I never expected it to take me 20 years to get back. After 20 years, I wasn’t even sure I could find my way back — at least not without the aid of a map (which I deplore; I’m a man, after all). As I bounced my Jeep across a couple hundred thousand potholes on Overton County backroads, that thought crossed my mind — that it had taken me 20 years to come back even though I live less than …
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.
I’ll warn you at the outset that I am a recovering Tennessee football fanatic. I haven’t burned by Vols gear, and don’t intend to. You aren’t going to hear me saying heretic things like, “I’m rooting for Alabama.” You can still find me plugged in to ESPN on fall Saturday afternoons. But I’m recovering in the sense that I no longer have the passion for Tennessee football that I once had. It’s a passion that began when I was a …
The descendants of Lewis Alexander Garrett (1868-1932) — which include Maude A. Garrett, Warren Omar Garrett, Elza Oral Garrett, Henry Clayton Garrett, Serina Bell Garrett, William Theodore Garrett, Denver Elmer Garrett, Myrtle Alice Garrett Voiles, Velma Ann Garrett Duncan, Lloyd Albert Garrett, Herman Alexander Garrett and Virgie Leo Garrett — are an unmistakably Appalachian clan. They’re deeply entrenched along the remote northern Cumberland Plateau and they are mostly un-wealthy. It seems odd that such an Appalachian family would have direct …
Life is good if you’re Phillip Fulmer. I mean, it’s not $900,000-per-year good. But it’s $450,000-per-year good. And that’s pretty good when you’re sitting around doing nothing. It was revealed Wednesday that the University of Tennessee and Fulmer are nearing an agreement on Fulmer’s “separation package” as he prepares to retire from his post as the Vols’ athletics director. The terms: 50% of his current salary for the duration of his contract. That’s $450,000 per year for the next three …
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 …
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, …
Social Profiles