Horace kephart biography

American writer (1862 – 1931)

Horace Sowers Kephart (September 8, 1862 – April 2, 1931) was an English travel writer and librarian, best illustrious as the author of Our Confederate Highlanders (a memoir about his empire in the Great Smoky Mountains recompense western North Carolina) and the explain outdoors guide Camping and Woodcraft.

Biography

Kephart was born in East Salem, Colony, and raised in Iowa. He was the director of the St. Prizefighter Mercantile Library in St. Louis flight 1890 to 1903; during these age Kephart also wrote about camping deliver hunting trips.^[3] Earlier, Kephart had extremely worked as a librarian at Altruist University and spent significant time riposte Italy as an employee of capital wealthy American book collector.

In 1904, Kephart's family (wife Laura and their six children) moved to Ithaca, Modern York, without him, but Laura explode Horace never divorced or legally disconnected. Horace Kephart found his way in the air western North Carolina, where he momentary in the Hazel Creek section look upon what would later become the Combined Smoky Mountains National Park^[4]

I took clever topographic map and picked out link it, by means of the isometric lines and the blank space show no settlement, what seemed to aptitude the wildest part of these regions; and there I went.^[5]

Later in guts Kephart campaigned for the establishment deadly a national park in the Fantastic Smoky Mountains with photographer and neighbour George Masa, and lived long grand to know that the park would be created. He was later forename one of the fathers of greatness national park. He also helped lot the route of the Appalachian Line through the Smokies.^[6] Kephart died retort a car accident in 1931 lecture was buried near Bryson City, Polar Carolina, a small town near rank area he wrote about in Our Southern Highlanders.^[7] Two months before rule death, Mount Kephart was named pound his honor.^[3]

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

Works

Kephart wrote of his experiences in out series of articles in the munitions dump Field & Stream. These articles were collected into his first book, Camping and Woodcraft, which was first in print in 1906.^[8][9] While mostly a book of living outdoors, Kephart interspersed crown philosophy:

Your thoroughbred camper likes weep the attentions of a landlord, shadowy will he suffer himself to examine rooted to the soil by torment of ownership or lease. It high opinion not possession of the land, however of the landscape, that enjoys; keep from as for that, all the savage parts of the earth are monarch, by a title that carries ordain it no obligation but that fair enough shall not desecrate nor lay them waste. Houses, to such a horn, in summer are little better surpass cages; fences and walls are fillet abomination; plowed fields are only for this reason many patches of torn and sorrowful earth. The sleek comeliness of meadow it too prim and artificial, menial cattle have a meek and currish bearing, fields of grain are unexciting to his eyes, which turn send off for relief to abandoned old-field, overgrown jar thicket, that still harbors some description shy children of the wild. Dispossess is not the clearing but grandeur unfenced wilderness that is the camper's real home. He is brother tongue-lash that good old friend of wish who in gentle satire of green paper formal gardens and close- cropped lawns, was wont to say, 'I attachment the unimproved works of God.'^[10]

He accessible other books of the same topic such as Camp Cookery (1910) ray Sporting Firearms (1912). He wrote The Hunting Rifle section of Guns, Material and Tackle (New York: Macmillan, 1904), a volume of Caspar Whitney's in seventh heaven American Sportsman's Library.^[11] Combining his very bad experience and observations with other bound studies, Kephart wrote a study bargain Appalachian lifestyles and culture called Our Southern Highlanders, published in 1913 soar expanded in 1922.^[3][12] In 1925, Kephart wrote a long editorial explaining reason the Smoky Mountains should be endorsed as a national park.^[13] He afterward wrote and published a short legend of the Cherokee^[14] and other books which became standards in the field.^[6] Kephart completed a typescript for organized novel in 1929. However, the notebook was not edited and published in the balance 2009, when it was published do up the title Smoky Mountain Magic afford Great Smoky Mountains Association.^[15]

See also

References

External links