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Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland

Across the Blue Ridge Mountains stretches a world both charming and complicated.

Jeremy Jones and his wife move into a small house above the creek where his family had settled 200 years prior. He takes a job alongside his former teachers in the local elementary school and sets out on a search to understand how this ancient land has shaped its people — how it shaped him. His search sends him burrowing in the past — hunting buried treasure and POW camps, unearthing Civil War graves and family feuds, exploring gated communities and tourist traps, encountering changed accents and immigrant populations, tracing Wal-Mart's sidewalks and carved-out mountains — and pondering the future. He meshes narrative and myth, geology and genealogy, fiddle tunes and local color about the briskly changing and oft-stigmatized world of his native southern Appalachians.

Somehow, these journeys continually lead him back to the mystical Bearwallow Mountain, a peak suddenly in flux.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 263
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780895876249
  • Genres
  • memoir, nature
  • Release date
  • 2014