The Aura of Loneliness: Horace Kephart Revisited

Horace Kephart, my great-grandfather, was one of the country's greatest librarians in his time—an iconoclast who ultimately helped pave the way for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But what I could never forget, as I grew up with his name, is that he'd abandoned his wife and six children at the age of 42 to live the outpost life—among bears, among the Appalachians, among the tall trees against which he sometimes rested his narrow, beautiful head.

Horace Kephart has inspired song cycles (the glorious Ways That are Dark by Daniel Gore) and theater and library collections; he proved so irresistible and ineluctable to me that I once spent some six months researching and writing my own version of his tale (with my brother's help, with the help of my father's cousin, with the help of librarians, too). Because his story can't be known wholly, it can get told again and again, which is something my talented cousin Libby Kephart Hargrave is poised to do later this month at the Calhoun Inn, in Bryson City, NC, where the Horace Kephart library is located. I know she'll do a bang-up job at an event that will be filmed by West Carolina University and will unite those whom Kephart continues to intrigue.

I post a few words from my 6000-word essay here, the skimmed-down beginning, an introduction to a man.

In July 1959, Clarence E. Miller, by then retired from his post at the St. Louis Mercantile Library, sat down to remember Horace Kephart, the most brilliant man, Miller claimed, that he had ever known and “almost, as a matter of course, the least assuming.” Miller was a young job applicant when he first encountered Kephart. Kephart was a man of some repute—born in 1862, a college graduate by 1879, an ambitious bilingual librarian whose career had taken him from Cornell to Florence to Yale and, in 1890, to the top spot in St. Louis, where he had notoriously begun to build the largest standing collection of “Western Americana.” Following “perhaps the briefest interview on record,” eighteen-year-old Miller was given employment at the Mercantile.

Hoping for mentoring and encouragement from this married father of six, Miller realized soon enough that he wouldn’t be getting much of either. Concise and efficient, his memory perfectly photographic, his demeanor cordial enough despite a predilection for solitude, Kephart, recalled Miller, "lived almost exclusively in a world of his own, guarded most securely by his constant activity. He had no secretary and spent most of his day beating a two-fingered tattoo on a Smith-Premier typewriter."

As the years went by, Miller noted, Kephart, a “crack shot with a rifle” who once tried but failed to raise a small corps of volunteer sharpshooters on behalf of the Spanish American War, spent more and more time in the woods. He would camp alone in the Ozarks on the weekends, Miller said, and then return to the library early each Monday, renewed, invigorated. Once back in the civilized world, he’d burrow deep in the card catalogue, pound his Smith-Premier, buy up a few more books for his beloved special collection. He’d consult with a growing band of western writers who hungered after the knowledge Kephart singularly possessed.

Nearly thirty years after Miller began making his sly observations of Kephart, F.A. Behymer, a star reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, journeyed to a tiny town in western North Carolina to spend an afternoon with the former librarian. The year was 1926. Kephart was sixty-four years old. He had lived alone in the Appalachians since scandalously abandoning all that had ever seemed to matter—his library, his reputation, his Ozarks, his wife, his six young children—at the age of forty-two. At the Cooper House in Bryson City, Behymer sat with Kephart in his modest writers’ workshop and noted how the window opened out on the Tuckaseegee and “the Big Smokies beyond.” It was a glorious view. It gave the illusion of freedom. It enabled Kephart—still sprightly, still fine-featured—to:

… raise his eyes and look through his window and see the swiftly-flowing water and the mountains that rise, ridge on ridge. And, if the day’s toll irks and the outdoors calls, there’s a packed knapsack hanging on the wall and within two hours he can be out in the wide spaces and the high places where he likes best to be.

My great-grandfather’s knapsack weighed just twenty-seven pounds. In the long, strange last chapter of his life, it was all he ever needed to feel the most alive. He had an “aura of loneliness,” Miller would later recall. It was the legacy he would leave with us, the mystery of a man.