Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail

by Montgomery, Ben

  In December 1918, they bought the Brown farm for $30,000, the place their children would come to think of as home. The farm included a field of fertile bottomland that ran flat as a tabletop from their hillside house to the Ohio River, about a quarter mile away. From the front porch, Emma could see the green hills of West Virginia across the river. The house had four bedrooms upstairs and one down, three covered porches and a basement. An old, defunct piano sat in the parlor, with a horsehair sofa that pulled out into a bed. A Victrola sat on a small table, near the bookshelf. The living room had a heating stove and the kitchen held a cooking stove and a sink with a hand pump that drew water from a cistern. One porch had a swing, and the children’s rooms had chamber pots they’d use in the winter. There was a plot large enough for a three-acre garden out front, and Emma woke early each day to tend to it by kerosene lamp. She grew rhubarb, cucumbers, beans, and a healthy patch of morning glories.

  They had only $5,000 to put down from the sale of their other farm, which meant there was work to be done between there and comfortable. Emma threw herself into it, and saved until it hurt. The children all worked hard, too. By two years old, they were sweeping floors and gathering eggs. By three they were collecting kindling for the potbellied stove. By four they were washing and drying dishes. By five they knew how to wash their own clothes.

  Each morning, P.C. would rise at five and dress and walk to the bottom of the stairs, where he’d pound on the newel post while calling out their names. The kids would jump to their feet from where they slept, four to a bed. The girls swept the house and did the dishes and sometimes helped prepare the meals. After breakfast, they’d all head out into the fields to hoe or pull weeds or pick vegetables or deworm the tobacco plants. The younger children were charged with filling a bucket with lime and walking among the muskmelons and watermelons, sprinkling the mixture on the vines as they went.

  To prepare the fields, P.C. hitched a drag to a team of horses to break the earth, and the kids would sometimes climb onto the flat wooden contraption and drag their bare feet in the loamy soil.

  Emma went to the fields each day and worked alongside the farmhands, as did all the kids. When the work was done, the children would tear off across the bottoms toward the Ohio River, between their home and the mountains. A few of them could swim to the other side, but most stayed in the shallows, laughing and splashing off the day’s dirt. They’d sing “Old Black Joe” and climb inside an old tire and spank each other down the hillside.

  At harvest time, they’d pick muskmelons, watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers, and corn. P.C. took most of it to the Saturday market down in Huntington. The rest they ate or canned or sold at a little vegetable stand by the highway. Muskmelons or a dozen ears of sweet corn for ten cents. Cucumbers for a penny each. Emma canned hundreds of gallons of fruits and vegetables for the summer and winter, and the shelves in the cold underground cellar were lined with scores of half-gallon jars.

  They ate everything that came from the earth and wasn’t poisonous, from blackberries to persimmons to wild raspberries. They learned that birds and animals don’t go hungry, so why should people? So many trees and bushes provided food—hickory nut, beechnut, walnut, honey locust pod, maple syrup, crabapple, mulberry, plum, cherry, huckleberry. Edible plants included dandelions, narrow dock, wild lettuce, white top, clovers, violets, meadow lettuce, poke leaves, and milkweed. And nothing went to waste.

  Once in a while the men would kill a fattened hog, and they’d build a fire under a fifty-five-gallon drum full of well water. Late in the day they’d string the hog from a tree and gut it. When the water was hot enough they’d lower the heavy carcass into the drum, then crank it back up and run their sharpened knives over the flesh to remove the coarse hair from the hide. They’d portion the hog and Emma would take the hams, prepare them and smoke them in the smokehouse. She’d take all the meat from the head and cover it in brine in a ceramic crock, sometimes adding a little vinegar, and make hog’s head cheese. She’d stuff green peppers with shredded cabbage and dunk them into the brine. It wasn’t rare for the kids to eat so much that they became sick.

  When she cured the bacon, she’d remove the rind and cut it into small strips and cook it in a heavy pot to render the lard and preserve the skin, which she called cracklings. The children ached for the hog slaughter because it meant their school lunches would include biscuits and homemade jam and fried pork loin.

  Emma made apple butter in a giant cauldron over a large fire outside. She put the girls in charge of stirring the fresh, peeled apples constantly with a long wooden paddle and they occasionally got too close and felt the sting of popping hot apple butter on their skin.

  She made chicken and dumplings and chicken and noodles and every once in a while, on special occasions, fried chicken. Once every summer a man drove around to the farms with a truck full of various cuts of beef. Emma would peek inside and ask the man about prices. She could never afford much, but sometimes she’d walk away with a chuck roast and she’d make a giant pot of stew. Beef was rare, though—so rare that one of the boys walked into the barn once and bit a cow on the ear to see if it tasted like beef.

  She served breakfast at a long table, and P.C. always sat at the head. Sometimes, if the farmhands joined them, there’d be seventeen mouths waiting to be fed. She’d come from the kitchen with large pans of biscuits, bowls of oatmeal and cornmeal mush, and bacon. She served pancakes but refused to flavor her syrup.

  When the children needed to relieve themselves, they used the outhouse, which they called “the closet” or “bath with a path.” It was a three-seater, and they wiped their behinds with pages torn from the Sears, Roebuck catalog to save money on toilet paper. They walked to school, barefoot sometimes, because they each got just two pairs of twenty-five-cent shoes a year, and they had to make them last.

  At Christmas, P.C. would chop down a tree and drag it home. The older children would string popcorn and make ornaments from last year’s wrapping paper or the tinfoil from chewing gum or cigarette packages that they found along the road. Their stockings were filled with an orange, a banana, a candy cane, English walnuts, and a new pencil or handkerchief. Most of the larger gifts they shared, including a sled one year and a single pair of roller skates another. Emma sometimes made the girls little dolls with ceramic heads and sawdust stuffing.

  P.C. was a thinker, a renaissance man, and his neighbors thought highly of him, even if he overpaid his farmhands. He’d taught school for fifteen years—at the one-room Oak Dale and Waugh Bottom schools—before he quit to run a farm and grow a family, which expanded again in 1920, with the birth of twins, Robert Wilson and Elizabeth Caldwell. He drew blueprints and built a beautiful modern home for his parents on a hillside not far away. He also designed and constructed a new schoolhouse at Swan Creek.

  The neighbors knew of his above-average intellect. He’d bought a large tobacco barn for one hundred dollars from a man who lived a mile away and had numbered every board, into the thousands, then disassembled the barn and hauled it down the road and up the hill and to a level patch behind their house where he rebuilt it, nail by nail and board by board. When he finished the project, he climbed to the peak of the aluminum roof and did a handstand while the farmhands cheered at his thin silhouette.

  On Sundays, he required the children attend church. They’d pack into a pew at the Methodist church near Swan Creek, where they’d sweat and swat flies for hours while the preacher tried to save their souls from eternal damnation. P.C. made a point of delivering a short sermon to the congregation, himself, when the preacher had finished.

  Always, though, just beyond the thin shroud of his respectable public persona, there gurgled a mean streak, and if something set him off, he’d grow wild-eyed and his veins would bulge. His children once watched him beat a stubborn horse half to death with a leather strop. He was prone to administer discipline on his own blood with a briar switch or fire poker or whatever instrument was close at hand.

  His m
adness, in the right moment, wasn’t even bound by law. In 1924, a year after Emma delivered their ninth child, P.C. killed a man.

  P. C. Gatewood and Hiram Johnson got into an argument one afternoon. The state would charge P.C. with manslaughter and the trial would drag on. Young Monroe, twelve at the time, would testify that Hiram Johnson had fetched his rifle and Monroe had fetched his daddy’s for him, and just as Hiram had raised his gun, P.C. had swung his and caught Johnson on the forehead, the approximate site of a fresh wound from an earlier scrap the old man had found himself in. He never regained consciousness and four days later, in the hospital, Hiram died.

  Word was that Johnson’s widow would not sue P.C. because he’d paid the medical bills and funeral expenses. But a lawyer from Huntington, West Virginia, convinced her to try for a settlement and she won. P.C. was convicted of manslaughter and ordered to pay $50,000. His prison sentence was suspended because he had nine children and a farm to tend to, but the debt was so burdensome that he had to sell half the land. Even then he couldn’t make ends meet, and each year it got worse. By the time Dora Louise was born in 1926, and Lucy Eleanor in 1928, P.C. was struggling to keep his farm running. In August 1929, he got a job with the Ohio Township rural school board, hauling pupils from Sugar Creek to Crown City and back for seventy-five dollars a month. He converted an old pickup truck into a makeshift school bus to make the runs. The board hired him again the following year, but in 1932 the contract went to Stanley Swain, who offered to do it for seven dollars less.

  The extra income was missed as the Gatewoods inched through the worst of the Great Depression and tried to cope with a drought that had started in the east and raked across the country toward the Great Plains. Crop prices had fallen drastically. That same year, nearly 40 percent of the labor force was out of work. By the following year, more than 40 percent of Ohio factory workers and 67 percent of Ohio construction workers were unemployed, and many of them, with nowhere to turn, were moving from cities like Akron and Toledo and Columbus to the countryside to try to feed their children off the land.

  It wasn’t unusual for tramps to stop at the house on the hill and ask for food. They all had the same look of desperation. Though she eschewed government handouts, Emma was always generous and invited them to sit on the porch and enjoy a hearty meal. She’d do anything for someone who needed help, and often nursed sick friends back to health. P.C. occasionally let the tramps sleep in his barn if they promised not to smoke. The children sometimes followed the travelers down the highway, and they’d grow old remembering one particular family. The man was driving a dog team, which was pulling a small cart loaded with their possessions. The woman was pregnant, clutching a young child, her feet hanging down off the back.

  In 1932, as progressive New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt chased vulnerable President Herbert Hoover, P.C., a longtime Republican, switched parties. Emma would have none of it. When the election rolled around, P.C. was in his sickbed, eaten up with ulcers. Pollsters were dispatched to his home to record his vote, but Emma wouldn’t let them inside. This event added yet another layer to their discord.

  P. C. Gatewood, with the help of his wife and children, held on, but they wouldn’t hold the farm through the decade. And he was becoming increasingly difficult to live with.

  Emma trudged on, as May wound down, through lonely woods. She sucked on bouillon cubes as she hiked, and found water where she could. She filled up on wild strawberries—whenever she found a patch, she’d drop her sack and stuff it with as many as she could carry. After a hard climb up Shuckstack Mountain, she discovered a dented trash can lid that had collected a small puddle of rainwater. It was just enough to wet her throat. She cleaned the lid to collect more from the looming rainstorm. There was just enough room on the precipice for a small fire tower, and she made her bed on the porch, propping up several planks to shield her from the strong wind.

  The next afternoon, she ran into a man and woman, the first couple she’d seen on the trail. She was out of food, and after she explained what she was doing, the day hikers felt sorry for her and divided their supplies. She made it to Spence Camp in a downpour, a rain so hard she couldn’t light a fire. It was only 4:00 PM, but she hung up her wet clothes and climbed into the lean-to and tried to sleep, wet as she was.

  She wasn’t down long when a man appeared out of the woods. He introduced himself as Lionel Edna and said he had been painting trail blazes, white, two inches by six inches long, on trees along the path. He fixed himself supper as they chatted, then climbed into his sleeping bag on the opposite side of the shelter. They talked a while before drifting off.

  She left early the next morning and the wind had picked up, giant gusts that nearly blew her down. The weather was odd, she thought, for May in the South. The rain started at 11:00 and she decided to call it a day when she reached a shelter around 2:00 PM. She found some dry wood and built a fire and washed and dried her clothes.

  The following afternoon, she trudged into Newfound Gap, near the center of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and into the strangest scene she’d seen so far. There were people everywhere at the popular park, including about a dozen nuns who were slapping each other on the back and acting like teenagers. She watched one of them climb onto a wall and shout and jump off, as the rest of them laughed. They were giddy, having fun and playing around a stone monument built to honor the Rockefellers.

  Emma noticed a bus stop nearby. Her shoes were about ruined, and hiking through all this rain without a raincoat was miserable, so she reckoned she could use a few supplies. Gatlinburg, Tennessee, wasn’t far, so she decided she’d catch the bus. Just then, one of the nuns approached and asked if she could take a picture of Emma.

  She bought shoes and a raincoat and got a bite to eat in Gatlinburg, then tried to hitchhike back to the trail, but nobody would stop. She checked into a motel instead.

  She caught the bus the next morning and got back on the trail by 8:00 AM, hiking quickly to break in her new sneakers. A heavy fog settled over the Smoky Mountains that evening and a chill set in, so Emma heated smooth stones in the fire and slept atop them to keep her back warm.

  She made it to the edge of the Smoky Mountain National Park, near the line separating North Carolina and Tennessee, the following day, and she fell in love with the fields of rhododendron and laurel that seemed to be growing everywhere she looked. She lost the trail once and asked some boys to point her in the right direction. When she found the trail in the rain, it had been plowed up. The muck from the tilled field clung to her shoes and the walk through the field was staggering. On the other side, as she walked down an abandoned buggy road, she found herself in a tunnel through the tall rhododendron. It was dark and eerie and, as the rain fell into the tunnel, quite beautiful.

  She made it into Hot Springs, North Carolina, on May 28, after an arduous uphill climb. The little town on the French Broad River whispered of the past. In 1914, during World War I, the owner of a resort called the Mountain Park Hotel had struck a deal with the War Department to house prisoners of war there. By train came 2,200 Germans, four times the population of the town. They were mostly passengers, officers, and crew members from the world’s largest ship, the Vaterland, which had taken cover in an American port when Great Britain had declared war on Germany.

  They were no ordinary prisoners of war. The men wore suits and ties and the women were fantastic dressmakers. They set about building a village on the hotel lawn using driftwood and scrap lumber. They built a chapel from flattened Prince Albert Tobacco tins. The townspeople developed friendships with the enemy aliens, and each Sunday afternoon they sat together for a concert from the prisoner orchestra. After the war, the prisoners from what had been the largest internment camp in the United States were transported to Fort Oglethorpe, in Georgia, where Emma had started her journey. But many of them had found their nineteen months of captivity so enjoyable that they returned with their families and settled in Hot Springs.

  Emma sense
d that brotherly love. The folks in the area were awfully nice, and just about everybody she bumped into insisted on feeding her and giving her something to drink. One woman gave her a glass of buttermilk and a piece of cake, her first on the trail, and she enjoyed it. She heard the locusts sawing for the first time all year. On May 29, she came upon a small store and intended to buy some food for the desolate walk ahead. All the store had was a can of black beans and a box of raw prunes. She bought them anyway, and chewed the dry, hard prunes all afternoon until they were gone.

  The sun was hot as she made her way up Turkey Bald Mountain. The climb was slow and Emma was lost in her thoughts when she heard something strange. It sounded like some kind of bird at first, a low sort of hiss, and she kept walking, unafraid, until she felt something strike the leg of her dungarees. She glanced down and there beside the trail was a rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike again. She slammed the tip of her walking stick toward the snake and jumped sideways. She darted by, her adrenaline surging, her ribs rising with each short, sharp breath. The snake stayed coiled and Emma was soon yards past it, thankful, reminded of the danger of a single misstep.

  4

  WILD DOGS

  JUNE 1–8, 1955

  She’d been gone nearly a month.

  Emma’s children hadn’t heard from her, had no idea where she was or what she was doing, but not one of them was worried. Their mama was raw-boned and sturdy, and despite her absence, they knew she’d be all right, whatever her ambitions. It wasn’t rare for her to be gone for long stretches, so if they gave her disappearance a passing thought, it did not dwell in their memories.

  She zigzagged between North Carolina and Tennessee, thirsty, sore, tired, over roads of cut stone and up mountainsides steep and tall, sleeping outdoors more often than in, giving herself to the wilderness, planting a crop of memories, exploring the world and her own mind, writing in her little notebook of the challenges and rewards, the wild dogs that came in the night, the cozy fire that made a campsite more cheerful, the magic of campers who shared their sausage sandwiches across picnic tables.