Brenda Lawson was scared. It was late in the night of May 29, 1970. She and her husband, Robert, were sitting in their 1965 Pontiac Tempest, in a darkened Norma driveway. Not just any driveway; they were at the home of Dr. D.T. Chambers. The elderly doctor was one of Norma’s most prominent citizens, and his two-story brick home with stately white columns was the most prominent residence in the fading lumber community. Brenda and Robert didn’t want to be …
Author: Ben Garrett
→Ben Garrett is a journalist from East Tennessee. He is publisher of the Independent Herald, a weekly newspaper serving the Big South Fork region of the Cumberland Plateau, with a sideline in website development and digital marketing. He is also an erstwhile blogger.
Across the southeastern United States in the winter of 1872, newspapers gave accounts of a brutal murder in the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee, with details that seemed more likely pulled from the script of a modern-day TV crime drama than from a remote, mostly law-abiding community in rural America: A teenaged orphan girl, her body beaten and mutilated, found dead in the woods … her surrogate mother suspected in her death. That was the mystery of Huckleberry Ridge, and …
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. …
In modern America, Santa Claus is the most central figure for Christmas — moreso, even, than the very man whose birth Christmas celebrates, Jesus Christ. That chafes Christians, of course; after all, Christmas is a deeply religious holiday with deep religious roots. And, yet, Christians celebrate Santa just as they do the baby Jesus, helping to elevate the jolly old elf to front and center of Christmas traditions. There are those who would argue — perhaps in an effort to …
It was unusually cold, even for late December in those days — and late Decembers in Tennessee were colder back then than late Decembers in Tennessee today. White Christmases weren’t terribly uncommon. But this was beyond white-Christmas-cold. The holiday was still five days off, but temperature highs had dropped into the low 20s during the day. Nighttime temperatures were in the single digits, with even some subzero temperatures recorded. Yes, it was cold for a Tennessee late December. That 1952 …
On December 21, a rare phenomenon will occur: if weather conditions cooperate, a “Christmas star” will be visible in the night sky. It won’t really be a star at all; rather, it will be the planets Jupiter and Saturn so close together that they appear to the naked eye as one (even though they’ll actually still be millions of miles apart), creating the illusion of one bright star in the night sky. The last time they were this close together …
Did you ever wonder how and why Baptists came to be the predominant religion in the Appalachians (in general) and the Cumberland Plateau (in particular)? It’s a history that we (the Independent Herald) have been examining for our monthly religious focus series. In this part of the world, Baptist churches out-number all other denominations by overwhelming margins. In my home county on the northern Cumberland Plateau, for example, there is one Catholic congregation, one Presbyterian church, two Methodist churches, one …
The older I get, the more of a fan I become of old cemeteries. Not the well-kept and often-visited cemeteries so much as the forgotten cemeteries that have become lost in the forest. “Forgotten cemeteries” is a bit of a misnomer, of course. These cemeteries usually aren’t forgotten at all. But they’re neglected, left to return to nature, and as the years go by fewer and fewer people know where they exist. Someday, if their stories aren’t told and preserved, …
“The mountains are calling and I must go.” Well over 100 years since John Muir’s death, that famous quote by the great American conservationist still rings true. For all who have the mountains in their blood, the mystique of these towering landforms still draws us. The mountains have been calling me for a while, but it’s been nearly impossible to get away from work. On Wednesday, I decided, I would make time to get away. So after finishing up some …
It has been four years since the devastating 2016 wildfire season that left an indelible impact on much of East Tennessee. The deadly Chimney Tops Fire that began in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Gatlinburg and eventually spread into Gatlinburg was the most famous example, and the damage from the fire can still be seen simply by driving along the parkway through downtown Gatlinburg and looking at the mountains that tower over the town. But there were plenty …
The experts were calling for a strong finish to the 2020 hurricane season in the Atlantic basin, and it looks like things are about to get really interesting in the Gulf of Mexico. It looks increasingly likely that there will be two organized tropical cyclones in the GOMEX simultaneously next week. The first is Tropical Depression 14, which formed a few days ago and is currently getting its act together in the Caribbean. It may briefly reach hurricane strength before …
As a University of Tennessee football fan in the 2000s, “prevent defense” became feared terminology in my house. We ripped John Chavis (then the defensive coordinator at UT) for his Mustang package (which was just another way of saying dime defense, where an extra defensive back is added on the field). Chavis was a fine defensive coordinator for three stops in the SEC — Tennessee, LSU and, to a much lesser extent, Texas A&M — before his career petered out …
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