Horace Kephart

Infobox Writer
name = Horace Kephart


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birthdate = 1862
birthplace = Pennsylvania
deathdate = 1931
deathplace = North Carolina
occupation = Librarian
nationality = American
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genre = Outdoor literature, Travel literature
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Horace Kephart (1862-1931) was an American travel writer and librarian, best known as the author of "Our Southern Highlanders", about his life in the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina.

Kephart was born in Pennsylvania and raised in Iowa. He was the director of the St. Louis Mercantile Library in St. Louis, Missouri from 1890 to 1903. In these years Kephart also wrote about camping and hunting trips. cite web
url = http://www.wcu.edu/library/digitalcoll/kephart/horacekephart/biography.htm
title = Horace Kephart: Biography
work = Horace Kephart: Revealing an Enigma
publisher = Hunter Library Special Collections, Western Carolina University
accessdate = 2006-06-24 ]

In 1904, Kephart moved to western North Carolina, where he lived in the Hazel Creek section of what would later become the Great Smoky Mountains National Park:

:"I took a topographic map and picked out on it, by means of the contour lines and the blank space showing no settlement, what seemed to the the wildest part of this regions; and there I went."cite book |author=Frome, Michael |title=Strangers in high places: the story of the Great Smoky Mountains |publisher=University of Tennessee Press |location=Knoxville |year=1994 |pages= |isbn=0-87049-806-1 |oclc= |doi=]

Later in life Kephart campaigned for the establishment of a national park in the Great Smoky Mountains, and lived long enough to know that the park would be created. Kephart died in a car accident in 1931 and was buried near Bryson City, North Carolina, a city whose people he wrote much about in "Our Southern Highlanders". [http://www.smokymountainnews.com/issues/07_05/07_13_05/mtn_voices.html A hike with a bit of history, The Smoky Mountain News - 13 July 2005] Two months before his death, Mount Kephart was named in his honor.

The Mountain Heritage Center and Special Collections at Hunter Library, Western Carolina University have created a digitized an online exhibit called "Revealing an Enigma" that focuses on Horace Kephart's life and works. This exhibit contains documents and artifacts (photos and maps) that can be browsed or searched.

Writings

He wrote of his experiences in a series of articles in the magazine "Field and Stream". These articles were collected into his first book, "Camping and Woodcraft" which was first published in 1906.cite book |author=Kephart, Horace |title=Camping and Woodcraft: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for Travelers in the Wilderness |publisher=Univ of Tennessee Pr |location= |year=1906 |pages= |isbn= |oclc= |doi=|id=LCC|SK601 .K3 ] cite book |author=Kephart, Horace |title=Camping and Woodcraft: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for Travelers in the Wilderness |publisher=Univ of Tennessee Pr |location= |year=1988 |pages= |isbn=0-87049-551-8 |oclc= |doi=] While mostly a manual of living outdoors, Kephart interspersed his philosophy::“Your thoroughbred camper likes not the attentions of a landlord, nor will he suffer himself to be rooted to the soil by cares of ownership or lease. It is not possession of the land, but of the landscape, that enjoys; and as for that, all the wild parts of the earth are his, by a title that carries with it no obligation but that he shall not desecrate nor lay them waste.

:Houses, to such a one, in summer are little better than cages; fences and walls are his abomination; plowed fields are only so many patches of torn and tormented earth. The sleek comeliness of pasture it too prim and artificial, domestic cattle have a meek and ignoble bearing, fields of grain are monotonous to his eyes, which turn for relief to abandoned old-field, overgrown with thicket, that still harbors some the shy children of the wild. It is not the clearing but the unfenced wilderness that is the camper’s real home. He is brother to that good old friend of mine who in gentle satire of our formal gardens and close- cropped lawns, was wont to say, ‘I love the unimproved works of God.’” (page 21)

Combining his own experience and observations with other written studies, Kephart wrote "Our Southern Highlanders", published in 1913 and expanded in 1922. cite book |author=Kephart, Horace |title=Our Southern Highlanders; a Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of the Life Among the Mountaineers, by Horace Kephart|publisher=The Macmillan Company|location= New York|year=1922 |pages= |isbn= |oclc= |doi=|id=LCC|F210 .K382 LCCN|22|021|761]

He wrote a short history of the Cherokee.cite book |author=Kephart, Horace |title= The Cherokees of the Smoky mountains; |publisher=The Atkinson press |location=Ithaca, N.Y.|year=1936 |pages= |isbn= |oclc= |doi=|id=LCC|E99.C5 K4 LCCN|36|019|280]

References

External links

* [http://www.wcu.edu/library/digitalcoll/kephart/ Horace Kephart: Revealing an Enigma (from Hunter Library Special Collections, Western Carolina University)]
*findagrave|7256148