Finding Lost Cove

Walt told me a story of his last night that I'd never heard! Amazing after being married 25+ years! It just came up over a casual discussion of receiving $10 checks for his savings account for his birthdays.

OK. There's a ghost town in North Carolina called Lost Cove. Lost Cove is located along the Nolichucky River in Western North Carolina. (Surveyors weren't sure whether it belonged to Tennessee or North Carolina and that's how it got its name.) It was reportedly settled shortly before the Civil War and was a thriving Appalachian logging and farming community for about 100 years. There is no road access to it and never was. The location and terrain of the community were difficult to navigate and when the railroad stopped making stops there, residents eventually had to leave Lost Cove and the last residents left in the 1957.

In the summer of 1954, Walt and his sister, ages 13 and 14, boarded the bus in Sarasota bound for North Carolina and their summer camp -- where he slept all summer in a tent on an island in the middle of the river, not far from Cherokee. (This delicious camp was where he and Brooks spent every summer of their junior high and high school years.) But this particular year Brooks had schemed, after reading about Lost Cove, that they should take a week out all on their own to find it.

First Brooks had to fudge the camp starting dates on the letter from the director to their parents. Then she convinced Walter to take $50 from his savings account and she would do the same to cover them for this extra week of exploring before they actually arrived at their camp. So these two young teens boarded the Trailways bus in Sarasota, bound for North Carolina, as usual, but with a secret plan of their own.The bus must have 
made a stop in Greensboro because Walt remembersthat their best friend, 
Diane,
went with them. So with Brook's map as their only guide, the three of them took the bus as far as they could, and then hopped mail trucks and slept in homes where they saw "Rooms for rent" signs.

The closer they got to Lost Cove, the more worrisome became people's comments. "You're going where??? The people there are a bad bunch!" Well, Walt, deciding they need some protection since he felt responsible for the girls bought so he bought a little "Saturday night special" along the way and stuck the loaded pistol in his belt. He said he was sure glad he had it when they started hearing comments about the huge razorback hogs in the woods.

Moving right along, they made it to Relief, North Carolina (still on the map but with no population statistics) where they were to leave roads and pick up the railroad tracks to Lost Cove. As they left Relief, they were warned to be careful because the sound of the river running alongside the tracks muffled the sound of trains!



They walked the tracks 2 1/2 miles and sure enough, there was Lost Cove! And not a soul around. They actually camped out in an abandoned house for 3 or 4 days. (After a couple of days, Walt walked back along the tracks to Relief to buy more supplies -- he says the girls ate up days' days supplies in two!) His clear memory as he went into the country store is of an older girl, probably 18, who came into the store looking so thin and malnourished that he was shocked -- and then he was dumbfounded when the storekeeper shoo'd her out and apologized saying, "We don't get many of them types in here anymore."

Finally deciding they'd better get on their way to camp, they walked, took mail trucks again, and finally caught the bus to Cherokee. Finding they'd arrived a day too early for pick up by Mr. Barry, their beloved camp director (grade school principal in Charleston who liked to jump the girls at camp each night -- yes, you read that right), to go into their campsite. So they looked up some Cherokee Indian friends who were campmates and spent the night with them. And there they were, ready and waiting when Mr. Barry showed up with his pick up to take them to their summer "home," their big adventure behind them!