Mount Mitchell: A Dispute That Ended on a Summit

At six thousand six hundred eighty-four feet above sea level, Mount Mitchell is the highest point east of the Mississippi River, higher than any peak in the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains, or the White Mountains. It does not look like the highest thing for a long time, not until you are nearly at the top and the spruce-fir forest opens enough to show you the other ridgelines falling away in every direction.

The mountain carries the name of Elisha Mitchell, a University of North Carolina professor who first measured the summit elevation in eighteen thirty-five and announced that it was higher than the nearby peak his colleague and former student Thomas Clingman had been calling the highest. Clingman disputed this. The argument between the two men, conducted partly in scientific papers and partly in newspaper letters, lasted two decades.

In June of eighteen fifty-seven, Elisha Mitchell returned to the summit to remeasure it and settle the argument definitively. He slipped and fell from a waterfall on the mountain and drowned in the pool below. He was sixty-three years old. The following year, the state of North Carolina declared the peak to be the highest in the East and named it for him. His body was brought to the summit and buried there, where it remains.

Thomas Clingman's name went instead to the highest peak in the Great Smoky Mountains, Clingmans Dome, thirty miles to the southwest. Both men lost the argument in a sense, and both names survived it.

Mount Mitchell State Park, adjacent to the Blue Ridge Parkway at Milepost three fifty-five, charges a small state park fee. The summit tower and a small museum are open seasonally.