The Southern Highland Reader

GSMNP-The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported over the weekend about cautious optimism on the part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park officials about their efforts to curtail the invasion of the hemlock woolly adelgid.

An excerpt:

“The work to preserve Eastern hemlock trees and forests in 2009 progressed and showed successes despite increased decline and obvious mortality of trees throughout the park,” the report states.

“‘Cautiously optimistic’ is a good term for it,” said park spokesman Bob Miller.

A three-pronged strategy, using a combination of predatory beetles, foliar treatments and systemic treatments, is being followed to destroy hemlock woolly adelgids on the trees.

Because of cost, accessibility issues and priorities given to most-visited areas, the treatment area is limited in scope and includes about 132,000 hemlocks in the park.

Read the story here.Read a post at Ruminations from the Distant Hills here.Our post “Saying Goodbye to the Hemlock”, from last year, is here.

REGIONAL–The Hendersonville Times News, along with the Knoxville News Sentinel, have followed closely 11th District Congressman Heath Shuler’s real estate misadventure involving the TVA in east Tennessee.

The Times News warned early on that even the appearance of influence-peddling in real estate matters would recall memories of Shuler’s predecessor, Republican Charles Taylor.

In a Friday editorial, the Times News “wraps the thing up neatly, and says Shuler’s damage in this case is self-inflicted.

Here’s the lead:

GSMNP–Those thumps you heard earlier were tourism folks fainting dead away at the news that the Great Smoky Mountains National Park will close its wildly popular Cades Cove loop for three months in the spring for repaving and sprucing up.

An excerpt from the Knoxville News Sentinel:

The park examined a “full range of options” to do the work, according to Superintendent Dale Ditmanson.

All would have required unsuitable detours for the 3,000 to 4,000 vehicles that enter the cove each day, Ditmanson said.

Night-time work also was considered, but the road would have had to be closed for the rebuilding of the sub-base.

The park chose to close the road and recycle it in place as the most efficient and “environmentally responsible” way to complete the work, Ditmanson said.

Read the story here.

REGIONAL–The Southern Appalachian Bear Study Group, a group of biologists from Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia who study black bear populations, think that the current population of bears across the Southern Appalachians is the highest on record.

An excerpt from Morgan Simmons’ story in the Knoxville News Sentinel:

The latest UT studies put the black bear population in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park at around 1,500, or about two bears for every square mile of the park.

The number of bears taken by legal hunting in Tennessee has increased dramatically since 1982, when the harvest was only 21 bears. In 1997, hunters harvested a record 370 bears. Many biologists thought the population had peaked that year, but then came the 2008-09 hunting season, when Tennessee hunters harvested 446 black bears for yet another record.

[Research ecologist] Frank Van Manen said that while the region may be biologically capable of supporting even more bears, it’s clear that in some areas, the population has reached its cultural capacity as determined by people’s willingness to tolerate bears visiting their bird feeders or breaking into their homes.

Read the story here.

CHEROKEE–In early September, the Knoxville News Sentinel’s Carly Harrington put together this overview of Qualla Boundary economic conditions, and talked to some folks that might not otherwise be heard in such a piece; among them, Leon Grodski and Natalie Smith, owners of Tribal Grounds Coffee and well-known multimedia artist Davy Arch.

The general theme: while the influence of Harrah’s Cherokee Casino has its pluses and minuses, the influx of cash that the casino brings is giving the Cherokee greater opportunity to control their economic destiny.

An excerpt:

While roadside shops continue to hawk their fake American Indian wares, locals say they are trying to get away from such “shot glass” tourist attractions, focusing instead on authentic Cherokee history and heritage.

“The tribe is spending money to create a nicer experience that’s more culturally oriented and authentic. The goal is to move away from the touristy trinkets from China,” Groski said.

After the park opened, people from other places were attracted to the area by the lure of tourism and its financial prospects. The tribe, in need of money, allowed them “to market their junk.”

“They wanted any kind of business they could get. We weren’t generating revenue to support the infrastructure,” Arch said, noting that there’s more tolerance and acceptance of the Cherokee culture today.

“Things are looking up. We have more control of our destiny now than the last couple hundred years. It’s changing.”

Read the piece here.

REGIONAL–The Knoxville News Sentinel and reporter Josh Flory have followed for over a year the story of Rep. Heath Shuler’s involvement in a real estate development company that swapped some land with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The significance is that the TVA is a federal agency, and that Shuler sits on a committee that provides oversight of that agency.

Here’s some background.

In a blog post today, Flory reports that a TVA employee seemed to be playing duck’n'cover. Flory’s lead:

A former TVA employee allegedly provided false information to the agency’s inspector general in connection with an inquiry that involved U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler, according to an IG’s report.

The allegation was included in a report that was released to the News Sentinel under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

According to the TVA IG’s “Report of Administrative Inquiry”, which was released on Monday and dated June 9, the former employee denied knowing that Shuler, a North Carolina Democrat, held an ownership in The Cove at Blackberry Ridge LLC, a waterfront project in Roane County.

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The controversy centers on TVA’s Maintain and Gain Lakeshore Management Program, which allowed landowners to gain water-access rights in one location by trading rights they owned somewhere else on a reservoir.

Last year, the News Sentinel reported that an entity with ties to Shuler — a former University of Tennessee football star — received approval for a transaction that provided 145 feet of water-access rights along the shoreline of Watts Bar Reservoir in Roane County.

That entity, The Cove at Blackberry Ridge LLC, agreed to relinquish 150 feet of water-access rights in Rhea County and also provide about $15,000 for a shoreline bank stabilization project at a different location on Watts Bar Reservoir. Investors in The Cove at Blackberry Ridge included Shuler, who was formerly a member of the House transportation committee’s Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment. That subcommittee is one of two congressional panels that provide formal oversight of TVA.

Read the whole piece here.

KNOXVILLE–Author Cormac McCarthy’s childhood home, recently named to the top of a list of endangered Knoxville-area places, burned to the ground earlier in the year.

In this followup, the Knoxville News Sentinel’s Fred Brown calls up his inner McCarthy to describe a stately but derelict farm house, ill-used by criminals and vagrants and owned by a recluse.

Brown’s lead:

A thick silence hangs over the charred remains. The place is humid, moist even, behind a lush, green curtain of tangled brush and bamboo that arches over the short, muddy road. Two brick chimneys stand sentinel-like; another is half-gone. Rusted and warped appliances and pipes are jumbled in the middle of the black mass, bent from searing heat and fire.

Another excerpt:

McCarthy, considered by some critics and scholars to be America’s greatest living author, won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 novel “The Road.” Another novel, “All The Pretty Horses,” won the National Book Award in 1992, and a movie made from his book “No Country For Old Men” won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Picture.

Read the piece here.

NATIONAL-The story of pro football star Michael Vick’s incarceration for his involvement in organized dog fighting — and his eventual release and return to the NFL — has excited plenty of comment.

Michael Vick

Some considered it odd that pro ballplayers who have killed others when driving drunk did far less time than Vick.

In today’s Knoxville News Sentinel, though, columnist Ina Hughs takes a look at Vick from a couple of angles, and her main thrust is summed up in this excerpt:

“The second issue this debate raises is a more controversial question: What makes Vick so morally reprehensible?

As Shayne Lee puts it in an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer: It’s true that Americans are fond of dogs, but dogs are animals, and exploiting and killing animals is “as American as Apple iPods.”

In the name of science research, we expose and inject rats and chimps to all sorts of dread illnesses and lethal drugs. We dab mysterious chemicals in their eyes to test our cosmetics, with no clue as to its effect. We make sandwiches out of pigs and slaughter baby cows for scaloppini. We shoot deer for fun and mantel decor.

Fine restaurants drop live lobsters into boiling water.”

Hughs’ point is valid. Sure, dog fighting is ugly. So are a lot of things we take for granted.

This sort of contradiction, or selective outrage, or whatever, is part of what made the recent tempest over Cherokee’s tourist bear pens an eye-roller. Are the bear attractions lowbrow? Sure. Is it a particularly pleasant existence for the bears? No. But if Florida tourists think Cherokee’s pens are the worst thing that happens to black bears in this neck of the woods, they should come back later in the fall.

And if they then argue that the bear shouldn’t be hunted, they should see what’s left of a bear that wanders in front of an 18-wheeler. Bear populations are growing, and they need elbow room.

Read the whole News-Sentinel piece here.

REGIONAL/NATIONAL–The Knoxville News Sentinel reported on Tuesday that the story about congressman Heath Shuler’s involvement in a small Tennessee land swap with the Tennessee Valley Authority isn’t dead.

From my earlier post on the subject:

The swap essentially provides water access at Watts Bar Resevoir to a [housing] development called The Cove at Blackberry Ridge, in exchange for an equal amount of shoreline elsewhere on the same lake and $15,000. Shuler is an investor in the Cove at Blackberry Ridge.

Shuler has ties to the development company, and sits on a committee that exercises oversight over the TVA. This suggests the possibility of conflict of interest, although no evidence of such has been presented. When I posted about it a year ago, it struck me as much ado about not-so-much, but the News Sentinel reported in its Tuesday that a sealed report on the matter has been forwarded to the house ethics committee.

The News Sentinel, by the way, has sued to have the report made public.

GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK–Each year, wildlife managers in the Smokies hunt and kill wild hogs — wild boar, feral pigs and mixtures of the two — because the animals are non-native, somewhat dangerous and because they do a lot of environmental damage.

This year’s hunt netted over 500, which is the most in over two decades, according to a story in the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Excerpt:

Since the late 1950s, the park has removed almost 12,000 wild hogs. The animals are a target for control because they’re non-native, and they do considerable damage to the ecosystem by eating rare plants and salamander, defecating in streams and churning up the ground.

The park’s hog population traces back to the early 1920s, when a herd of European wild hogs escaped from a game reserve on Hooper’s Bald in Graham County, N.C. By the 1940s, the wild hogs had spread into other counties as well as the Smokies.

Kim DeLozier, chief wildlife biologist for the Smokies, said he believes the park’s hog population has been augmented in recent years by the addition of feral hogs – domestic pigs that have escaped or been released into the wild.

Read the whole piece here.

REGIONAL–One of the most iconic historic photographs often to be seen here in Sylva, on the south side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is a shot of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s motorcade passing down Main St. after he dedicated the park in 1940.

Swarms of people hang out of every window, and at bottom left, a little blurry, FDR waves his hat from the back of a convertible sedan.

FDR in Cherokee, 1940. Photo by Ewart Ball for the Asheville Citizen-Times

The Park is woven tightly into the history of our area, as much for the families it displaced and for the industries it supplanted as for the environmental and cultural gem it has become.

The Great Smokies National Park is the country’s most-visited, and for that reason, and because of its location, it also one of the most stressed. These days, just in time for the park’s 2009 75th anniversary, leadership from the northern side of the park has thing looking up for additional funding and the addressing of environmental concerns.

U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, has become the park’s biggest champion in Washington. He hopes President Barack Obama will replicate FDR’s visit sometime this year. Moreover, he’s in the position to help the park in many ways.

Read more in a story from the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Maryville Republican has developed a reputation as the Smokies’ biggest booster in Congress. His recent elevation to an influential position on the committee in charge of funding for all national parks is giving Alexander a chance to turn his words into dollars.

“I’m looking forward to that role as much as anything I’m doing in the United States Senate,” Alexander said of his new role as the top Republican on the Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee.

Alexander said he sought the position primarily so he could make sure the Great Smoky Mountains gets its share of federal funding and to help the park deal with some specific problems, such as the blight that’s killing hemlock trees and the dirty air that on many days makes it hard to see the steep hillsides.

“From this position, I can work for strong national clean-air standards, which will make the air healthier and help get rid of the smog in the park,” Alexander said. “Ten million people a year don’t drive to East Tennessee to see the smog. They come to see the blue haze that gave the Smoky Mountains its name.”

COCKE CO., TN-Moonshiner and self-promoter “Popcorn” Sutton passed away yesterday, in Tennessee, at the age of 61.

Tennessee authorities think Sutton, who was reportedly ill and faced a long jail term for a recent conviction, might have committed suicide.

Full story from the Knoxville News Sentinel.

An excerpt:

Sutton spent the last three decades building a reputation as one of the South’s top makers of white lightning. He starred in various documentaries about the tradition and penned an autobiography, “Me and My Likker.”

Last month, he was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for illegally brewing spirits and possessing a firearm as a felon. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Greeneville confirmed that Sutton was supposed to begin serving his sentence later this week.

A raid last year on Sutton’s property turned up guns, three 1,000-gallon stills, more than 800 gallons of moonshine and hundreds of gallons of sour mash and other ingredients, records show. He kept some of the illegal brew in a shed and some in a junk school bus.

We’ve written before about Sutton here and here.

KNOXVILLE–Hancock County, TN, is one of Tennessee’s poorest counties, and has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the U.S.

Not surprisingly, OxyContin and Meth are big problems for longtime sheriff Doug Seal. It used to be the more lyrical white liquor, though, and the folks in Hancock County could flat produce the ’shine.

Seal shut down Hancock’s last still in 2002, and now he tours that still around in the back of a ramshackle 1951 Ford pickup, and gives educational spiels. It’s a pretty big hit at county fairs and such.

The Knoxville News Sentinel’s Fred Brown points out in the lede of his feature Sunday that there are a lot of strange things to be seen in Hancock County, but Sheriff Seal’s pickup with a still in the back has to rank right up there.

An excerpt from the piece:

A few of the state’s most famous moonshiners hailed from Hancock County, starting with Mahalia Mullins, aka “Big Haley,” a 500-pound Melungeon whose moonshine on Newman’s Ridge in Sneedville was memorable. Legend has it she was so huge that when she died in her cabin, the stone fireplace had to be torn out to remove the body.

Here’s a link.

Free-lancer Justin Fee took the photographs.

PARROTSVILLE, TN.–Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton, a famous moonshiner whose penchant for self-promotion far out-strips his liquor-making skill, exhausted his get-out-of-the-clink free cards yesterday in Tennessee, and was sentenced to a year-and-a-half behind bars for making white liquor and doing various other things he ought not be doing as a convicted felon.

Sutton has managed to whip up a frenzy of support on the internet, but the facts of his arrest were hard to overcome. From the Knoxville News Sentinel:

Agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives put a cork in Sutton’s operation March 13 after he sold an undercover agent about 300 gallons of untaxed whiskey and agreed to sell another 500 gallons, ATF Agent Gregory Moore wrote in an affidavit.

A raid on Sutton’s property turned up guns, bullets, three 1,000-gallon stills, copper line, more than 800 gallons of moonshine, and hundreds of gallons of sour mash and other ingredients, federal court records show. He kept some of the mountain dew in a shed and some in a junk school bus.

More from the News Sentinel.

KNOXVILLE–University of Tennessee researchers have determined that a letter thought for 175 years to be fake is instead authentic, and that the letter — which threatened the assassination of President Andrew Jackson — was written by the father of the man who killed Abraham Lincoln.

From the Knoxville News Sentinel:

London-born Junius Brutus Booth was a famous Shakespearean actor and a manic public figure. He had three sons in the theater, including John Wilkes Booth, who later would murder President Lincoln in April 1865 at Ford’s Theatre in Washington.

First, I'll stun him with the toupee, then I'll finish him off with slings and arrows!

Another excerpt:

The letter, which addressed Old Hickory as “You damn’d old Scoundrel,” demanded that Jackson pardon two prisoners named De Ruiz and De Soto who had been sentenced to death for piracy in a high-profile trial of the day.

Pardon the pirates, the letter writer demanded, or “I will cut your throat whilst you are sleeping.”

Here’s the story from the Knoxville News Sentinel.

REGIONAL–Knoxville News Sentinel outdoor writer Bob Hodge writes about ghostly happenings on a solo hunting trip.

REGIONAL–One conclusion easily leapt to is that college athletics are a broad source of funding for schools that play.

However, most athletics programs at colleges fail to cover their own expenses, and depend on student fees and other funding sources to operate.

The University of Tennessee is one of fewer than ten exceptions nationwide, and — eureka! — some folks over that way are wondering whether athletics might kick a little funding over to the other side of campus, given the 13% funding decrease the UT systems faces on a state level.

Athletics Director Mike Hamilton makes a persuasive argument that the athletics department already does, and that it stands ready to do more.

This story from the Knoxville News Sentinel gives interesting insight to the conversation, including the fact that at many schools the athletics and educational sides of things are financially independent of each other.

KNOXVILLE–Thom Mason, Director of the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory near Knoxville, has high hopes for President-elect Obama’s choice for Energy Secretary, Steven Chu.

“There’s clearly an understanding that in tackling the energy problem, it’s not sufficient to just push for currrent deployment of existing technology, but looking for a transformational breakthrough,” Mason said.

Here’s more from Frank Munger’s Atomic City Underground blog at the Knoxville News Sentinel.

SYLVA-I have a family picture of myself with my grandfather at about the age of six, taking in one of Nancy and Bruce Roberts’ ghost stories of the Old North State. We’re on the sofa at “Whitehall”, my grandparents old farmhouse in the rolling countryside near Mount Holly, and my eyes are as big as saucers.

The Roberts’ ghost books were among the ones I loved to death as a kid, leaving them invariably dog-eared and scrawled-upon. My aunt — a teenager at the time — took note, and often lead me aside to tell me ghostly falsehoods about the far-flung bedroom I spent my nights in when I visited.

So now, when I see my own six-year-old sleeping with a blanket wrapped firmly around her head to protect her from her own imagination, I can empathize.

Anyway, in spite of the numbers on the calendar the past week has been particularly Halloweeny, with brittle leaves blowing around under gray skies, so when I came across the story about Tennessee’s famous Bell Witch earlier today, I channeled specters of many a childhood tale.

We didn’t have as many sources for grimness in the early seventies, so we seized upon a few famous stories and woolied them to death. And the Bell Witch story is a good one, because it’s about poltergeists, and them things will work your scare buttons from several directions at once.

Here’s the story from the Tennessean, by way of the News-Sentinel, of one of the Bell Witch mysteries, now solved.

KNOXVILLE/REGIONAL-The Knoxville News Sentinel-affiliated Knoxvillebiz.com recently reported that U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler, congressman of North Carolina’s 11th district, was party to a land-swap with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The deal has drawn attention because Rep. Shuler, of Bryson City, sits on a committee that exercises oversight over the TVA.

The swap essentially provides water access at Watts Bar Resevoir to a development called The Cove at Blackberry Ridge, in exchange for an equal amount of shoreline elsewhere on the same lake and $15,000. Shuler is an investor in the Cove at Blackberry Ridge.

Shuler’s investment in the development predates his election to congress by approximately one year. Both Shuler’s business group and the TVA say he wasn’t involved in negotiating the deal. Furthermore, Knoxvillebiz.com noted, Shuler has “leaned on” the TVA over a number of issues, most notably pollution in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the ongoing conflict regarding the “road to nowhere” along the north shore of lake Fontana.

To us, it seemed like relatively small potatoes. Maybe so, says the Hendersonville Times-News’s editorial board, but still, Shuler needs to understand how these things are perceived.

The Times-News says, essentially, “too much of this is how your predecessor lost his job, Sen. Shuler.”

The Asheville Citizen-Times, meanwhile, takes a look at the issue in its Tuesday editorial. It arrives at the apparent conclusion that the incident is being overblown.