(One other thing I forgot to mention in Rutherfordton—a town I think I’d like to re-visit someday— was a coffee shop/restaurant/bar in one end of a storefront, near the courthouse, with the most appropriate name I’d seen in a long time: Legal Grounds).
A few miles away outside Marion, the county seat of McDowell County, Garden Hill, the home of Joseph M. Carson’s father, John Hazard Carson, and my original immigrant ancestor in that line (1773), is still standing and in almost its original form, having survived both General Stoneman’s raiders in 1865, a fire in 1894, and a series of later owners. It’s now owned by a non-profit foundation. The house was more or less closed for some required repairs and ADA-type alterations, but the one staff member who was there was delighted to hear that a direct Carson descendant had come from so far away to see the house, and basically gave us the run of the place. She showed us round the first floor and added some bits to the standard tour-guide spiel to place the various ancestors in their context for us. Then she told us to take ourselves round and look at whatever else we liked in the house, which meant we got to go up to the third story, normally closed to tourists, and see some of the bones of the house in the attic, which I believe they’re getting ready to open in the next season or two. She also let me take pictures of whatever I liked (although unfortunately, I lost all of them in a hard drive accident last month).
We continued west on US 70, avoiding I-40 because I-40, and got to the oddly named town of Old Fort, named after the Revolutionary-era Davidson’s Fort, built for defense against the Cherokee. It was lunchtime. It was always lunchtime. We stopped at the train depot, which is an always thing if L can manage it, because me and trains. They had a nice photo exhibit up, around the Southern Railway which ran through town. M, though, was feeling hungry and a little fretful, so we ate at a luncheonette in a converted commercial building right across the street.
Once done there, we drove on to Asheville and stopped at the Folk Art Center. The center is an outgrowth of a nineteenth-century Presbyterian missionary’s interest in traditional Appalachian arts and crafts, and now serves as the hub for a lively and growing crafts guild stretching across the Southeast. L wanted to see the quilts they had up (of course), but wasn’t best pleased that some of them were hung way high, so she couldn’t inspect the detail and stitching. I liked the wooden treenware they offered in the gift shop, so L bought me a pasta strainer and French rolling pin, both carved from walnut.
A little later we ran into a roadblock, literally. A barricade stood in the road, with a sign telling us a rockslide on the Parkway had closed the road, so we had to turn around and backtrack to Marion, at which point we changed out driving (I had been, but I was frankly feeling the stress of mountain roads) and wove up state highway 80 to get back to the Parkway above the rockfall. L enjoyed driving the switchbacks around the mountains and getting to play with the clutch and shifter.
The Parkway is now complete north and east of Asheville, which it wasn’t when we came through in 1985, so we didn’t have to get onto US 221 and drive the stretch where I once scared the daylights out of L, shoving the Battlewagon over a two-lane highway with no guardrails at all around a bunch of REALLY STEEP hills. Our plan was to stop for dinner at Boone, where we knew of a really good steak house that served the college community, but discovered it had closed and the building was vacant. So we wound up at a really undistinguished chain restaurant, so undistinguished I can’t even remember its name, and went on to Salem, where we spent the night. Near Deep Gap, I saw a sign that we were driving on the “Doc and Merle Watson Highway, which was completely the right thing.
Our ultimate goal for Thursday was Old Salem, a preservation/re-creation of the original Moravian settlement at Salem, North Carolina. It was described as “Colonial Williamsburg without the pretension,” which is pretty accurate. It doesn’t have the size or scope of Williamsburg, either; they concentrate on the Moravian community which, being (1) religious and (2) consequently more homogeneous, took the narrower focus without harm.
One of the big things L thought I would enjoy was MESDA, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. The museum tours are time-certain, and since we’d arrived shortly before noon, we paid for places in the 1:00 PM tour, then went up the street to find lunch.
Lunch presented itself at the Salem Tavern, where we got in just before the lunch rush. L had salmon corn cakes, which turned out similar to Maryland crab cakes, I ordered the Moravian chicken pie, an acceptable version of chicken pot pie, and M ordered a boring grilled cheese sandwich. The child isn’t quite as unadventurous an eater as her sister is, but she definitely gets into ruts.
After lunch we took a quick hike up into God’s Acre, the common burial ground. I took a few pictures of stones, but they were fairly uninteresting (religious strictures on ornament, I suppose). We got back to MESDA on time, joined our group of two others plus the docent/guide, and … walked, or more accurately shuffled, through room after room after ROOM of domestic interiors. The museum is structured as a linked series of rooms representing domestic architecture on the mid-Atlantic seaboard from southern Maryland to South Carolina, there was NO way to change the docent’s semi-glacial pace through them, and there was NO place to sit. Almost every chair, settle, bench, or what-have-you was an EXHIBIT, and hence off-limits. I hadn’t brought my walking stick, and by halfway through my bad heel was in full flare and in pain with every step … which the docent utterly failed to notice or to offer to accommodate.
When we finally dragged (in my case, staggered) to the end, I was in no condition to walk anywhere for a while, so L and M went downstairs to the Toy Museum, which M turned out to be rather uninterested in—the exhibits were largely mechanicals or static displays that didn’t have a lot to engage her. L thought I might have enjoyed it more, but I hurt too damned much to care.
While we were walking down Main Street and looking at the various shops, L noticed a hatter’s and insisted we go in. I didn’t object so much, because as I&rsuqo;ve gotten older, I’ve gotten to like wearing hats more. The shop is now more a general retail place, but did have several styles of men’s hats, nothing much later than the original shop’s establishment date of 1825. An example of a circa-1800 style called a carriage hat caught my eye, so L didn’t have to persuade too very hard to get me to buy it. It wasn’t quite large enough and the sweatband (heavy leather) had a crease in it that leaves a red mark on my forehead, but I got it anyway.
By now it was mid-afternoon and we had only a couple of hours until they closed for the day, so our “tour” was necessarily limited. We stepped into the gunsmith’s shop for a few minutes, but they were shaping stocks, which isn’t nearly as exciting as watching someone at the forge shaping a barrel, or filing and assembling a lock mechanism. The Single Brothers’ House, where unmarried men and boys lived, was somewhat more interesting since it held the tinsmith/pewterer’s and the tailor’s quarters, as well as a smaller, single-manual version of the large Tannenberg organ that stands in the visitor’s center. Both organs are beautifully restored, beginning from almost total ruins, and quite playable. Along the way we learned some facts about distinctions of dress I wouldn’t have noticed on my own: girl’s and women’s age and marital status was indicated by the color of ribbon used to tie on their caps. Little girls wore red ribbons, unmarried girls and women pink, married women blue, and widows white. (There doesn’t seem to have been a corresponding system for the men, which failed to surprise me.)
Outside and behind the house, we watched a joiner working on shaping a large, free-standing cider press that would eventually stand in the tavern grounds. I took M down to the brothers’ prettily-tended kitchen gardens, which were coming on nicely. On the way back up to the car, we stopped at the public water pump and I demonstrated for M how you got water 250 years ago. The pump handle was well enough balanced that she could even work it herself for a couple of pumps.
Old Salem keeps pretty much business hours and there isn’t a lot to see in the evening, so we didn’t try to stay, but went on to Greensboro for the night.
