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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Sam Parker, December 5, 2000. Interview K-0252. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Living in remote log cabin affects residents

This excerpt offers a brief look at the effect that wilderness can have on people. Living in a log cabin on 2,500 acres of undeveloped land, Parker felt a "pioneer mountain spirit." This feeling was not deep enough to prevent Parker from selling the land.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Sam Parker, December 5, 2000. Interview K-0252. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

ROB AMBERG:So at that point you were living in a log cabin? SAM PARKER:Living in a log cabin. 2,500 acres of just gorgeous mountain Eden. And very few people around. ROB AMBERG:What was it like being a person who was trying to sell home sites then in, basically, this almost wilderness area? That must have been pretty much of a challenge. SAM PARKER:It was tough. Now, we did get sales, and it kept us alive. And it got almost to the point, Rob, where you really didn't want to see people coming, because what you were going to do was sell a portion of this Eden to essentially a stranger. We were infected with the pioneer mountain spirit at that point in time. I think that's the word-we were infected with it. Here we were working with people-the laborers who worked there at that point in time-the Abby Hunnicuts, the Ponders, Aaron Ponder, Clay Jenkins. These people had essentially seen frontier mountain-living in reality and had grown out of that. So they knew. They still cooked on wood stoves. They still milked cows. They still did the things that the pioneering folks of this county have done for centuries. Now, they were one step above it, maybe a half a step above it, but they infected us with that pioneer feeling. The old back to the earth feeling. ROB AMBERG:How did you respond to that? Did you want that for yourself? SAM PARKER:We did. It's interesting. It made you want to get back to the earth, to do canning, to do hog raising, to do cattle. It's that frontier feeling. And we were infected, no question about it. Infected to the point that we asked Clay, who was the foreman on the job up there, blue-collar workers, "Start looking for us a place." We wanted a place of our own.