Civil War hooks in my new book

Order at McFarlandBooks.com/LeConte-Lodge

 McFarland Books recently published LeConte Lodge / A Centennial History of a Smoky Mountain Landmark, which has been a three-year project with my former newspaper colleague, Mike Hembree. 

 Somebody asked me, "What's your next book? The Civil War?"
 I have considered turning The Stoneman Gazette into a book (since Google's blogspot platform will not last forever. 

 But there are Civil War tales in the new book. Joseph Le Conte, whose family name adorns Mount Le Conte, evidently visited Alum Cave searching for nitre, the raw ingredient in gunpowder. His pro-slavery opinions complicate his legacy.

 Before LeConte Lodge was built, the highest inn in eastern America was the Cloudland Hotel atop Roan Mountain. It was built by Gen. John T. Wilder, a Union officer whose "Lightning Brigade" made a decisive stand in the 1863 Battle of Chicakmauga. 

 Uncle Ike Carter, who was 75 when he visited the tent camp that became LeConte Lodge in 1925, was one of the first to scale Mount Le Conte. Carter told photographer Dutch Roth that he first made the hike as a boy before the Civil War.

 Samuel Simcox, an English immigrant who worked on railroads during the Civil War, became the oldest man to climb Le Conte when he made the hike at age 80 in 1927. (The record is now 93, by Rufus Morgan). 

 I haven't been able to connect any of these individuals with Stoneman's Raid. It's likely that the raiders would have had a view of Mount Le Conte in March 1865 as they departed Knoxville via Strawberry Plains and Morristown toward North Carolina.

 Mike has another book on the way, Petty vs. Pearson,  a chronicle of NASCAR's defining rivalry. In the last days of the war, Stoneman's Raiders came through Spartanburg, Pearson and Hembree's hometown. 

–Tom Layton