he ended up having to sell it. And
that was before I was working and had the means to purchase land. When
we got out of school, my wife and I—and settled down here—got
So you're right on the line, then.
Yes.
Yeah. I'm curious, how old are your daughters?
One is sixteen and one twenty.
And how do they, or how did they respond to this desire on your part and
your wife's part to—for them to think a little bit more self-reliantly?
I've got a twenty-year-old son and a ten-year-old daughter, and of
course they think we're nuts [Laughs]
Well, our kids have accepted it pretty well I think. At the time—when
they were doing something they didn't really want to do, they objected
to it as a normal kid would do. But as they've gotten a little bit
older, especially the twenty-year-old—now is a junior at Appalachian
State. She is looking at a career of her own, and she's working with
elementary kids because she's going to be a teacher. She's starting to
see the wisdom in the things that we've tried to instill in her for the
last ten, fifteen years. Ever since she's been big enough to understand.
And I think you have the natural rebellious period of kids, and our kids
were no different, where mom and dad don't know anything. But now, I
think they are responding pretty well to what we tried to do there.
We're
Oh yeah, that's great. Now, is your wife from this area or is she from Ohio?
She is from Ohio, but her parents moved around, too. Her dad was from North Carolina, her mother from Elizabethton, Virginia. They moved to Florida. He was a minister, and he took a church at the Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio. He was a pastor there at the time that I enrolled there in school. And so, she's moved around; she's been all over, but her parents are pretty close to this area. She has the same type of values that I have, and [it] worked out real well. I think it was planned out to have it that way.
Yeah, I think fate plays a role in all of those things. My wife is a
rural North Carolinian from down in the Valdese area, and moved up here
in the late 70s-early 80s. I'm from DC. We're decidedly different, [but]
our values just really click with one another. It's pretty amazing. I
guess I want to go back a little bit to this. When I first moved here I
stayed with a woman who was an elderly ballad singer over in Laurel
section. Her father and grandfather were both herb doctors, and [were]
really kind of revered in the community. It seemed like every community
around here had a person
I don't remember people so much coming to her. She had a respected position. I'm sure people would ask her about things like that. I don't want to make more out of it than it actually was, but it was just—as I gathered from what I could see of it at that time, it was tradition for elderly ladies that had been raised back in the Depression days to try to make all the medicine type things. If they had a stomachache, they had a remedy for that. They had a lot of remedies. It was like her cooking. My grandmother had no recipes for anything; it was all in her head, and it drove my wife crazy. When we first got married, I would say, "Granny could really make squirrel dumplings, and I loved that dish." And she'd go to my grandmother's and say, "Well, how do you make squirrel dumplings? I need to write the recipe down." Well Granny'd say, "Well, a little touch of this, a little bit of that, and so forth." My wife couldn't cook like that. It was the same with the medicines—she just intuitively knew and remembered how to take sassafras or something and boil it out. Whatever, I don't remember a lot about that. I just pointed it out to illustrate that she was very self-reliant.
That's really interesting to me that people around here kind of existed on that oral tradition. That passing down and that knowledge that they had stored.
Yeah, very little written down. My grandmother went to I think the third
or fourth grade. She didn't have much formal training at all. She had
trouble reading big words and so forth. But as far as surviving—and that
was the name of the game through those early years of this century in
Western North Carolina. It was a hard place to live.
And there wasn't really money around to buy those things.
There wasn't. There wasn't money. There were a few rich people—the Vanderbilts and so forth—but the rank-and-file people living here either had to learn the ways of the land and be able to survive, or they didn't survive.
Right. Yeah, I've talked to a lot of people who were raised around here, and certainly there were little pieces of money that came in when you sold the tobacco crop, or maybe you sold some herbs or something like that. But people around here, the vast majority of people didn't really see any money until almost the early, mid 60s. You know, when the federal programs started coming in. Your family's move to Ohio sounds like was maybe a direct response to that.
It was. In the late 50s there weren't many jobs around here; not a lot of good-paying jobs and so forth. Coming off of the Depression years the economy hadn't really picked up that well, and my dad just drifted from place to place looking for something better. That's how he ended up in Ohio.
Do you remember when you were young, before you had moved, where did you go to school?
I went to school in Barnardsville for a couple years. Actually, I moved
back and forth to Ohio several times. My parents were up there
regularly, but I didn't like it up there in the big city—in
Cleveland—near as well as I did out in the country. There weren't enough
things to entertain me in the city, so I came back. That's how I stayed
with my grandmother. She reached a point in time—her youngest daughter
left home in
Do you have siblings?
Yes. I have a brother that lives here in Mars Hill now that's a little bit younger than I am, and a sister in Greensboro.
That must have been hard for your parents to let you go back—let you come back here—and potentially not see you for long periods of time, you being relatively young at that age.
I'm sure like any parents they missed me. I missed them at times, but it was accepted that Granny needed somebody to help her with the harder things—the wood splitting and so forth around the house, the gardening, the carrying and the lifting. A sixty-year-old woman living by herself is not a good situation, and so they accepted it. And then as I said, I went back and actually graduated from high school in Ohio. Then my brother—younger brother—came down and stayed with Granny for a while. So she had all the boys there with her for most of the time after she was sixty years old.
I see that around here a lot. People—again, my friend Delly, who I stayed
with for years, raised a number of children. She raised three children
from her husband's
I think it was. Today we would think in terms well, we've raised our kids up. It's time for them to get out and get their families on their own. And now it's time for us to rest and relax, and enjoy our later years. But I never heard anything like that from my grandmother. She was so family-oriented. She loved her kids, she loved their kids—the grandchildren—and there was not a bad apple in the bunch in her mind. That's not the whole truth. We were a normal family; some better than others. But as far as the responsibility factor that she had to the family—until her dying day, she would have done anything for any family members that had problems. That's how she perceived her role as matriarch of the family, and the family loved her for that. She made it until she was eighty-eight years old. Finally succumbed to brain tumor. But even in her last days, she would be thinking about the family, what she could do for the family members.
Did she cook with wood, heat with wood, things like that?
She had a wood stove there for a while. About the time I came to stay with her she traded out and got an electric stove and refrigerator and things like that. Before my time it was traditional mountain, where they had a spring and kept all the stuff in that spring with the cool water, their milk and so forth, but she modernized a little bit. She didn't have a phone in the house until she was over eighty years old. She didn't want a phone, but she didn't miss anything.
Phones and electricity are two of the most significant changes that have
come to the community in the last fifty years or so. They seem to me to
really change the
She did. She walked; she didn't drive. I was too young to drive, so when
Sunday came—or Friday night or whenever—it was nothing for us to set out
and walk a mile to one of her elderly friends' homes. Then they would
talk, and it'd be dark, and we'd take a flashlight, and we'd walk back.
[Laughter]
Did you always have electricity when you were growing up? Or do you remember a time when you didn't have power?
I don't remember a time without power, either in the house that I lived in—that I was raised in there—or when I lived with her. She always had power.
Yeah, it certainly came to different parts of the community at different times. I've met a couple of—you probably met Jerry Plemmons—and I spoke with him for this project. He's a little bit older than we are. He remembers the first eight years or so of his life being with out electricity. He remembers specifically when it came in.
The old house that I remember—my first recollections were it had
electricity in it, but it had no indoor plumbing. It had an outhouse. It
had a coal stove in it. No phone. No insulation in the walls. One of
those homes that you could see cracks. When it snowed, sometimes the
snow would drip through it. But we had feather beds, and either
fireplaces in the living room or coal stoves in the back bedroom. We had
a wood cook-stove in the front, in the kitchen. I don't ever remember
being cold. I may have been cold, but I don't remember it. We seemed to
be warm, and I don't ever remember it being an inconvenience not having
a bathroom in the house. But I'm sure there were times—when people were
sick and had to trudge through the snow to get to the outhouse—
And it was a situation that you obviously chose, too. It was one that you felt more comfortable with than, say, living in the big city, living in Cleveland. It's almost like kids today would choose those conveniences and that kind of larger picture.
Keep in mind we didn't have video back then. There TV was just in the
infant stage. There was radio. Most of the houses had a radio, although
I don't remember a radio in the old house where I grew up. But without
all these things that turn people today into couch potatoes, people in
those days had to find something to entertain themselves. So they found
other things. Being out in the country, there's just a lot of nature to
entertain people. We spent a lot of time outdoors and doing things in
the woods and so forth. I don't ever remember feeling like, "Well, I'm
being deprived because I live here." It's the opposite. I felt deprived
when I lived in Cleveland, because it's just surrounded in a big
neighborhood with houses everywhere. I just wasn't used to it, I guess.
It's just a cultural thing. I was raised in a more rural setting, and I
felt comfortable there. But today, you're right, a kid today has been
weaned on MTV, and videos, and the movies, and a car when he was sixteen
years old, and all the things parents give their kids today. It's a
shame in a way, but I guess some people say that's progress [Laughter]
As an adult, as a parent, as a member of your community, it sounds like
you're really trying to maintain some of those older traditions. Kind of
continue them,
Yes, I think it's important that we pass down all the traditions that we possibly can. I asked my kids, and they think it's funny when I ask them this question. I try to get them—or did when they were younger—try to get them to go out and help me garden. And there's some work in gardening, having to dig and prune, and spray, and all that stuff you do gardening. I said, "Well, what would happen if the economy got bad again? Why, I've seen it when I was real little, or even worse before I was born. What would happen if that happened today and you couldn't go over to Ingles in Mars Hill and buy bread and milk. What would you do?" I don't want to be pessimistic or a forecaster of doom coming in the future, but to me that's a valid question. That was something my grandmother and others instilled in me. You have to be knowledgeable enough to take care of yourself and not depend on everybody else to lay things in your lap.
I think it's good to be in a place where you can depend on yourself, too. Not every place is like that.
I think Madison County, North Carolina has got to be up at the top of the
list. I have a neighbor that can sit down and make wagon wheels from
scratch. They're carpenters, they're plumbers, they're automobile
mechanics. They can do anything. I'm not that gifted myself. I don't
want to mislead you and you think that I am, but these people in Madison
County—because it was isolated somewhat geographically and by the road
situation from the rest of the world, they learned to survive. I'm
convinced that the older people over here could do just about anything
to make a living if everything collapsed economy-wise and everything,
and that to me is a very valuable thing to be able
I think you're right about that. When I first moved to the county in
'73—most of the new-comers that I know that moved in back then were all
kind of adopted by a local family. People who taught us you don't burn
pine [Laughter]
Well, see, you've got 200 years of history here that they passed from father to son on down ten generations or however long this area's been settled. They had to learn to do it right, or they just went without water, or they went without shelter, or they went without heat or whatever. There's been a storehouse of knowledge built up there, and to me, to lose that would be a tremendous waste.
I totally agree with that. We have a spring, and heat with wood, and garden pretty heavily, and keep a few animals. And the same thing I tell my kids over and over again, is that, "First of all, you need to hang on to this land. Because even if you don't want to live here for periods of time, this really gives you a security that you're not going to get from anything else. It's that knowledge that you can come here and raise some food and can it or put it in the freezer. You're always going to have water. Those kinds of things. And that kind of knowledge, to me, is what real security is all about.
I think of the movie, "Gone With the Wind" and Scarlett O'Hara, at some
point in the movie—when she comes back to the plantation it's all torn
up; there's no crops in the fields or anything. But she reaches down and
she gets a handful of that red
It's curious to me now, as I look at the wave of new people that are coming into the community. That change has been going on for a while. It certainly didn't come with the road or anything like that. I mean, it's been happening for—
Twenty or thirty years.
Exactly. What I sense, though, among this kind of more recent group of new people, is that the value of the land seems to be based more on its economic value. It's an asset. It becomes a monetary asset as opposed to that image that we just talked about with Scarlett O'Hara—it's the land, and this is what will really provide for me. That concerns me. It almost seems like there is a cultural shift that is happening. It seems to be pretty pervasive, not just here but all over the country. But again, we notice it here because we're here, but also because Madison County has been closed off. And those values have been allowed to exist for a longer period of time than they did in other parts of the country.
Well, I agree with you. What we saw back when we first moved over here—at
that point in time, the few people moving in here would be adopted by
the local people. The people that came initially to Madison wanted to
grow their own wool or whatever, and grow their gardens. And they
learned from the people here. Basically took on the values of the people
here while retaining their own individual values. But if that is
shifting and if people are looking at it as an economic thing just to
buy and sell land, I think that will change the complexion or the nature
of the county for the worse. I really hate to see that, myself. To me,
the land is something to be preserved. As a road builder
I kind of look at that and just wonder. It's interesting. You, certainly, being raised here know this. When I first moved here it was two-lane from Asheville out to Mars Hill, and certainly on over the mountain into Erwin and Johnson City. The first project we saw was kind of a widening of [US Highway] 19/23 from two-lane to four-lane, and then in the early 80s the four-lane being put in from Weaverville to Marshall. What was immediately evident was just how that better access changed the whole dynamic of everything. There was suddenly increased opportunities for people not only to move in, but for people to go out and find better jobs and things like that. But that really changes a person's relationship with their place.
It does. Again, it's just progress. People call it progress, but it's
change that will occur. Areas don't tend to be the same—stay the same
indefinitely. They tend to
I'm not sure they could be happy anywhere.
Well, that's how I feel. They say, "Well, we'll move to Florida." And
they don't like Florida. "We don't want to go back to New Jersey,
though. So, let's try Western North Carolina." So there's a lot of
people moving in here, and there's a lot of opportunity. I think the
area has more opportunity for residential type situations than a lot of
big business. We just don't have the geography of big flat areas to
develop, like the Piedmont of North Carolina does. But I think that this
area has a tremendous potential for residential areas. As you see the
new roads put in and the accesses near the interchanges, I think we're
going to see more and more people wanting to move out into
Right. I was doing a lot of work down around Iredell County back in the mid-late 80s, photographing a lot of farms down in there. I remember that whole little juncture right there, right around where I-40 and I-77 meet, and there was like one or two gas stations. There was nothing there.
Yeah, there was nothing! Nothing there.
And now there's this enormous mall that has just expanded, and as you go north out of Statesville up and towards Harmony—.
Same thing.
Exactly. It's mushrooming. We've spoken a lot about the uniqueness of this area, and just how it really is at the—in many and certainly in my opinion—at the top of the list in terms of the place where you really can be self-sufficient. That culture, that society, those traditions have been allowed to maintain, a lot of it because of the isolation, because of the relative isolation. One of the dangers that we have, then, is making it more homogenous, more like every place else.
But what do you do to prevent that from happening? I remember a few years
back Oregon put out a notice that, "We want you to come out and visit,
but we don't want [Tapping noise on recording speaker].
And how do you draw the line?
And how do you fence off the area and say, "No, we're not going to take anybody else." And how do you infringe on the rights of the people—their freedoms to sell and trade land and do the things that they want to do with it? I don't know what the answer is. I'm not sure there is an answer to that situation. But I believe as long as this is a desirable area, which it has become recently—in the last twenty years or so—that you're going to see this influx of people into North Carolina. You're going to see building, and the things that go with an influx of new people. And I don't think it's all good or all bad. I think there's some good in it, but I do think that the local people have the feeling that you have—that it reaches a point of saturation when the dynamics start to change. When the new people decide they want to control the power bases—they want to be on the school board, they want to be the county commissioners—and they have different views than the prevailing view of the local people—that's when you see the clashes. I've seen that happen in some of the surrounding counties. It may happen in Madison County.
I suspect you're right about that. And actually, we see little bits and pieces, signs of that happening. This big cell tower debate has been part of—
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
That's pretty representative of the cell tower issue, of things that are yet to come. It's always curious to me watching new people come in and cut in a driveway up to the top of the ridge. I always go back and look at the old person—the old woman—I stayed with for a long time when I first moved here. Native-born people understood that you build low because it's more protective. It's going to give you better access, and you don't have to maintain a road up to the top of the mountain. I just look at those kinds of things and kind of go, "Okay, this is another little symptom here."
Yeah, well, you see those people make mistakes sometimes, and you know
they're making a mistake. But they have a right to make that mistake
[Laughter].
They'll pay for it sooner or later. They'll have to maintain that mile-long driveway up to the top of the ridge. And they're going to be hot in the summer, windy, and just totally unprotected. And frankly, I moved here because an uncle of mine had moved to Marshall back in 1970, and I stopped to visit him and never left. He was one of the first people in the county to do that very thing. You know, built a house right up on top of a ridgeline. It was beautiful, but I mean, had an enormous fuel bill and energy bill because of it. You know, just exposed out there.
I'm wondering if you can give me an encapsulated history of I-26. Go back as far as you want to go back. I certainly am aware of a lot of this, but I'd like you to talk a little bit about that and how it kind of came into being. What the concerns were, what the issues were. All those kinds of things.
I think the beginning point for any discussion on this portion of I-26, Rob, is to look at not just this little segment of road in Madison County, but the whole quarter—north/south quarter—of I-26/US 23. If you go south of Mars Hill, you can go all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. And you're basically on an interstate highway, except for the portion in Buncombe County that'll be eventually rehabilitated. When you get to Asheville, you're on I-26. You end up in Charleston, South Carolina. That's all interstate, approximately 200 miles; I don't know exactly how far it is.
That's about right.
When you leave Mars Hill, or leave North Carolina at the north end of
Madison County at Sam's Gap, you're on a four-lane highway that goes at
least to Columbus, Ohio. The only reason I know that, that's where
mother-in-law lives and that's the way we go. There have been sections
recently completed up there that were detoured, like we have here in
Madison County, around an old two-lane road that was eighty years old or
so. But those have all been completed now. I just was up there for
Thanksgiving a few weeks ago, or last week I should say. The only
missing link in this whole quarter now—from Charleston, South Carolina
to Columbus, Ohio—is the nine-mile section in Madison County. Of course,
thirty years ago there were more sections in Kentucky, Virginia, and
other places of this quarter. But it's a natural north/south quarter
that's moved commerce and people. I suspect if you went back to the
history, it was an old drover's route a hundred years ago, where people
drove cattle and pigs and turkeys and things like they did down along
the Buncombe turnpike, down the French Broad River. I think they
probably did the same thing across Sam's Gap, and so commerce has moved.
It's been a natural quarter for over a hundred years. It became
apparent, as these [slang for exuberance and exhiliration]
I didn't realize it was that high.
Yes, and even the bigger tractor-trailer rigs have been banned from using the road. That ban went into effect about five years ago because of the concern of the families living on Murray Mountain that were putting their school kids out there. The mothers were just terrified that a runaway truck—these big rigs—would come off the mountain and run over a loaded school bus. So, even with the ban we're still having 500 to 700 rigs per twenty four hour period come off of the mountain. That road has just outlived its usefulness. Unfortunately, because of the grade of it, the terrain of it, the horizontal alignment of it, it is not possible to go in and put an easy remedy on fixing the existing road.
Let me interrupt just briefly.
Sure, go ahead.
You're on a good track and I want to jump back to that. You mentioned horizontal alignment. Could you talk—
I'm talking about curvature. As you go from the base of Murray Mountain to the top you have a lot of switchbacks in it—very short curves that are sharp in nature and very steep banks and super elevations. The road just gets a heavy frost on it, and the tractor-trailer rigs jack-knife up there on the road. They block the road. The next thing we know, the road's closed down. If we get a one, two inch snowfall, it's almost automatic that that road is going to be closed. There's not a good parallel route adjacent to US-23 to detour traffic. So when the road closes down, people that move the commerce in and out of Western North Carolina basically have to go around Knoxville and I-75, take I-40 from Asheville over there and around. It's a real hard detour. There's not a good, easy way—alternate route.
And Pigeon River Gorge is no picnic either.
It's no picnic either.
I think it's closed down in the western direction now.
It is. And I was going to say that at times when I-40 is closed and all that traffic is detoured up US-23—as happened in the summer July, August of 1997—we saw that tractor-trailer rig count jump from about five or six hundred per day to 2,000 per day. I don't know if you remember it, but we also saw the fatalities on that.
I think there were three fatalities.
There were three fatalities that year within three weeks of each other.
Right.
So it was recognized early on—back in the 70s—that that road was becoming
outdated. At that time there was an Appalachian Regional Commission in
effect through the Federal Highway Administration, and there was a
plan—an initial plan in the 70s—to
I'd like to go back just a little bit. I guess I-40 was completed, when, the late 60s, early 70s?
I want to say that's correct. I don't know the exact date, but that's generally correct.
I'm aware a little bit of the politics of why I-40 got placed where it is and stuff like that. Obviously the existing road—the main road—from Asheville over to Knoxville—had been [US] 25-70 prior to I-40, which goes right through Marshall and Madison County. I'm curious about how this portion of I-26—this nine-mile section—kind of relates to that completion of I-40 through Pidgeon River Gorge. Was I-40 the initial design? Or, I mean, I-26? Was this the ideal route kind of thing? Again, my understanding is that because of Dan Moore and the politics of that particular era, it was decided to put I-40 through Haywood County instead of Madison.
There are some similarities, some connections, between these two roads,
but they're also differences. If you look at the alignment of I-40, it's
more of an east/west road, and I-26 is more of a north/south road. There
was a proposal to build I-40 through Madison County, which was bitterly
contested by the people in Madison County in those early days—the 60s, I
guess early 60s. Because of the politics it was decided to put it
through Haywood County instead. There's been a sense of loss in Madison
County. I
And this is what we're suffering today.
Yes. We're paying the price for doing it real cheap. It was not so much
of a cut-rate thing back when they did it. That's all they could afford
when they did it, but it goes more to the heart of the design. I know
that I-26 was much more carefully planned out. I don't want to say
there's no possibility we couldn't have a rock slide on I-26 when it's
open. But if you look at the type of construction over here, and even
look at the type on Tennessee's side of US-23 now, that will tie
into—that'll all eventually be I-26—it is eons ahead of what they did
back in the 60s down on I-40. And the type of terrain—the
If they're heading west, yeah, that's going to be a problem. You talked about the environmental assessment that went on for three years prior to the actual construction. What kinds of issues was the Department of Transportation facing environmentally with a project of this scale, scope and location? What were some of the major things that you were concerned about and had to deal with and continue to deal with?
Well, there are a number of issues that are involved in that
environmental impact statement. They look at the location of the houses
that'll be replaced—the schools, the churches, the graveyards. And of
course, we have had to replace some of the housing—buy people out or
move them into different areas to make room for this I-26. We did move
three cemeteries, I think. And that's tough when you have people already
buried, and you have to deal with the relatives of those people and move
the graves. Although, that went a lot better than I thought it would go.
We didn't have really a tough time with that. We hired a professional
grave-mover that knew what he was doing [and was] sensitive to the
problems with the families and the needs of the families, so that went
fairly well. One of the biggest areas, environmentally, that we've had
to deal with
I've read a statistic that on this job there was the largest single order for culvert pipe ever recorded in the United States.
Yes. There're only two major pipe manufacturers in the country that do
steel pipe. Each one of them got the order on one of the big jobs. The
Gilbert job, the C job, had fifteen miles of metal pipe, and that was by
Lane Pipe Company. And Lane did tell
That's remarkable to me. I spent some time up at the Babbitt's property on Sprinkle Creek. I remember going up there one time. It was the last apple season that they had up there before the orchard was bulldozed, but my son and I went up there and picked apples. I remember talking with Lucille and Howard, and they were talking about all the springs that were on that property. I think that he was claiming that there were as many as thirty springs on that property. How do you as an engineer then, kind of wrestle with that issue? You know, I remember being out there with Jody one time—Jody Kuhne. We were up on Little Creek, and we were looking at the mountain face and looking at the mountain and standing on US-23 right there. He said, "Well, all of this is really pretty insignificant, geologically. It's really the creek that's the major geological thing in this specific area." So with that idea in mind, then, my sense is that if you've got a place with twenty springs or ten springs, that each one of those things is going to—over a period of time—serve to erode what would be your fill area or the road itself.
Well, what we had to do, Rob, was capture each of those individual
springs in a piping system. And that's what we've done at each of the
major fills. Before we start putting the fill material in one of the
things we had to do was a lot of undercutting, because of the type of
material that's prevalent in this area. It's called coluvium material.
It's not a good material to build the fills on. And so the first order
of business under all the fills was to go in and dig out these coluvium
deposits, some which were up to fifty feet deep, and replace those with
shot rock. When we went in and dug under those areas—under where the
interstate would be, down at ground level before the fill was started—we
It strikes me. I've had this experience a number of times when I've been up on the highway. Obviously just the enormity of this project, but at the same time there is a minuteness also. I think in terms of dealing with an individual spring that might be putting out a quarter of a gallon a minute or something like that. You have this enormous project, but then you have really small little details all along the route that have to be dealt with also.
Well, that's true. We have that situation. But we have that on most of
our jobs. This job is not unique; we've had a lot of springs on most of
our jobs in these mountains in the past. This area—from the Babbit apple
orchard in particular, across Buckner Gap, all the way down to Bear
Branch Road—has been an area that's had more springs than any place I've
ever been and all the highway jobs I've worked on. Another way we've had
to deal with those springs is go in and do horizontal drains, which will
bore holes that we drill into the mountainside horizontally or at a
small angle, hence the
This specific job is not necessarily unique in that respect, in that you face these kinds of issues on a lot of jobs in the mountains. Talk a little bit about what has been unique to this job. What are some of the issues that you've faced that you haven't seen before, that maybe caused you to do things differently than you normally would've as an engineer?
The first thing that would strike a highway engineer doing the kind of work that I do is the enormity of it. That's the biggest obstacle. I think we have a total of—on the Gilbert job, the C job—twenty six million cubic yards of material. That's about six or seven times what was moved out of Beaucatcher open cut in Asheville.
Wow.
And there is a set period of the contract. This material does have to be
moved. It was a longer contract than normal because of the size of it,
but it is still five years. The contractor has to move all of that
material in that time period, or he's penalized. There's a pretty stiff
penalty, like about five thousand dollars per day, if he doesn't make
it. So that sets up a schedule—for four years of the five years the
contractor
Has this been professionally for you the job of a lifetime, so to speak?
It would be the job of a lifetime for any DOT engineer. I've had in my
career an average of maybe five to eight projects per year. As I've
said, a big interstate project would be a ten million dollar project to
move two million yards of material. We have a lot of smaller projects
where we resurface the roads every year. Or we build bridge replacement
projects. Half million dollar job to put a new bridge in. And that's
[Laughs]
The Department of Transportation is divided into fourteen divisions, and each division has six or eight counties in it. This is division thirteen, which is everything from the Haywood County line to Hickory. We have seven counties here. We have three resident engineers that do all of the major construction—big projects. Of course, our maintenance people do smaller projects themselves. But for the new contract projects, the three resident engineer offices—one in Asheville, one here in Mars Hill, and one in Marion—manage all the work going on in division thirteen. It's contract work. It's more of a geographic thing. It was just more of fate that I was here at this time and place, but there's actually no competition.
I have heard concerns from primarily environmentalists that this route, because of its location—because like you say it opens up the southern Ohio Valley basically, and opens it up to the lowlands and South Carolina—that there is a concern about hazardous waste on this road. That is kind of one of the prime motivations. Do you have any thoughts on that?
When you say prime motivations, do you mean for building the road?
For building the road.
I have heard nothing about that in official DOT capacity. I know that hazardous waste materials are moved across the interstate systems all over the country from place to place. It would not surprise me to find out in the future that, since South Carolina takes hazardous waste, that other states will use the route if they're in this quarter area. Probably some of them are coming down I-40 and I-85 and I-77 now, and I don't know of any prohibition that the state would put on that. But as far as building a road just for that purpose, I don't think that would be the case. Or that might have been one of the fifty reasons for justifying I-26, but it would not be up in the top. Not from North Carolina DOT standpoint, anyway.
And obviously, this is going to be a much safer, better route than I-40.
I want to make sure that I'm getting this point across. North Carolina would not build a road through North Carolina so that Pennsylvania or Michigan can get their waste to South Carolina. If there's something there, it's way above my level and they have not involved me in that. But I've never heard anything that would lead me to believe that.
Like you say, waste is travelling, and I would fully expect that that would be the case on this road at some point. But as far as it being a prime motivator, it's not.
I don't think so. We're involved in building the best road for the money for the time period that we're in. That's our commission from the taxpayers, or our job description if you want to look at it that way. We're just building a part of the whole nation-wide interstate system.
There's an interesting book out. It's a history of the interstate system. It's called Divided Highways, I think. I can't remember the author's name, but in reading that book he was talking about the initial motivation for the interstate highway system back in the early 50s. President Eisenhower basically was really enlightened when he was fighting Hitler in Germany and saw the road system.
Saw the Autobahn System, and he realized the importance from national security standpoint more than anything, I think. To be able to move military machinery and people rapidly—from point A to point B—nation-wide. And he looked at the fact that the United States did not have anything that compared to that. That's my understanding of how the interstate system was born. He brought it back from Germany and said, "Let's build that in this country." I think he did it primarily for national defense, but also realizing that commerce and other things would benefit from it.
That's exactly my understanding. I think he had had an experience in
between the two world wars where he was heading up an army division or
something like that. And it took them over a month to move across
country—move that whole division across country—and recognize that "Boy,
we could be in a situation where this is just going to be untenable. We
have to be able to do better than that." And obviously, commercial and
tourism traffic the 50s was beginning to play a more major role, as
truck traffic was increasing, and commercial traffic. You talked about
this quarter being historically a commercial trade route, and the
reading I've done is that even Native Americans were moving along this
very route three, four hundred years ago maybe, trading. Tribes from the
Southern Appalachians were trading with tribes from the southern Ohio
valley. I talk about that fact when I talk about lecture and show slides
and
I think that's the case. And I think the road has just been modernized to match the times. I said before this old road that crossed the mountain now that we're dealing with was built nearly seventy years ago. For all I know, back in the 30s there were as many horse and buggies went across there on that opening day as there were automobiles.
I think that's accurate.
Have you met this guy, Calahan? He lives right off of Bear Branch up in that hollow up there. He and his brother were the famous Calahan Brothers back in the 30s and 40s. They were a musical duo, and they played in the Grand Ole' Opry and a number of places. But he was telling me when he was growing up and they were first getting started on their music career, they would travel up and down 23 in a horse and buggy and play these little gigs in these churches and schoolhouses and things all the way up to Johnson City. [They would] go back and forth on a pretty regular basis, doing that until they eventually moved on to bigger and better things. But he said it was all wagon travel. Horse travel.
I've seen pictures of people trying to bring wagons across the top of
Sam's Gap back at the turn of the century, mired down in the mud. You'd
see people pushing the wheels and somebody else leading the horses,
trying to get them all coordinated move that thing out of the mud. And
you can just imagine looking at those mountains now, [Laughs]
That's entirely correct. Have you ever heard of a book called The Road by a man named John Ehle?
I can't say it as I have, Rob.
I'll bring you a copy. This was, basically, it's a novel, but it is about the building of the road system from Old Fort into Swannanoa back in the 1870s. It'll really put road building into perspective for you. It's a wonderful book, and I've got it. I'll try and remember to bring that over to you. I think you would really just find it thoroughly interesting in terms of how it was done and what they had to do to do this thing. Used a lot of convict labor.
I have another book. I think it's called Kingdom of Madison.
Yes, I've got that one.
Written by a history professor at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Wellman.
Wellman, Manly Welman?
That's right.
Sounds right. He tells about the old turnpike down the river. It's
probably very similar to what you're talking about. Back in the early
days—and this would have been the 1800s—that's how you paid your taxes.
The men went out and carried rocks, and they shoveled and
wheel-barrowed, and improved a section of road that washed out in
flooding and all that. And they had to work for a week or so to pay
their taxes, or put
Wouldn't that be nice?
Or a time machine to see.
Yeah, actually see what it was like. My friend Delly was born I guess in
1900, and she lived over in Sodom Laurel and talked about how her family
raised tobacco when it was first brought into the area. Another way for
them to get money was for them to go out and gather herbs and really
stockpile lots of herbs, because evidently there was an herb house in
Asheville. She was saying they would stockpile things, and then they'd
get a huge wagon load of stuff. But you're talking a two, three, four
day trip for them to take that wagon load of herbs to Asheville, sell
it, maybe do some shopping while they were there, and then get back out
of there. We're talking a long time. Just a big effort. I want to go
back a little bit to a couple things. One of the environmental concerns
I know is that this is prime black bear habitat. I read the article in
the Sentinel last week about the bear tunnels, and certainly have known
about those for a while. And you talked early on about bear-hunting as a
child, and going out with relatives to do that kind of thing.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
( ) that this is one of the real prime black bear habitats in the eastern United States. How does, then, something like an interstate highway, with an enormous right-of-way, really affect those populations of wildlife and black bear? Or even flora and fauna? What do you as an engineer, how do you respond to that? How do you accommodate for those populations?
Well, the environmental assessment of the project has been discussed by
biologists and people with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources
Commission that know much more about it than most of the highway people
do. They have data on bear, deer, all the wildlife and plants in that
area. It's not an easy thing to resolve. Of course, the old existing
highway—there has been mortality for bear up there. Just a month ago
there was a black bear run over on Sam's Gap, on the old road right
there. But it's more likely to happen with bigger faster speed highways
in one respect. The other respect is you have a lot more sight-distance
on the newer roads. The problem with the bear is they like to
travel—migrate—long distances. And they do a lot of that at night.
They'll cross those roads when it's dark foggy conditions, and the
motorists don't see them in time to swerve and get around them. We have
built the crossings. Or, we're in the process of building these
bear-crossings, which is a new concept to highway building, trying to
route the animals under the roads. I think other states have begun to
use it. I saw an article recently about an underpass in Florida for
reptiles—for alligators and turtles and things like that. So, the
highway building industry is trying to accommodate in every way that
I want to jump back a little bit. You know we started our conversation
talking about your early life in Barnardsville; about your grandmother
walking to visit people, things like that. And obviously progress,
things change, the size of our culture, the size of our population has
grown. And this road is being built really to accommodate a lot of those
changes, and to really deal with the increased traffic and the size of
vehicles. You're obviously just very much a person who places value on
those older ways, on those older traditions, but also a person who is
modern enough—sophisticated enough—to recognize the need for these
roads. I'm curious between the contrast of the two. How do you think
about that? You can go to part of this county and still see people
walking, going to visit neighbors and things like that. But obviously
this road is a much
Well I guess I would see myself as pragmatic, if that's the right word to use. Number one, I don't see that I-26, the quarter, the new road that we're building, will completely change the whole area of this part of Madison County. The immediate footprint of the road, yes. It's obvious it's changing. But I think that when you get back into the coves and the valleys a mile a way from the road, you're still going to have the local people living there and having their little worlds that will not change drastically as a result of the road being over the mountain range from where they live today. So I look at it from that respect. I do have a problem in seeing a lot of trees cut down—forest land cut down. I love the forest and the trees. To me, it's a sacrifice. I see it a whole lot like going to the dentist when you have a tooth-ache, and the dentist says, "You know, this is going to hurt a little bit, but after I get through doing this things are going to be better." If I didn't feel that overall the balance was tipped in favor of the road, I wouldn't participate in it—if I thought it was overall a destructive thing that was bad. To me, it's a balance. I look at dead trees on one hand; I look at dead bodies on the other hand. All I have to do is go look at one tractor-trailer rig at the base of Murray Mountain and see a fellow decapitated or a woman all banged up like the lady. She wasn't killed a couple weeks ago, but she may be paralyzed, or she may be broken up the rest of her life and never walk again for all I know. She was in pretty bad shape.
And that was so close to being a real disaster with school buses.
School buses. There could have been a lot of tragedy there. So life is a
balance, and you take the good and the bad. And you have to make
choices. Life is full
Here's a little metaphor. Looking down the road ten, twenty years from now, what do you think the effect will be? Again, obviously, a lot of these changes preceded even thought of the road. Or certainly any kind of planning of the road. A lot of the demographic changes, the cultural changes. Do you see the road as maybe accelerating some of those changes? What will be the end effect of the highway? Other than, obviously, the safety. That is so obvious to everyone, I think.
I think there will be changes of some degree, adjacent to the road. I
think Madison County—the business people, the chamber of commerce
people—are hoping that it will bring some additional industry to the
county. As you know, the county right now has a population of less that
20,000, and if you go back and look at the census in 1940, it was
25,000. So the young kids are leaving Madison County. That in itself is
not good to preserve the old way of life if the generations are not
succeeding themselves, and the kids
I went to a couple meetings of a sign ordinance commission down in Marshall, and it was very interesting. There was a lot of people speaking pro and con on that issue, and one of the main arguments for people speaking for the signs—who wanted to be able to put signage up—was of course, "Well this is my land, and it's adjacent to this highway. I didn't really have a choice in terms of the highway coming through. I was paid for my land and that kind of thing, and I want to be able to use my land in any way I see fit. And that at this point would include a huge billboard." It was interesting to me, because that value—that idea of basically being able to do with your land whatever you see fit—is a very, very old value in this community, basically one that brought me to this community. I love the fact that "this is my land. I can do whatever I want with it."
You see more and more of that. I saw that in Buncombe County, in that area that I was born in—Barnardsville area—with the county commissioners wanting to restrict the use of the water in the creeks. And there's a balance there that allows the property-owners some freedoms to do basically what he wants to do with the property. But at the same time, you have to be cognizant of the overall. To me, those billboards, the way I've seen them in other parts of the country, would be a disaster for the beauty of this road. I can understand the property-owner wanting to make some money off of his mountain land that he can't do anything else with up near the interstate. But when I look at the big picture, and I look at the people in Madison County—the same people that want to bring industry and tourism to the county—and then I put myself in the place or in the car of that person from Michigan driving down here, and I see all those billboards plastered, I don't know if I want to stop in Madison County or not.
That's entirely the way I feel about it, too. At the same time, it's kind
of like this was—this place, I remember moving here and thinking, "Boy,
there is this kind of freedom that certainly doesn't exist in suburban
Washington, DC!" [Laughter]
That's a part of the overall changing atmosphere you see.
Well, and like you say, I think there's good and pros and cons on all of those things. And I do think that that is one of the pros in terms of the changing cultural atmosphere. Twenty years ago there wouldn't have been any discussion about that.
It wouldn't even have been proposed to have a signing ordinance. But you
see what I see is abuse of that right. Madison County, before they
started the trash clean-up system—living over here, you saw the same
thing I saw. It was deemed a right to throw your trash out of your car
window on the highway. Before they had landfills and
Yeah. I live on a paved road over in the Little Pine section, and we have a stretch of two, three miles of unpaved road that fronts our property. It had been a historical dumping site for years. And the woman who owned it finally hired somebody to pull all the metal out, stuff like that. And then the trash ordinance came in, and we ended up turning a couple people in who—you know, I'd go to the end of my drive way and see people just backed up to the hillside.
Well, is that right? Did they have the right to do that?
I don't think they do anymore. [Laughter]
They thought they did!
But they certainly thought they did! And it was again, seemed like something that was almost historical in nature.
Well that's part of this overall changing aspect. 200 years ago you could divide Madison County into little miniature counties. And that family lived there, and they did what they wanted to and they really didn't affect the other little counties adjacent to them.
Right.
But that's not the case now.
That's exactly right.
That's not the case.
And you know, the whole straight-piping issue is part of that kind of thing. Again, when I moved here that was kind of the order of business.
When we started this road up here, that was before this effort to clean up the straight-piping. At that time, a survey was done—twenty-five percent of the households of Madison County were straight-piped. So you're talking about several thousand households putting their stuff straight into the streams. Some of it were those streams up here now. It was kind of an irony—and funny to some of us building the road—that we had all these restrictions on us about putting silt in there. We went out there and we found these pipes coming out of the houses straight into the streams. And you'd hear a flush, and all at once you get this deposit of waste material in this stream. If I dropped a tablespoon of dirt in there and somebody saw me do it, I would get severely castigated. That's part of the irony, but you look at the big picture. Clean up that straight pipe, eliminate the signs, eliminate the dumping the garbage over the hillsides. I think overall that's working out for the better, for the overall betterment of the whole.
Right. One final thing is—and we've talked about this and kind of eluded
to it—and in a sense I think you've probably answered this, but I think
what I recognize is just the speeding up of everything. Everything is
getting faster. Obviously. And one of the things that I really cherish
about this place, and the particular place that I live is the—especially
compared to where I grew up. My parents live a mile from the DC beltway,
and I'm old enough to remember quite clearly what the place was like
before the belt-way came in. It was an area of smaller communities and a
lot of rolling hillside, that kind
Well, I think I understand what you're asking. People tend to fantasize
the best of what we've had in life and what we see in life. And I think
ideally we would live in a fantasy area or world where things don't
change. I can remember all those wonderful times growing up, being out
in the creek trout fishing, or eating popcorn in front of the fireplace
with Granny. I would like to preserve that. I'd like it to stay like
I'm hoping that Madison County—and I just differentiate between thinking and hoping—but I'm hoping that Madison County does not change its basic nature and character because of this road or anything else. I'm hoping that there will be a time of stabilization where there will be enough industry to attract the people that live in the county where the kids don't move away [and] where it maintains its population. It has its own individuality separate from Asheville or somewhere else. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. I think there are natural limitations on radical change. I think all it would take—even with this road built and completed and everything—would be another major economic hard time. A bad recession, depression or something like that. And then all the building, the new fast foods and everything, just comes to a crashing halt. All the realtors go out of business. I don't wish for something like that, but realistically, we can't stay in this economic period that we're in indefinitely. More than likely, we're going to have our slower periods like we had in the 70s and 80s.
I think there's some natural limitations there. Where you live in Little
Pine, this road—I don't think you will see the affects of the road in
Little Pine, or even where I live on Bull Creek in Madison County. The
immediate area adjacent to the road I think will change. Who knows what
the overall change in the county will be; I don't have any idea. It's
hard to tell, but I don't envision or don't wish for an overly developed
Madison County. To me, that's a contradiction in terms. When I think of
Madison County, I think of rural beauty, mountains, not too many people.
I don't believe in my or your lifetime we're going to see a half million
people living in Madison County and everything
That won't be an interstate-grade road, but that will be like a widening of 19 E? Maybe straightening in parts of it?
It will be both. It will not be designated an interstate, but it will be closer to an interstate than it will just a four lane un-widened road. It'll be built to newer standards for faster, safer traffic and so forth.
But it won't be accessed—won't be as limited as it would be on an interstate.
I think it will be limited, but I don't know if they're going to build frontage roads and build interchanges. More than likely not. I haven't seen the planning for that road, or had a lot of discussion about it. But I don't think it'll be left totally unlimited, either, where people can just connect a driveway into it. I think there will be some control on it. But once that road is finished, I don't see a whole lot more major road building in Madison County for the next twenty or thirty years. Now, I'm not a forecaster, and I don't look at these things and study them and look at the growth patterns. Some people do, but I'm trying to ask myself, "Where would you build another road in Madison County?" You mentioned 25-70. I was involved in that road-building. And I look at it. If you look at the portion from Weaverville down to Marshall, for example, that road has been there now since.
‘82?
'82. Eighty-three it was opened. Nearly twenty years. I don't think it has changed the character of that area drastically. It probably is accessible as far as the land area and the geography of the areas up through here.
No, I think what we're seeing along that little corridor is—and again, this has been probably in the last five to ten years—there is more home construction. And I think that that is growth in Asheville, basically, that's coming out to a more quiet rural area with great—incredible—access into Asheville. As a person who—for the early years I was here—traveled along the river, working jobs in Asheville or something like that and traveling along the river, that road was an absolute godsend. And at the same time, there is again that memory of the old road and the thinking, "Well God, those were the good ole' days." But the reality is, "Boy!" The time spent on the old road, the danger of the old road. It was a scary time.
A lot of accidents down there. A lot of people tumbled off the side of the road. Young kid.
Into the river.
The kids drinking and so forth.
The traffic moving really fast, too. I want to share with you, though—I've been up certainly on the new highway many many times, and I'm struck by—there's a couple locations. One is crossing Sam's Gap from Tennessee, but also crossing Buckner Gap. I have to tell you that there is this sense that the view—especially when you cross Buckner Gap—is so absolutely incredible.
When you can see this parkway mountain range?
You just see the whole southern mountains. It just opens up. I tell people, I say, "You know, this is going to be a safer road. There's no doubt in my mind." But I think that there's going to be accidents, because people are just going to come across that gap and go, "[gasps] and just be so taken with how beautiful it is."
I agree with you. There was a lot of debate where we would put our welcome center and our rest area, and a lot of people wanted it at the state line up there. But the geographics were not such that we had a big enough area up there. We would have had to go in and just level an entire mountain. Twenty acres of a mountain. And you would have had a real bungled up looking area by doing that even if we had the right of way, which I guess we could have acquired it if we were just determined to build it. But you had no view out of there! All you could see was the adjacent hills, which are pretty, but you don't have that panoramic view that you have from the area that you're talking about, just south of the Buckner Gap cut. It's a shame that at that higher elevation we did not have a place big enough there. But we're not but a mile below there.
You're down right close to the Babbit's property, aren't you?
It is the Babbit's property. We're going to build a scenic overlook area there such that people coming in to rest can walk up a walkway, and there's a knob there. There's a razorback mountain that comes out just north of that orchard area. And it comes right down to the interstate, but it's a little bit above the interstate. There's a huge oak tree there, and we're going to build—actually build a platform area like a deck area—that people can walk up that walkway. And from that you see that whole panoramic view that you're talking about, including Mount Mitchell. And then we're building another overlook for people coming northbound just down below there that can see that view. But even going out through that smaller cut down at the very bottom there at Jarvis property—you go through it, and to me that cut just frames that panoramic view. Of all the pictures I take, I probably have more that I've taken at different times of that area, just because it just perfectly frames all of that.
It frames it.
But I think your perception that that's the view—it is, and I think people are going to be stopping everywhere. One thing that I think needs to be added to this discussion that we have not touched on before we end up here—and I think this aspect of the view is going to bring it out—and that's air quality. One thing I'm hoping is that when people see the potential for views, and that you can go up there today when there's a front moving through here in the winter time, and you can see everything perfectly clear on a clear day. But in the middle of the summer with all the haze and fumes that overhangs, air pollution and all—I'm hoping that—as a builder involved in this road—that people will go up there and they'll look, and they'll see the view when it's clear and they'll say, "We want this year round." I know that's kind of paradoxical, because people will say, "Well, why are you participating in the road-building, because those cars are contributing to that air pollution." There will be some of that. But I have to be optimistic enough to believe that the technology can be developed to reduce that automobile pollution. I think the major polluters are the industries up in the Ohio Valley and up north of here.
And in Tennessee.
I noticed when our governor was up here a couple months ago, and I got to
ride in the helicopter with him and be his tour guide for I-26—which was
an honor for me—but the reporter in the plane was asking him about the
air pollution laws. He signed new law in reducing pollution pretty
dramatically. It's not as much as everybody wanted, but I think there's
going to be more and more pressure to do that. What I'm saying is that I
hope that this scenic highway will be kind of a focal point. If people
are interested in
And so just having the views that they have from the highway will hopefully cause people to be a little bit more active proponents for this. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. And I think that that makes some sense.
You were going back to my childhood; I don't remember haze and pollution back in the ‘50s when I was growing up around here.
Well, I guess Smokey Park was almost uninhabitable in different parts of the summer just because of all the vehicles, and just with the inversion of the air.
Yeah, I've noticed a dramatic increase in the stuff lately, and something's going to have to be done with it.
Well, I think Gary Walklin's wife had real issues with the air quality.
Oh, she did. She did. She went back to Alaska because she said that she's just allergic to everything around here. It was not only air pollution, but a lot of things.
I emailed him a couple weeks ago and told him that she would have been glad she wasn't here at the end of the summer as dry as it was around here. This is a really bad year for all of that.
I wish he was still here so you could do a full-scale interview. He was one of the more interesting people I've ever had work for me.
Well I did about an hour and a half with him.
Did you? That's good.
He felt a little bit scattered that day, so he and I are emailing back and forth. I'm trying to get him to say, "Go ahead and use this for this project." But he was concerned that he wasn't totally able to concentrate. We were out on the job, and he was obviously needing to pay attention to what was going on out there. But I find him to be just a really interesting man.
He was probably one of the most environmentally sensitive people that have ever worked for me. And it worked extremely well. It was a godsend for this job to have people like that, because we've gained a lot of recognition for being environmentally sensitive in building this road. A lot of it was because of people like Gary. There were tours where people were brought up here from other areas of the state, and I've heard people say, "Well if they can keep that stream clean here with those huge slopes they're working on, then we can do it in Winston-Salem. Or we can do it in Greensboro or somewhere else where they don't have near the geography to have to deal with. But Gary, having spent most of his career in Alaska, had to be—he was just ahead of us around this area. I got tremendous ratings from the people that rated the job that he worked on, for that reason.
That's great. I ended up swapping some photographs with him for a lot of
the lumber that he cut that he used to build his house. But he had a
pile of beautiful red oak flooring that I ended up swapping for. We just
converted the top half of our barn to some more workspace. And I'm in
the process of laying that flooring down now. This is going to be the
Gary Walklin floor in my barn now. [Laughter]
You need to do what my neighbor who's deceased now did. He was an art professor at the college here.
Yeah, I know Gordon.
Well, he passed away with the cancer, but he purchased the property adjacent to mine. When he purchased it before I did back—I guess it was in the 60s or 70s—it had a tobacco barn on it. He looked at that barn, and as an artist he could envision that being made into a household. He didn't have the architectural background to know whether it was going to be stable, but I think his father-in-law was an architect in New York, and he brought him down here and they looked at that. He said, "Oh, this is sound. Just leave all the poles and everything in there." So he lacquered the tier-poles up through the middle of it. When you went into Don's house in the living room, you'd see these poles that are lacquered sticking up through. Of course, he made art studios, he had storage space.
Our place is kind of typical of Madison County farms. It's 100 acres, but it's only an acre of tillable ground and tobacco allotment. My wife and I both raised tobacco in our years here, but we knew that was in the past for us, certainly.
END OF INTERVIEW