President Obama Speaks to the Horace Kephart Legacy

Today my cousin Libby sent me the transcript of a talk recently delivered by President Obama—a talk centered around America's Great Outdoors Initiative.  Tucked within those remarks are these words about my great grandfather, Horace Kephart, about whom I have written here many times on this blog, as, for example, here.

President Obama's words, which I reproduce here, make me, might I say it, proud?  They also make me hopeful.  (Added as a postscript, in my bronchitis haze:  I allude to legacies here, but I don't make a very persuasive link to the photograph.  And so, a correction:  In addition to the land my great grandfather helped to rescue from plunder, he sired the children depicted here.  The young, soulful-eyed man on the left was my grandfather, who sired my father, who is a continuing great dad to my brother, sister, and me.)

So conservation became not only important to America, but it became one of our greatest exports, as America’s beauty shone as a beacon to the world.  And other countries started adopting conservation measures because of the example that we had set.

Protecting this legacy has been the responsibility of all who serve this country.  But behind that action, the action that’s been taken here in Washington, there’s also the story of ordinary Americans who devoted their lives to protecting the land that they loved.

That’s what Horace Kephart and George Masa did.  This is a wonderful story.  Two men, they met in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina -- each had moved there to start a new life.  Horrified that their beloved wilderness was being clear-cut at a rate of 60 acres a day, Horace and George worked with other members of the community to get the land set aside.  The only catch was that they had to raise $10 million to foot the bill.

But far from being discouraged, they helped rally one of the poorest areas in the country to the cause.  A local high school donated the proceeds from a junior class play.  Preachers held “Smokey Mountain Sunday” services and encouraged their congregations to donate.  Local businesses chipped in.  And students from every grade in the city of Asheville -– which was still segregated at the time –- made a contribution.

So stories like these remind us what citizenship is all about.  And by the way, last year Michelle and I, we were able to walk some of the trails near Asheville and benefit from the foresight of people that had come before us.  Our daughters, our sons were able to enjoy what not only Teddy Roosevelt did but what ordinary folks did all across the country.  It embodies that uniquely American idea that each of us has an equal share in the land around us, and an equal responsibility to protect it.

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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.

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