Detour to a lonely mountain
A summer morning and echoes of ages past on Occaneechee Mountain.
It was my daughter Ivy’s last week at home before heading back to college, and we revisited a place we’d both been many times, though not for several years: Occaneechee Mountain in Hillsborough. The state natural area is a little off the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, and I likely won’t see it on the way by; but it makes a leisurely walk with some lovely views, done before the heat of the day.
A bit of history, first, to explain the name. Occoneechee Mountain is named for the people who lived along the Eno River in the decades around 1700. But they didn’t live here long. Who they were and where they came from is a complicated story with few reliable sources. I’ll try to untangle it as best I can.
The historical record begins in the seventeenth century, when the Iroquois fought French colonial forces and other Indians for control of the fur trade in a series of conflicts known as the Beaver Wars. By the 1650s, the Souian-speaking peoples of the Virginia Piedmont, already facing incursions from English colonists, found themselves caught in fighting between the Iroquois to the north, the Cherokee and Catawba to the south, and the Shawnee to the west. Some abandoned their towns and came together for mutual protection on an island in the Roanoke River, which they called Acconeechy. (The spelling is from a contemporary English map.) According to some accounts the island was already well populated, and an established trading post; in any case several related peoples seem to have merged there. Acconeechy lay along a major trading path, and in addition to hunting, fishing, and farming the river banks, the residents set up as middlemen, trading furs and deerskins between the Cherokee and Catawba and their English neighbors.
Then in 1676, Bacon’s Rebellion broke out: an uprising of disfranchised colonists against Virginia’s colonial elites. Most of the rebels had come to Virginia believing what was even then the usual advertising, that America was a land of opportunity. Some had subjected themselves to seven years’ forced labor to pay for their passage, hoping for a new life afterward. But they found themselves hemmed in, with the best land already gobbled up by the men for whom they’d been laboring. Since the elites weren’t about to give the rebels any of their own land, Nathaniel Bacon and his followers demanded the colonial government confiscate land for them from the Indians. As a demonstration they attacked Acconeechy Island and drove out the inhabitants.
The Occanneechi (as their descendants spell it) made their way along the trading path to what is now Hillsborough in the North Carolina Piedmont. The English explorer John Lawson found “Achonechy Town” there in 1701. Situated in “extraordinary rich Land,” he wrote, “Their Cabins were hung with a good sort of Tapestry, as fat Bear, and barbakued or dried Venison; no Indians having greater Plenty of Provisions than these.” Archaeologists have found remains of a small village with a central square, a dozen wigwams and sweat lodge, fortified against enemies, with an exterior cemetery; remnants of pottery, stone tools, and steel axes traded from Europeans, as well as evidence of a diet of corn, beans, squash, and venison. Lawson, writing more generally of the people of Carolina, described a more varied diet:
Venison, and Fawns in the Bags, cut out of the Doe's Belly; Fish of all sorts, the Lamprey-Eel excepted, and the Sturgeon our Salt-Water Indians will not touch; Bear and Bever; Panther; Pole-cat; Wild-cat; Possum; Raccoon; Hares, and Squirrels, roasted with their Guts in; Snakes, all Indians will not eat them, tho' some do; All wild Fruits that are palatable, some of which they dry and keep against Winter, as all sort of Fruits, and Peaches, which they dry, and make Quiddonies, and Cakes, that are very pleasant, and a little tartish; young Wasps, when they are white in the Combs, before they can fly, this is esteemed a Dainty; All sorts of Tortois and Terebins; Shell-Fish, and Stingray, or Scate, dry'd; Gourds; Melons; Cucumbers; Squashes; Pulse of all sorts; Rockahomine Meal, which is their Maiz, parch'd and pounded into Powder; Fowl of all sorts, that are eatable; Ground-Nuts, or wild Potato's; Acorns and Acorn Oil; Wild-Bulls, Beef, Mutton, Pork, &c. from the English; Indian Corn, or Maiz, made into several sorts of Bread; Ears of Corn roasted in the Summer, or preserv'd against Winter.
It was, in theory, a good place to settle. It still is. But the Occaneechi were beset by European diseases, especially smallpox, and they faced new attacks from the Iroquois. The cemetery found by archaeologists was sadly well populated. When the Tuscarora launched a war against colonists in eastern North Carolina in 1711, Virginia’s governor Alexander Spotswood built Fort Christianna to house Indians friendly to the English, and the Occaneechi took him up on the offer. There they coalesced with other Souian-speaking groups, including Saponi, Tutelo and Meipontsky, under the name Saponi. By the early 1800s they had scattered, and their descendants have only quite recently reorganized as the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation.
The Occaneechi’s sojourn in these parts was thus barely longer than mine has been: thirty-eight years, perhaps, to my thirty-one. The echo of their name on the map testifies not to ancient roots but to the impermanence of human arrangements; to our failures to live in the world, and with one another. How long does it take to become native to a place? I ask not in snarky comeback to anyone’s designation as native peoples—or to anyone else’s as not native; as some Southerners will still tell you, just because a cat has kittens in the oven don’t make them biscuits. I ask, seriously: How long must one live in a place before one belongs there? It is a matter of intent, I think, and of humility. For a modern, it would take longer than humans are likely to exist. For the Occaneechi, perhaps thirty-eight years was enough. Or perhaps, as I do, they longed for a permanence they could not quite feel.
The mountain that bears their name simply endures. It is a mountain by virtue of having outlasted everything else around it. Unlike the Appalachians, which were thrust up by geologic cataclysm a quarter billion years ago and have steadily eroded since, Occaneechee Mountain was once level with its surroundings: a deposit of hard quartzite that remained while the surrounding Piedmont wore away. That makes it a monadnock, a word that derives from the Abenaki language of New England and meant something like “mountain that stands alone.” (Or, as this lover of Tolkein finds himself thinking, “lonely mountain.”) Its peak is 860 feet above sea level, some 350 feet above the Eno River that winds past its base. Not much next to the Blue Ridge, but higher than anything else this far east in the state.
The hill is just high enough to shift the ecology. When the Piedmont eroded it stranded a population of brown elfin butterflies, not otherwise found nearby. The slopes are home to chestnut oaks, whose leaves are easily recognized once they fall; besides here and on a few high hills in Eno River State Park, I have seen chestnut oaks only some ways north and west.
More hard-rock outcrops benefited those who arrived after the Occaneechi left. Between Hillsborough and Durham the Eno’s swift descent and hard rockbed offered ideal sites for mills: hard rock makes a sturdy foundation and good building material. At least fifteen mills once ground corn and sawed lumber on that stretch of river; fifteen mills now long reduced to piles of stone too regular to be natural.
One mill stood out, and still does: the Eno Cotton Mill, built in Hillsborough in 1896, which at its peak employed 600 people working three shifts a day to run 30,000 spindles and 676 looms weaving broadcloth and other fabrics. A massive operation, monstrously loud, mechanically dangerous, the air and the lungs full of lint, turning sharecropped cotton into clothing for half the world.
That, too, is past. When the mill closed in 1984 the land that had been the village for the mill’s workers, some 29 acres, were donated to the city and became the Occaneechee Mountain Natural Area. Though the houses were relocated decades ago, you can still find deposits of broken glass along part of the hiking trail: the village dump.
But some trash is treasure. I suppose these bits of stonework are, like the glass, remnants of the mill or its houses; we found them embedded in terraced steps on the trail, used for erosion control alongside the usual timbers.
The “natural area” itself is not large. Ivy walked and played here as a child on homeschool field trips, and remembered it being bigger, as one will. A couple of good fields, a pond, and a few trails, with an overlook and a couple of nice vantages on the Eno River. Two and a half miles will get you to the peak and back.
The day was breezy, the sun bright, the water high after a summer storm. The far bank reflected on the surface of the river, pixelated by crossing ripples. We sat on a bench for a quarter of an hour while Ivy mulled over how she would paint such a thing. You would have to come back every day for a year, we decided, like Monet with his water lilies. Photographs don’t do it justice; this was the best I could do.
For lunch we had bought a loaf of bread from Weaver Street Market in Hillsborough, where I used to shop every week when I lived over this way. The bread was made in part from kernza, a perennial variety of wheat developed by The Land Institute in Kansas to be part of a polyculture that mimics the native prairie—what the institute calls “natural systems agriculture.” There’s no genetic engineering, only old-fashioned, painstaking breeding.
I’ve been following their work for years and was thrilled to see kernza come to market. Describing grain’s flavor is hard; kernza is nutty, earthy, like wheat only more so. It tastes wilder, I suppose, as indeed it is.
As I recall, Wes Jackson, the Land Institute’s founder, once described his goal as agriculture for the next ten thousand years. I have three collections of his essays on my shelf but can’t find the quotation; but I am reminded, hunting for it, that one of those collections is titled Becoming Native to This Place. After all this archaeology, the bread felt like starting over. A good feeling, and a good lunch.
The mountain will go on regardless.
Notes and further reading
On the Occaneechi see the North Carolina History Project, NCPedia and this article from Virginia Places. They get a brief mention in Ruth Y. Wetmore’s First on the Land: The North Carolina Indians (John F. Blair, 1975), which is at hand but fairly old, and is contradicted on some points by other sources. John Lawson’s A New Voyage to Carolina, his 1711 account of his travels a decade earlier, is available via the Gutenberg Project.
NC Geology explains how Occaneechee Mountain formed and why the Eno offered such good sites for mills. On the origin of the word monadnock Wikipedia cites "Devonian Period" from the New Hampshire Geology Home Page, archived at the Wayback Machine.
The Eno River Mill gives this brief history of the Eno Cotton Mill. NC State University Libraries has a short biography of Charles R. Makepeace, the mill’s original architect. The best piece I found on the mill was this anonymous page on RootsWeb, part of a broader project on Orange County’s history; I do wish that people back in the early days of the Web had more often signed their work. They did better and more thoughtful work, by and large, than what’s been created since.
My daughter Ivy wrote a paper for her college honors rhetoric class on perennial polycultures, and she found that the literature jumps directly from popular overview to papers written by and for plant geneticists. If you’re interested in the concept, start with the Land Institute’s overview of their work. Beyond that I’d recommend Wes Jackson’s New Roots for Agriculture (U. of Nebraska Press, 1980). If you’d rather cut to the chase, you can buy sprouted kernza crackers (and now flour, I see) from Columbia County Bread and Granola in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. I don’t have any connection to the company, and I’m certainly not getting any kind of kickback: they’re just good crackers.
Superb