Visiting Our Past: How WNC handled snowy winters of the past

The wintry weather making its impression (in mid-February 2014) will be a memory by the time of its reading. Yet, while still imprinted by winter's arsenal — wind, ice, cold, snow — we might review people's greatly varying accommodations to it through history.

Today, our main concerns have to do with technology — power lines, vehicles, worldwide worry, livestreamed.

If we travel back 100-plus years, technology is still prominent, but in a 19th-century way.

A self-tagged "Grumbler" wrote The Asheville Citizen in 1899 about the side effects of urban heating, and how he'd told his friend to keep away from Asheville.

"The heavy clouds of smoke, which," he noted, "roll from the tall chimneys, gently dropping their jet black flakes until everything is covered with a soft veil must be injurious to the inner as well as to the outer man, and I do not believe my friend could be benefitted by reviling the trains and dogs by night and inhaling the smoke by day."

"Of course," he added, "you might say newcomers could easily avoid these nuisances by taking a house for the winter further out in the country, but — the roads!"

Out in the country

The Westfeldts of Fletcher lived year-round on their 750-acre working farm, Rugby Grange, starting in 1878.

There was no green grocer to go to, and no stove; yet winter was a food feast. As the late John Parris illustrated in his columns, "there's an art to bleaching apples," and there's also "the art of smoking hams."

"I want to tell you," Lucy West of Pigeon Valley told Parris, "there is nothing better than bleached apples except ripe apples right off the tree. You can't tell the difference nine months later."

Preparing winter food meant a lot of hard work in group settings, and contributed to social life. Imagine Thanksgiving, on and off, for four months. Imagine the power going out, and having to read books or tell stories.

Jennie Fleetwood Westfeldt, who grew up at Rugby Grange in the 1870s and '80s, recalled, in a memoir she wrote late in life, how her grandfather, Gustaf Westfeldt, a coffee importer and retired Swedish diplomat, liked to read the mystical works of Emanuel Swedenborg; and her grandmother, Jane McLoskey Westfeldt, novels by the prolific Mrs. Oliphant, who portrayed women struggling against restrictive society.

They owned a McLoskey family slave, William Webb, whom Gustaf, opposed to slavery, gave his freedom papers.

"Uncle Billy," as Webb was called, lived with his wife in a separate house and acted as a kind of butler, training staff, bottling wine, traveling with the Westfeldts. He nursed Gustaf when he was ill, was a pallbearer at his funeral, and is buried next to Gustaf in the Calvary Church cemetery.

"As Uncle Billy grew older," Jennie Westfeldt recalled, "he did not go away...in the winter but stayed on at the Grange in his old room....He would tell us the Br'er Rabbit stories. He didn't know the stories had been put in a book. They had been passed on down to him by his people."

Brittain Cove

The Rice family on Wooten Cove Road in Brittain Cove survived winter with their own version of the Westfeldts' pork and palaver.

Texie Shelton and Joe Rice had gotten their children through the Depression in Madison County with homegrown food.

"You cut off a piece of that side meat (from a hog) and you give that pot of (pinto) beans a college education," their son Joe Rice related. "My mother, when the thrashers came through in the fall, she'd stuff them straw ticks so full of straw, you had to jump to get into bed.

"She'd give us a hot glass of boneset tea, and we'd sleep on that straw tick, throw a feather bed on top of it. It could snow in the house, it wouldn't bother you. You could come out of the bed the next morning, feeling yourself a young mule, yelping, bucking — yeah, boy."

Jean Boone Benfield of Leicester, a Boone descendant, relates in her book, "Mountain Born," how her family passed the time with playful talk.

In the winter, she says, her father liked to anoint a bad storm with the words, "First it snew, then it blew, and then it friz."

Worst of times

When winter descended on communities during times made hard by other events, the effects were as bad as bad could get. The Civil War was one of those times.

Madison County farmers, made desperate for salt in January 1863, stormed Confederate supplies in Marshall, and were hunted down and executed in what has come to be known as the Shelton Laurel Massacre.

The following winter was also severe, and Confederate troops under Gen. Longstreet and Union troops under Gen. Burnsides, stalemated in east Tennessee, dug in at their camps, bereft of food, having exhausted local farms.

Desertions multiplied. It was common for soldiers to go on furlough or go AWOL in winter.

Author Terrell Garren, an expert on the war in Western North Carolina, tells how his wife's great-great-grandfather, James R Payne of Madison County, "a private in the 3rd N.C. Mounted Infantry of the Union Army... managed to get home and sire a child every winter during the war."

Garren's great-great-uncle, Lt. Henry Garren of the 35th N.C. infantry regiment, had the job of rounding up Confederate deserters and bringing them back. He was shot and killed in the effort.

Twelve members of the 58th and two of the 60th N.C. regiments (organized in Mitchell and Buncombe Counties) lived their last winter in 1864.

After nearly two years in service, the 58th and 60th had moved, as part of the Army of Tennessee, to Dalton, Ga., after having held off Federals at Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge. The army would be encamped for months.

Several men went home without leave "to provide for the needs of their families," then returned to their commands, and were tried as traitors, Sgt. R.D. Jamison recalled after the war in an account published in "North Carolina Troops."

The men were tied to stakes next to waiting coffins. Lt. Robert Clayton, who had drawn an unlucky lot, gave the order to fire. Twelve died. Two survivors were shot at close range.

Leaving war behind

Capt. Thomas Lenoir had to leave his command of the Haywood Highlanders (Co. F., 25th N.C.) at age 45 because of back ailments, headaches and measles.

He was known as a strict commander, Carroll C. Jones reveals in his book, "Captain Lenoir's Diary." Once, Lenoir court-martialed and punished three men for going AWOL for a day.

Back home in retirement at his place, Bachelor's Retreat, at the Forks of Pigeon, he won prizes for purebred cattle. He organized an ice-skating exhibition one freezing winter, and showed off his skating skills.

So, we use Lenoir's story to escape the horrors of the war and glide back to a happier time, the 1830s.

Winters were much colder then. Rivers froze. In 1835, a four-horse wagon crossed the French Broad River on ice.

Zebulon Vance, future Civil War governor, growing up in Reems Creek, dreaded leaving the hearth for the upstairs bedroom, but was comforted by the luxuries of the time, including the bed-warming ritual.

The brass pan of the Vance's bed warmer (on display at the Vance Birthplace State Historic Site) was filled with coals and then sprinkled with salt to keep down sulfurous smells before being passed between bed sheets in a graceful arcing motion.

The Vances provided their beds with goose down comforters and mattresses, a Scots-Irish preference. It took fifteen pounds of goose down to fill a mattress. Consequently, the owners of such mattresses would have refreshed the stuffing infrequently and would have suffered with bugs, which accounts for the German preference for straw tick mattresses.

Geese were part of the late fall and early winter parade of livestock and poultry along the Buncombe Turnpike at the time.

If we follow the trail of the animals backward through history, we can see how the Cherokee survived winter.

John Lawson in his book, "A New Voyage to Carolina, 1700-1709," wrote, "bear-hunting is a great sport in America, both with the English and Indians."

The meat of the bear, first of all, was considered the best available, except when the bears had been on a heavy fish diet. Bear fat yielded a thermal skin lotion, a high-energy drink, a pain-relieving salve, cooking oil, and cosmetics essential to many rituals.

Lawson also found Indians storing chinquapin nuts, gathered in winter and dried; also, hickory nuts, "which they beat betwixt two great stones," sifted and added to venison broth to thicken it. "Both these Nuts," he noted, "made into Meal, makes a curious Soop, either with clear Water, or in any Meat-Broth."

Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published Feb. 17, 2014.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: How WNC handled snowy winters of the past