Horace Kephart & Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Tired of being a Librarian so charted the Appalachian Trail

Horace Kephart- 1862 – 1931

Librarian beginnings

Horace Kephart was born in 1862 in Pennsylvania. He received his bachelor’s degree from Lebanon Valley College in 1879 and continued his education at Boston University spending much time at the Boston Public Library. He decided to pursue librarianship as a career and obtained a job as supervisor of library resources at Cornell University. He attained a position as an assistant in Yale College library and was later director of the Mercantile Library in St. Louis, Missouri, from 1890 to 1903. He was married to Laura Kephart and had six children.

Our Southern Highlanders: Western Carolina

In 1904, at the age of 42, Kephart arrived in western North Carolina to begin his life anew. He chose a simple lifestyle and “nature-as-healer” approach. At the same time, he immersed himself in his new natural environment and took an immediate interest in the history and culture of the people. Drawing on his library background, much of his understanding of the region came through readings on the topic to which he added his personal observations.¹

He wrote Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers (1913) and Camping and Woodcraft (1916).

Campaigned for Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Kephart campaigned for the establishment of a national park in the Great Smoky Mountains with photographer and friend George Masa² and lived long enough to know that the park would be created. He was later named one of the fathers of the national park. He also helped plot the route of the Appalachian Trail through the Smokies.³

Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart Biography is biography of the librarian-turned-woodsman who had a far-reaching effect on wilderness literature and outdoor pursuits and who was an important supporter of the effort to create Great Smoky Mountains National Park.⁴

There is a mountain named for Horace Kephart in the central Great Smoky Mountains. The Appalachian Trail crosses the mountain's south slope.

Mount Kephart - Wikipedia

In 2020 Horace Kephart : writings was reprinted by the University of Tennesse Press.⁵ His reputation as a travel writer and often-invoked observer of Appalachian culture rests almost entirely on two major works still in print today: Our Southern Highlanders (1913) and and Camping and Woodcraft (1916).

Kephart’s essays appeared in Harper's Weekly, Outing, and Field and Stream. His journals and correspondence are archived at Western Carolina University.⁶

1. An icon of the Southern Appalachian region, Horace Kephart (1862-1931) is best known for his efforts to protect the Smoky Mountains as a national park. He was also vigilant in efforts to establish the Appalachian Trail along the Tennessee-North Carolina border. https://www.greatsmokies.com/bryson-city-visitor/

2. George Masa’s Wild Vision : A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina. 2022. Spartanburg SC: Hub City Press."Self-taught photographer George Masa (born Masahara Iizuka in Osaka, Japan), arrived in Asheville, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century amid a period of great transition in the southern Appalachians. Masa's photographs from the 1920s and early 1930s are stunning windows into an era where railroads hauled out the remaining old-growth timber with impunity, new roads were blasted into hillsides, and an activist community emerged to fight for a new national park. Masa began photographing the nearby mountains and helping to map the Appalachian Trail, capturing this transition like no other photographer of his time. His images, along with his knowledge of the landscape, became a critical piece of the argument for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, compelling John D. Rockefeller to donate $5 million for initial land purchases. Despite being hailed as the "Ansel Adams of the Smokies," Masa died destitute and unknown in 1933.

3. An icon of the Southern Appalachian region, Horace Kephart (1862-1931) is best known for his efforts to protect the Smoky Mountains as a national park. He was also vigilant in efforts to establish the Appalachian Trail along the Tennessee-North Carolina border. https://www.greatsmokies.com/bryson-city-visitor/

4. Back of Beyond : A Horace Kephart Biography. 2019. Gatlinburg TN: Great Smoky Mountains Association.

Reprint: Kephart Horace. 1976. Our Southern Highlanders : A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life among the Mountaineers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

5. Horace Kephart : Writings. 2020 First ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

6. Search | Collections | Southern Appalachian Digital Collections. Horace Kephart The collection was given as a gift to Western Carolina Teachers College by the executor of Kephart's will, with other items donated by Kephart's son, George Kephart. The collection was loaned to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for approximately twenty years, and returned to Western Carolina University in 1973. The collection contains correspondence, periodicals and clippings, manuscripts and articles, printed materials, photographs, maps, and journals. The correspondence includes letters to and from magazine editors and individuals involved in public issues of interest to Kephart, especially Appalachian road systems and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The magazine and newspaper articles deal with outdoorsmanship, and were either written by Kephart or were of special interest to him. Prohibition and mountain living are also recurrent themes in these articles. The photographs are of mountain scenery, people, homes and camps. The maps represent various portions of the Appalachian mountain range, especially western North Carolina and Tennessee