Four Stages of a Bakersville Home

Four Stages of a Bakersville Home

Before 1920, Joseph B. Graigmiles built a house on the corner of 226 and 221 in Bakersville, just up the road from his print shop where he published a weekly newspaper, The Mitchell County Banner. He and his wife Sally Greene Craigmiles, known to local friends as...
Keepers of the Bees

Keepers of the Bees

Settlers in Appalachia had several types of sweetnin’ – sugar from maple or other trees, syrup from sorghum, etc., and honey from the bees brought from Europe to America in the 1600s. Many mountain families first kept bees in hollowed-out black gum trees and later in...
Sam Cresawn – The Snake Man of Turkey Cove

Sam Cresawn – The Snake Man of Turkey Cove

Just “off the mountain” below Little Switzerland, in Turkey Cove, lived “the snake man” – Sam Cresawn. In the early part of the twentieth century, Mr. Cresawn concocted and sold a cure-all for tuberculosis made of rattlesnakes that he...
Glen Ayre

Glen Ayre

Located at the base of  Roan Mountain, Glen Ayre was originally called Brighton. When the post office there closed in 1916, the community was renamed Glen Ayre for the Ayers family, many of whom still live there today.  

Granny Biddix and her Bible

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. We don’t know her first name, but her face tells the stories of a long life in the mountains of Mitchell County. Noted Mitchell County photographer Jim Jones took this picture, probably in the 1930’s. The information on...