Here lies the heart of that state of mind and country called Appalachia. It is filled with potent images of American self-identity - the log cabin hearth, the self-sufficient yeoman. I sped downward through the blue vistas that had flanked America's first frontier, and wondered about the route through the pass that had given the town of Big Stone Gap, Va., its name. Over a long summer weekend, driving a loop off Interstate 81 and taking day hikes, I found the excellence of its roads to be one of many mismatches between Appalachian legend and reality.
The traditional image of Appalachia was fixed in the American mind late in the 19th century largely by one man, John Fox Jr., who lived in Big Stone Gap.
Big Stone Gap was expected to become the Pittsburgh of the south.įox came to the mountains in the 1880's as a Harvard graduate, when his affluent family from Kentucky's bluegrass country began to speculate in coal and timber. It didn't, and instead Fox began to write about the mountaineers he met. ''The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come,'' published in 1903, was the first American novel to sell a million copies, but it was ''The Trail of the Lonesome Pine'' that established Fox's enduring fame and became the basis for an outdoor musical that has been performed for 30 years. In the play, a mining engineer comes into the mountains, meets a beautiful young girl, oversees her education and marries her. Magnificent Appalachian hardwoods fed a lumbering boom around 1900 that took almost all of the great old trees. Breaks Interstate Park, on the Virginia-Kentucky border, offers a rare opportunity to see a remnant of the original forest. Much of the park's timber was floated down the Russell Fork to market, but rugged terrain protected a small area from loggers. I checked into the Gateway to the Breaks Motel, about two miles from the Breaks, on a rainy Friday night the next morning, I drove U.S. Slowly, I hiked three miles on Prospector's Trail from Tower Tunnel Overlook and back by Overlook Trail. Both trails overlook a ravine cut through Pine Mountain by the Russell Fork of the Big Sandy River. Five miles long and averaging 1,000 feet deep, it is called the Grand Canyon of the South. A railroad was built through the gorge for coal in 1915, and its presence derailed a 1930's effort to designate the Breaks as a national park. By then, the Government was buying cut-over mountains to restore as national forests.
It was the middle of July, and overarching thickets of rosebay rhododendron still offered a few white blooms tinged with deep red. Massive trees stood so tall I could hardly make out the silhouette of their leaves above.
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