Welcome to an American ghost town - population six
From the local furniture-maker who made his own coffin to the time he saved a tourist from a bear, Dennis Coffey has gathered more stories in his retirement than most people will in their lifetimes. But the story he is telling me, as we sit in his log cabin in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, is bigger than these. It’s the tale of a settlement that was plagued by disaster yet never quite beaten, and of the isolated lives of the people keeping these towns on the map.
The towns in question, the neighbouring hamlets of Edgemont and Mortimer, lie along Wilson Creek at the southern end of the Appalachians. They’re a long way from, well, anything. Even the roads labelled as highways are single tracks of gravel and the brave traveller who arrives in Mortimer will find a place so depopulated that Wikipedia lists it as a ghost town.
“If it was managed right,” Coffey says, “Edgemont would have been something like Blowing Rock (a nearby tourist hotspot). This would be an iconic place to come and see and visit and spend money.”
It’s a town that never quite happened, where the harsh and wild realities of life in the wilderness gradually drove out all who settled there. At one point, it was set to be the county seat of Caldwell County, but today that honour goes to Lenoir, population 18,000.
And Edgemont? A population of six. This is not so much a tale of decline, but of sudden disappearance; a geographical missing person story.
The two towns sprung rapidly into being in 1904, when the Ritter Lumber Company bought up much of Wilson Creek for logging. In a matter of years, the waterfalls, crystal creeks and verdant mountains had given way to a town of 800 people, complete with hotels, a cinema, a music hall and a network of railroads.
Teddy Roosevelt is rumoured to have stayed in the Laurel Inn, and visitors would take the train all the way from South Carolina to stay along the picture-perfect Wilson Creek. Employees of the lumber company ascended the surrounding slopes, and timber shipped out across the South. Within ten years, the valley was cleared. Whole mountains stood bare.
But the forest does not take kindly to those who destroy it, and in 1916 Appalachia exacted its elemental revenge. First, fire swept the slopes of Grandfather Mountain, the source of Wilson Creek. Then came the water. A devastating flood burst a dam upstream and took down houses, railroad bridges and the sawmill, bringing Ritter’s operations to an end. The company was gone within a year, leaving in its wake naked mountainsides and unemployment.
Companies may flee, but mountain people are hardy. For the next 35 years, the people of Mortimer and Edgemont rebuilt their lives. Industry returned to the towns in the form of a cotton mill, and during the Great Depression, a government initiative called the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) set up a camp to provide men with shelter, work and food.
The CCC workers cut trails, from which they could fight wildfires on the hillsides, and today hikers roam those hundred-year- old paths in what is now a designated wilderness area. Logging continued under different companies, as new trails and railroad lines opened up more hillsides to the axe.
I’m sat in Dennis Coffey’s cabin, which he began renovating when he retired from his job as an engineer and moved back to his family home in the mountains. He’s showing me a black-and- white photo: two men, no taller than my fingernail, stand amid piles of lumber five times their height.
“They devastated this country,” he says. “They cut every tree they could make money off. You can make a dollar? Cut it. Row upon row upon row of virgin timber, and look behind it: that mountain is bare.”
The lessons of 1916 had not been learned. In 1940, Wilson Creek flooded again. The cabin in which we are sitting looking through photographs was one of only three buildings that survived, as a 30-foot wall of water swept through the valley.
Coffey’s father-in- law felt it approach from the dried-up creek and slight rumble in the earth. He grabbed his family, and they fled up the hillside before looking back at their home.
“My mother-in- law said she saw a curtain waving in the window,” Coffey tells me. “Then that house broke loose and went down the river. Everything they owned in their life was in that house. That’s how devastating this was up here.”
Coffey’s family rebuilt their home, but the second catastrophic flood in 50 years marked the beginning of the end for Mortimer and Edgemont. The mill left; the railroad was gone; the CCC camp closed during the war; and gradually people drifted away. Living in a valley with no work, barely a connection to the outside world, and the ever-present threat of natural disaster was too much.
The population shrank so much that today Coffey is one of only six permanent residents.
A secluded area with plenty of empty buildings attracts other kinds of threats. “We’ve had some bad times up here,” Coffey says. “What we went through in the 50s and 60s was just devastating. It was partly our fault, but then again, we couldn’t get the support we needed. This became a haven of drug heads, drug dealers, alcohol, thieves…”
At one point, a murderer on the run supposedly took up lodging in the town. The only surviving hotel, at that point empty and decaying, was destroyed after a group of men snuck in and lit a fire. They were never caught.
Today, the crime rate in Edgemont and Mortimer is lower than the rest of the county, a spokesperson for Caldwell County Sheriff’s Office tells me, and the huge numbers of trails, waterfalls and cliffs make it a popular spot for adventurers.
But there are still complex challenges in policing somewhere so remote. The logistics and response times are the biggest problem, and it’s a problem residents are aware of. The nearest fire station is only 12 miles away. “But that’s a 45 minute ride on these roads. It’s the same if you’re hurt; that’s a long ride for the ambulance,” says Coffey.
While the crime rate may be low, there is still a feeling of unease among many residents. Coffey has five cameras trained on his cabin, and he recalls once finding six or eight hypodermic needles lying in the creek-bed. Determined to improve matters, he says he took them to the Sheriff’s Office with a request for more policing. He also founded a Homeowner’s Association, and he’s still the president – “Nobody else wanted to be!” – but responsibility for the other local group, the Wilson Creek Clean- Up Fund, lies with his neighbour Bruce Gray.
Gray runs Betsey’s Ole Country Store, which serves as a grocery store, fishing tackle vendor, music venue, hot-dog cafe, cabin rental centre and just about everything else a small town needs. Alongside essential southern supplies such as buttermilk, cornmeal and grits, customers can buy “Where the hell is Mortimer?” bumper stickers.
“It’s kind of like living on the frontier,” Gray says. “You’re the judge, the jury, you’re the law. You’re everything.” Part of being everything, it seems, meant being rubbish collector. He set up the Clean-Up Fund, a non-profit, after five years of collecting trash from the river. He keeps a sharps box for the needles he still finds.
Like Coffey, Gray moved to Wilson Creek because of deep family connections to the woods. His father was one of the first Green Beret Special Forces, who trained in the area ahead of the Vietnam War. He recalls how his father brought him to the mountains after his first tour of Vietnam.
“It was 1965, and I was five years old. I’ve been coming back here ever since.” Finally, he was encouraged by his friend Betsey to buy the store and move there full-time. He tells me, “Four months after I moved up here, Betsey was killed tragically in an automobile accident. I was so distraught that she had been lost, and I named the store after her so that as long as it is here, she’ll be remembered.”
Twenty-five years later, Betsey’s Ole Country Store still welcomes any hikers and visitors who roll into town.
In the intervening years, he has adjusted to the isolation, and he is proud to tell me that Mortimer is the most remote accessed settlement on the East Coast. But nowhere will deliver stock for a store so remote, just as communications companies refuse to put in any phone or cable lines. Instead Gray must make a weekly pilgrimage along the dirt roads to collect everything his store needs - a three- hour round trip.
There can be no risk-taking when you live that far away, he explains. If your chimney blocks, if your generator dies, if you run out of food or firewood, there is no easy rescue: “You have to plan,” he says. “It’s like doing yoga with your days: You have to plan each one out and do it carefully, just right.”
As a business owner, he might welcome a few more people around Edgemont and Mortimer, but the solitude and wild beauty is what makes it home for him. Besides, he says, newcomers don’t often take to life in the woods: “The population might grow by five or six, but most people who live up here get burnt out real quick and they leave. I give newcomers one, maybe two years because they can’t handle the isolation.”
It’s not hard to appreciate why. A 45 minute drive to shops, bars, restaurants, and even to other people is not something most of us would embrace quickly. Combine that with the silence and inscrutability of dense, mountain forest, and you’ve got an atmosphere fit for a David Lynch thriller.
The isolation isn’t the only hurdle newcomers face, Gray says: “We’re surrounded by a national forest, we’re on a national Wild and Scenic River, and there really is not much room to grow up here.” A hundred years ago, disregard for the delicate mountain environment resulted in the towns flooding. Now efforts to protect that same environment act as a vast fence around Edgemont and Mortimer, hemming them in. In the wilderness, whatever you want to do, the woods will find a way to stop you.
The balance between man and nature, delicate in even the most forgiving environments, is tipped against man in the mountains. Take too much from woods, and they’ll destroy you - with flood and fire if necessary. Give the woods too much and they’ll parcel you in, forcing solitude and wilderness into your attempt at civilisation. Perhaps that’s the attraction of a remote town: to live in deference to nobody but nature.
Earlier I called the tale of Edgemont and Mortimer a geographical missing person story. But to stop growing, settle down, reject busyness and value peace and solitude – isn’t that what so many of us will crave across our lifetimes? It’s certainly the choice Coffey and Gray have made, a decision made joyfully and with optimism. Perhaps what the hardy inhabitants of Wilson Creek have witnessed is not the disappearance but the aging of their town: the retirement of civilisation.
This piece was a runner-up in our annual Cassandra Jardine Memorial Prize, in memory of The Telegraph's much-loved feature writer who died in 2012. It is open to female writers aged between 18 and 25.
