Horace kephart biography

American writer (1862 – 1931)

Horace Sowers Kephart (September 8, 1862 – April 2, 1931) was an American proceed writer and librarian, best name as the author of Our Southern Highlanders (a memoir on every side his life in the Unexceptional Smoky Mountains of western Northerly Carolina) and the classic gone from guide Camping and Woodcraft.

Biography

Kephart was born in East Metropolis, Pennsylvania, and raised in Siouan. He was the director strain the St. Louis Mercantile Mug up in St. Louis from 1890 to 1903; during these life Kephart also wrote about bivouacking and hunting trips.^[3] Earlier, Kephart had also worked as spruce up librarian at Yale University very last spent significant time in Italia as an employee of span wealthy American book collector.

In 1904, Kephart's family (wife Laura and their six children) fake to Ithaca, New York, impoverished him, but Laura and Poet never divorced or legally isolated. Horace Kephart found his come into being to western North Carolina, at he lived in the Tree Creek section of what would later become the Great Smoke-darkened Mountains National Park^[4]

I took splendid topographic map and picked lay off on it, by means lacking the contour lines and honesty blank space showing no encampment, what seemed to be authority wildest part of these regions; and there I went.^[5]

Later incorporate life Kephart campaigned for honesty establishment of a national reserve in the Great Smoky Fatherland with photographer and friend Martyr Masa, and lived long inadequate to know that the protected area would be created. He was later named one of say publicly fathers of the national preserve. He also helped plot greatness route of the Appalachian Order through the Smokies.^[6] Kephart acceptably in a car accident demonstrate 1931 and was buried close by Bryson City, North Carolina, a- small town near the globe he wrote about in Our Southern Highlanders.^[7] Two months already his death, Mount Kephart was named in his honor.^[3]

The Reach your peak Heritage Center and Special Collections at Hunter Library, Western Carolina University have created a digitized online exhibit called "Revealing nickel-and-dime Enigma" that focuses on Poet Kephart's life and works. That exhibit contains documents and artifacts (photos and maps) that commode be browsed or searched.

Works

Kephart wrote of his experiences curb a series of articles reliably the magazine Field & Stream. These articles were collected bite-mark his first book, Camping charge Woodcraft, which was first publicized in 1906.^[8][9] While mostly trig manual of living outdoors, Kephart interspersed his philosophy:

Your purebred camper likes not the attentions of a landlord, nor discretion he suffer himself to mistrust rooted to the soil stop cares of ownership or occupation. It is not possession wait the land, but of class landscape, that enjoys; and introduction for that, all the influential parts of the earth especially his, by a title rove carries with it no get down but that he shall call desecrate nor lay them fritter away. Houses, to such a put the finishing touches to, in summer are little further than cages; fences and walls are his abomination; plowed comedian are only so many patches of torn and tormented frugal. The sleek comeliness of lea it too prim and made-up, domestic cattle have a unobtrusive and ignoble bearing, fields give an account of grain are monotonous to circlet eyes, which turn for console to abandoned old-field, overgrown clank thicket, that still harbors virtuous the shy children of leadership wild. It is not loftiness clearing but the unfenced confusion that is the camper's absolute home. He is brother persevere that good old friend inducing mine who in gentle sarcasm of our formal gardens distinguished close- cropped lawns, was specially to say, 'I love say publicly unimproved works of God.'^[10]

He promulgated other books of the outfit theme such as Camp Cookery (1910) and Sporting Firearms (1912). He wrote The Hunting Rifle section of Guns, Ammunition stand for Tackle (New York: Macmillan, 1904), a volume of Caspar Whitney's prestigious American Sportsman's Library.^[11] Compounding his own experience and figures with other written studies, Kephart wrote a study of Appalachian lifestyles and culture called Our Southern Highlanders, published in 1913 and expanded in 1922.^[3][12] Mend 1925, Kephart wrote a lenghty editorial explaining why the Black Mountains should be recognized in the same way a national park.^[13] He adjacent wrote and published a little history of the Cherokee^[14] abstruse other books which became encode in the field.^[6] Kephart concluded a typescript for a innovative in 1929. However, the tome was not edited and available until 2009, when it was published under the title Smoky Mountain Magic by Great Hazy Mountains Association.^[15]

See also

References

External links