County will help historical society find money for new book

By Scott Nicholson

nicholson@wataugademocrat.com

A book project has helped revive the Watauga Historical Society and the group is reorganizing to collect information on the county’s historic structures.

The group has received pledges of about $10,000 toward the preparation and publication of a manuscript detailing an architectural survey conducted in 2003. The county planning department is contributing $5,000 from the “contracted services” line item of its budget, and the society hopes to get a $10,000 grant from the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area to complete the project.

Watauga County Planning director Joe Furman brought the proposal before the Watauga County Board of commissioners Tuesday night, asking the county to be the lead agency for the BRNHA grant application. Furman said the Watauga Historical Society, formed in 1977, had lost its nonprofit status and couldn’t head up the grant.

Furman said the current architectural survey, which is a 75-page document, is in report form and would need to be converted into a manuscript. A number of photographs collected as part of the survey would have to be gathered again for publication. Furman said some of the photographs were at the State Historic Preservation office in Asheville. Because a grant from the preservation office helped fund the survey, publication would have to receive the office’s approval. Such books have a standardized format, which Furman said was an attractive “coffee-table type of book.”

“Everything needed to move to the next step is there,” Furman said. “It can’t be done locally. You need to have an editor who is an architectural historian.”

The historical society was formed as a non-profit agency with 501-(c)3 tax-exempt status. However, after years of inactivity, it lost the status and now must file papers again. That’s why the county was needed as the grant applicant, Furman told the commissioners, who approved the request.

Bettie Bond, a board member of the historical society, said a number of preservation issues had come up in the last few years that brought the group back to life. The late Gene Reese was a long-time driving force in the society, and when he died the group lost some of its momentum, Bond said.

“We had so many things coming up, and that was even before the cultural museum,” she said, referring to the efforts to find a location for the Appalachian Cultural Museum. “We had to get going, and we had money we were responsible for.”

The group hopes to regain its status so donations to the book and preservation efforts will be tax-deductible.  Furman presented no timetable for the completion of the book, nor the expected response time from BRNHA, a federally designated 25-county area that receives funding to promote and preserve local culture.

The 2003 survey gives geographic and early history reports stating Native Americans probably traveled the area as early as 10,000 B.C., though the earliest evidence of seasonal settlements dates to around 1,000 years ago. The earliest European explorers came to the area around 1750, with permanent settlement beginning about 20 years later.

According to the survey, the Wilkinson Cabin is believed to be the oldest existing structure in the county, sitting in Zionville near the Tennessee border. The cabin was a stopping place for hunters and was probably part of the community of Trade, Tenn. It probably dates to about 1760.

The second-oldest building, the Tatum Cabin, sits at the Hickory Ridge Homestead on the Horn in the West grounds in Boone. It was probably built in 1785 and was originally located in Todd. Only one other structure, the Baird House in Valle Crucis, also dates back to the 1700s.

The survey paints a picture of an agricultural area, complete with slaves and cleared river valleys. Between 1800 and 1850, log houses were still common, as well as two-room frame houses were also constructed. Two-story houses also began to appear before the Civil War, though no churches or institutional buildings survive from that period. The survey continues up to 50 years ago, which Furman said was the cut-off point for which buildings could be officially considered historic.