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About the Book:
Much has changed in the over half century since Kingsport, Tennessee, developer C. P. “Bud” Edwards assembled over 6,000 acres along the North Carolina/Tennessee Border surrounding the imposing peak: Big Bald. Beginning as a mountain playground for him and his energetic friends but soon shared with others who embodied the “Back to Nature” wilderness movement of the 1960s and subsequent decades, Wolf Laurel became one of the oldest, largest, and most rugged of the mountain retreats introduced into western North Carolina during that era. Today over 750 dwellings grace the wooded slopes of the peaks and ridges where the counties of Madison and Yancey meet. Through days as a recreational resort, to almost exclusively a second-home community, to today’s mix of seasonal and full time residents, many have grown extraordinarily fond of mountain friends and their beautiful mountain world. We have investigated the trajectory of that fondness, the people and the institutions who built that life in the mountains.The story of Wolf Laurel begins before that era, at the turn of the twentieth century when ancestors of today’s residents of the Upper Laurel valleys farmed the hollows and slopes of northeast Madison County, and the impact of industrialization of the Southern Appalachians brought lumbering to the northwest hardwood forests along Bald Mountain Creek in northwest Yancey County. The ideas and energy of Edwards and those who came after him organized the later generations of the neighborhood into an enterprise that shaped a community generations of people seeking solitude and solace in the mountains learned to love. The dance that wove old families and new families together with craftspeople and business people to transform that early woodland life into a place where people loved to spend their days together in enjoyable fellowship with each other is the focus of the book.
The story is now written. The over 400 pages are now available. We hope that those who seek a glimpse of the complicated route by which Wolf Laurel became the community it is today will find our story worthwhile and enjoyable to read, and that today’s residents will find it enhancing their appreciation and pleasure in the community that they help to mold.
About the Authors:
James F. Klumpp
James F. Klumpp, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland. He is co-compiler and co-author of American Rhetorical Discourse and co-author of Making Sense of Political Ideology: The Power of Language in Democracy. His academic research has been honored with the Douglas R. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award, the Distinguished Research Award from the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Kenneth Burke Society. He is also co-author or author of research essays in local and family history journals and books. He became a full-time resident of Wolf Laurel in 2016 and has served as an officer of the Wolf Laurel Historical Society since 2018.