Visiting Our Past: The history, vision of Spruce Pine, North Toe

Searching for places that retain their history to a sacred degree, one can hardly find as rich a landscape as the North Toe River valley from Spruce Pine up to Henson Creek and Plumtree in Avery County. And that's largely due to the Houston and Wiseman families.

With gratitude to these heritage-keepers, this is the first of a four-part series on the people, the places and the prospects of this region.

Sunny Brook

In 1937, J. Myron Houston and his fiancée, Ruthie Greene, established the Sunny Brook store in Kalmia, north of Spruce Pine, and it became a center of commerce — not just for winesaps and shoe leather, but also for stories.

After J. Myron caught the oral history bug from Dr. Frank Brown of Duke University, he took his story-collecting into the community with his little daughter, Gloria Houston — "Daddy's shadow," he called her — by his side.

J. Myron's favorite source was Robert Wiseman, a fourth cousin.

"As a child sitting across the river from a cave generally acknowledged to be a stop on the Underground Railroad," author Gloria recalled in a foreword to her novel, "Bright Freedom's Song," "I listened as 'Uncle Robert' ... the oldest man in my community, told stories (about) William Wiseman (Robert's great-grandfather), the first of my ancestors to arrive in America."

View from the porch

We need to get a feel for the context. The landscape speaks.

Imagine Gloria sitting on Uncle Robert's porch in the late 1940s, her feet barely touching the floor from the porch swing. A quarter mile up the road is the store named for William Wiseman's vision, for when William was 13 in London, he and two friends stowed away in a ship bound for America, with a sunny land and a brookside home in mind.

Nabbed by the ship's cook, William was sold into indenture in Charleston. How he made it to the then-Burke County pastures he'd call Sunny Brook is one of the great tales that Uncle Robert and J. Myron perpetuated. (Be patient.)

But for now, we return to little Gloria, hearing about the nearby graves of William and his family. And then we fast forward to the 1960s to witness J. Myron and Uncle Robert's cousin, Scotty Wiseman, the famous country singer, futilely fighting the N.C. Department of Transportation.

When the DOT relocated U.S. 19E, it plowed through the gravesites of William Wiseman and his family, whose remains and broken gravestones now reside under the highway.

Legendary start

In 1758 in Charleston, 17-year-old William had ahead of him years of captive service; behind him, a legacy; and in hand, a skill set.

T.C. Chapman, in his genealogical work, "A Wiseman's Family," determined that the original Anglo-Saxon family name had been "witan," which meant a British official. Henry Brougham Guppy's "The Home of Family Names in Great Britain" states that Wisemans often served as sheriffs, and Chapman notes that William's father, Thomas, lived in Clarksville, a clerk's hamlet, and may have been a clerk to the king.

William left home after his father died, and, as youngest child, he began to feel misused by his family. He'd already gotten, from his father, training as a woodworker.

When his master in Charleston, a blacksmith, had heard enough of William's high self-opinion, he posed him a challenge, according to a story told by J. Myron Houston to Warren Moore, an interviewer visiting Sunny Brook Store in 1984.

"I'll build a piece of furniture and you build a piece of furniture," the blacksmith said, "and then when they're complete, we'll unveil the furniture and have the judges to check and see which is the best piece of furniture."

William built a dining table.

"He hewed the legs out like a panther's leg and he hewed the claws; and in that claw, he hewed out a perfectly round caster ... That ball in there was perfectly smooth."

It was William's trademark table, a design he'd brought with him, and it gained his freedom.

First settlers

William's story was not unlike Davy Crockett's, with whom he shared the ability to learn new skills and latch onto people he met in his travels. In John's River, Wiseman assisted a hunter and trapper named Jonas Davenport and married Jonas' beautiful daughter Marian (also called Mary).

Davenport packed his traps and set off to become the first settler of the North Toe Valley while William and Mary raised a family.

William followed some years later to become the eighth settler, renting land from Sam Bright, who'd come second. Bright established a place at which Daniel Boone and other pioneers stopped on their way to Jonesboro via the Yellow Mountain Trail.

Ensconced in what he called Sunny Brook, William built a sawmill, forged a plow and served as a magistrate — once marrying six couples stranded with their migrating families during the record snowy winter of 1809.

After his wife Mary and three of their eight children died of milk poison, William married Lydia Bedford and had seven more children, including Robert Wiseman's grandfather, Alexander.

Populating the wilderness was part of the impetus. Charles McKinney, who arrived in 1795 with the first apple tree seedlings in the valley (partly to pursue the art of apple brandy making) had four wives, whom he put in four separate houses and by whom he had 48 children, according to J. Myron Houston's account, "North and South Toe River Valleys."

Wiseman's most historic local craft was shoe-making.

"Now when the mountain men marched through here going to Kings Mountain to meet the British," Houston told Moore, "why he volunteered and built shoes for the soldiers. So if it hadn't've been for William Wiseman, the Battle of Kings Mountain, I guess, would have been fought mostly by barefooted men."

Refound gravesite

When Capt. Robert Sevier of Tennessee, one of the organizers of the Overmountain Men, received a buckshot wound in the kidney at Kings Mountain in 1780, he tried to return home against doctor's advice. He made it to Sam Bright's place, where he died and was buried in Bright's cemetery, a fact that was not confirmed until J. Myron asked Uncle Robert about it almost 170 years later.

"If the headstone ain't gone and that little wild cherry tree as big as my leg ain't gone, I can tell you exactly where to find it," Robert said. He also recalled it was the longest grave in the cemetery.

"Well, when I got there," Houston related, "this wild cherry tree was about 24 inches across the stump and ... here set this headstone beside that stump. I got up — and I'm pretty long-legged — and three steps just as long as I could step, I touched the footstone.

"And Sevier was supposed to be a real tall man."

On Sept. 9, 1951, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a monument at Sevier's grave, over which a shot gets fired every year by The Overmountain Victory Trail Association on its commemorative reenactment march.

Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published June 2, 2014.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: The history, vision of Spruce Pine, North Toe