Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,518

This is the grave of Horace Kephart.

Born in 1862 in Juniata County, Pennsylvania, Kephart grew up in Iowa. He was really into the outdoors. He took a lot of camping and packing trips and tried to find a way to make this work for him professionally. That wasn’t easy though. His training was as a librarian, first at Boston University and then at Cornell, where I think he met his wife Laura. He got a job at Yale for awhile in the 1880s. Then a book collector, one of these rich Gilded Age types, sent him to Italy to be his own personal rare book buyer. By 1890, he directed the St. Louis Mercantile Library, the oldest lending library west of the Mississippi. So he was clearly a successful person and he would direct that until 1903. Kephart has a wife and kids too, but it evidently was not a successful marriage. In 1904, Laura Kephart moved herself and their six children to Ithaca, New York without him. They never did divorce but they were separated for their rest of their lives. I imagine Kephart’s long journeys into the forests did not help.

With his wife gone, it seems Kephart no longer wanted to be a librarian. In fact, he suffered a nervous breakdown and moved to Dayton to be with his father for awhile. He also had tuberculosis and was on the verge of drinking himself into the grave. He moved to the Great Smoky Mountains and fell in love with the region. He wanted to be alone for a good long time to recover from the hell his life had become. He later said, “I took a topographic map and picked out on it, by means of the contour lines and the blank space showing no settlement, what seemed to be the wildest part of these regions; and there I went.” This turned out to be near Hazel Creek in western North Carolina, today part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There, Kephart fished and hunted and lived apart from people as much as he could. He also basically abandoned his children and was never really a part of their lives again.

But Kephart couldn’t stay away from society entirely. He liked to write. He wanted other people to see what he saw in the forest. This was the period of the Progressive Era when young men especially were again embracing the manly life in nature. Theodore Roosevelt was of course the most famous of these, but we have covered a number of these characters, such as George Bird Grinnell. This was the era when the Boy Scouts were rising, based in no small on “saving” our good young white Protestant boys by getting them out of the morally deficient and ethnically questionable cities for good times in nature learning how to be strong masculine men. Kephart tapped straight into this. He started publishing articles in Field & Stream, one of the two major outdoor journals of this time and milieu. It was the more populist one, with the similarly named Forest & Stream, being the more elite version.

Kephart started collecting these pieces into books as well. Camping and Woodcraft came out in 1906, Camp Cookery in 1910, and Sporting Firearms in 1912. These were generally less theoretical than the super elite men trying to prove themselves. Rather, they were. hands-on guides for people who really didn’t know what they were doing in the forest. Moreover, Kephart is one of the people who really introduced camping to the United States. It just wasn’t an activity people really did much before this, not for fun anyway. Even the big manly man TR had basically a giant pack train with him so he could live a life of luxury while in Montana or whatever. But Kephart, well, this was about taking a little bit of gear and camping by yourself. The rise of automobiles shortly after and the creation of decent roads in the following decades made this possible for a lot more people.

Kephart also just really found Appalachia interesting. Now a big time writer, he began to expand his writing to studies of the people of the region itself. This led to one of the most important books ever written about the region, Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers was published in 1913. It certainly played up some of the more colorful and odd things about this region and its people and traditions. We might even see it as an early version of Applachianploitation of the kind that sixty years later became popular in films such as Deliverance. But while there were other books out there pointing fun at these rednecks, Kephart at least came it with real respect for these people and their ways. There are chapters on bear hunting, moonshining, and crime, but also the self-sufficiency of these poor people and how they refused help even though they were in poverty. Kephart believed these people were relics from the past, the real ancestors of the modern America, somehow untouched by modernity. This was completely ridiculous and there were all sorts of middle class people and landowners around too that he just didn’t talk about because they didn’t interest him.

But for context, when Great Smoky Mountains National Park was formed, for which Kephart was a central figure, one of the most popular parts of the park became Cades Cove. Still is today. This is where people drive to see how the people used to live up there. But it’s almost totally fake. Yes, those cabins were there. But so were modern stores, middle-class homes, and other signs of the twentieth century. Park planners simply erased them from the landscape to create the mythological idea of people who were there without the modern world until the park’s creation. Plenty of people who still visit this place still believe this today. So it’s not like Kephart was operating in some weird place here. People wanted to see these old-timey folks that way, and so they did.

Speaking of the National Park, Kephart was one of the critical figures in its creation. He lobbied for it through the 20s. He and his friend, the photographer George Masa, did a lot of work publicizing the region’s beauty. It was a somewhat controversial move in national park world. The original national parks were intended to be places of awe and wonder–Yellowstone, Yosemite, etc. A bunch of relatively low-slung mountains with a long history of white inhabitance was not what a lot of those people had in mind. There was some resistance to it. But momentum grew and grew for it and other parks in the east, such as Acadia and Everglades. As hiking started to grow in American life too, Kephart was a big figure in the creation of the Appalachian Trail, along with his friend Benton MacKaye and others and he is the one who laid out the route through what is today the national park.

However, Kephart would not live to see it through. In 1931, he got in a car accident and died. Not sure why, but he was a pretty legendary alcoholic long after his divorce so since I wanted to mention that somewhere, this is as good as any spot. He was 68 years old.

Two weeks after his death, the U.S. Geological Service named a peak in the region Mt. Kephart, after him. Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in 1934. Many of the people Kephart wrote about in his books were evicted from the park upon its creation, as was common for New Deal projects in the South throughout these years, including for dam building and, later, for the Manhattan Project.

Kephart’s writings largely remain in print today, though I have not read them. But you can get them if you are in the visitor center at Great Smoky Mountains or in other regional bookstores. There was also a new biography of him published in 2019, so interest remains.

Horace Kephart is buried in Bryson City Cemetery, Bryson City, North Carolina.

If you would like this series to visit other key figures in the history of our national parks, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Clarence Dutton is in Wallingford, Connecticut and Ferdinand Hayden is in Philadelphia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.