Mount Kephart: Named for the Man Who Saved the Smokies

The summit rising to the south carries the name of a man who arrived in these mountains broken and stayed to save them. Horace Kephart was a trained librarian, a scholar who had spent years cataloguing rare manuscripts in Saint Louis, when his life collapsed around him in the early nineteen hundreds. His marriage fell apart. His health deteriorated. By nineteen zero four he had retreated alone into the most remote corner of the southern Appalachians, settling first in a camp on Hazel Creek in what is now Swain County, North Carolina, then in Bryson City.

What he found there remade him. Kephart spent years living close to the mountain communities, documenting their speech, their foodways, their crafts, their history. He wrote with both precision and affection, and the books that came out of that immersion made the Smokies visible to the outside world in ways they had never been before. Our Southern Highlanders, published in nineteen thirteen and revised in nineteen twenty-two, introduced generations of readers to the culture of Appalachian mountain people. Camping and Woodcraft became a standard reference for outdoor life that went through edition after edition.

But Kephart's most consequential act was advocacy. He became the most prominent public voice for creating a national park in the Great Smoky Mountains, writing articles, lobbying officials, and persuading skeptics that these ancient mountains deserved the same federal protection being given to the West. He lived just long enough to see the project succeed. He died in a car accident near Bryson City in April nineteen thirty-one; the legislation enabling the park was already moving through Congress.

The mountain that bears his name, reaching more than six thousand two hundred feet, was renamed in his honor shortly before his death. No individual did more to ensure that the range you're looking at became public land forever. The view from that summit is partly his creation.