Seventy-eight years ago today, April 5, 1931, locals and guests packed into the Bryson City, N.C. High School auditorium for Horace Kephart’s funeral. The New York Times reported on April 6, “All the seats in the auditorium of the public school were taken. Hundreds stood outside.” George Ellison’s marvelous introduction to the University of Tennessee Press edition of Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders notes, “His wife, two sons, and a grandson were in attendance.” Kephart and his wife Laura had been estranged since 1903,but Ellison writes “certainly there was an understanding of real substance between them that was maintained for the remainder of their lives.”
The sad gathering followed Kephart’s death in a highway accident. Ellison describes the event: “On April 2, 1931, at the age of sixty-eight, Horace Kephart was killed in an automobile accident near Bryson City. A friend, the Georgia writer Fiswoode Tarleton, who was staying with Kephart for a few weeks, was also killed. They had hired a taxi to take them to a bootlegger’s and were on the way back to Bryson City when the driver lost control of the car in a curve.” The New York Times described it as a “moonlight sightseeing ride.”
Wasn’t even much of a curve, really, just a gentle arc in the flat highway, and a bridge across a creek, and a thigh-high stone wall with which the car collided and overturned. There was speculation the hired driver had downed a noggin of moonshine before starting the trip back to Bryson City.
The New York Times story on the accident listed Mr. Tarleton first, then Kephart, since Tarleton was a 1928 O. Henry Prize winner and apparently a hotter property. Publishers’ Weekly also reported on the death in its April 18 edition, “Kephart had written many books on adventure, camping and the out-door life, besides Our Southern Highlanders, a volume which attracted much attention.”
I have not found a mention in Library Journal, but American Rifleman noted his passing. His contributions to librarianship had been forgotten, but his writings about firearms were still recognized.
The Horace Kephart Troop, Boy Scouts of America, Bryson City, North Carolina, erected a stone in his memory to mark his last permanent camp in the Smoky Mountains above Bryson City. They wasted no time. The stone was placed only 57 days after Kephart’s death.
A bronze plaque is mounted on a large, lichen-covered boulder to mark his grave in the Bryson City Cemetery. A photo is shown at the “And Now, Horace Kephart” posting in this blog. The plaque reads:
Horace Kephart, 1862-1931
Scholar, author, outdoorsman
He loved his neighbors and pictured them in
“Our Southern Highlanders”
His vision helped to create The Great Smoky Mountains National Park
While he may have loved his neighbors, the feeling was apparently not universally mutual. Old-timers thereabouts reported feeling that some of the mountain folk felt stereotyped and patronized in Kephart’s accounts. On the other hand, in Jim Casada’s collection of primary Kephart material, I have seen a letter to Kephart from the Bryson City Women’s Club thanking him in glowing terms for his taking the time to meet with them.
In any case, a moment of quiet to remember the Old Woodsman’s last days. He lived to the age of 68. Not bad, really, though not quite his Biblical quota. But he apparently didn’t suffer from any terrible illness, and his demise was quick and, we hope, painless: a broken neck was thought to be the cause of death. He left a vast number of readers who thought well of him. Although his family life appeared to be complex and strained, he was loved. What more could we want for ourselves?
Kephart was fond of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, perhaps especially so of Kidnapped. The following passage appears in Stevenson’s A Christmas Sermon. It seems a worthy goal for humans, and it reminds me of what I like to think about Kephart. The reference to ”. . . make, upon the whole, a family happier for his presence,” will seem ironic to those who take a dark view of Kephart’s carrying out of his family responsibilities. But in any case we really don’t know what goes on in other families, and we can’t presume to know much about the complicated nature of Kephart’s relationships.
To be honest
to be kind
to earn a little and
spend a little less
to make, upon the whole,
a family happier for his presence,
to renounce when that shall be necessary
and not be embittered,
to keep a few friends,
but these without capitulation-
above all, on the same grim condition,
to keep friends with himself-
here is a task for all that
a man has of fortitude and delicacy.
