Dan’l Boone’s Descendents
Visit High Country

By Scott Nicholson

Brace Boone and his family literally walked in the footsteps of their famous ancestor, though no reports of bear-killing were carved into any trees.

Isabella, Victoria, and Brace Boone ate at a Boone landmark as part of their visit to the mountains.

Boone, who is an eighth-generation descendant of Daniel Boone, brought his family to the namesake town of Boone for a two-week vacation. His wife, Stephanie, and children Isabella, 5, and Victoria, 3, prowled the mountains where their kin once hunted buffalo and elk and used a hunting camp near what is now Rivers Street on the Appalachian State University campus.

Though Brace had visited the town before as a youngster, last week was the first time he’d brought his wife and children. They attended the Fourth of July parade, ate at the Dan’l Boone Inn and walked through some of the wilderness on the Blue Ridge Parkway that remains little changed from the days when the famous hunter prowled the ridges.

Brace said even as a youngster he had an instant affinity for the mountains. “I really liked it,” he said. “It’s very beautiful. I liked the town itself, and it has a really good feeling to it, and the people are friendly. There’s a lot going on, too.”

He and Stephanie enjoyed several hikes on forested trails. “I was comfortable,” he said. “It has always resonated with me. It really feels like home.”

“My husband spent lots of time in the North Carolina mountains as a child,” Stephanie said. “He always had a fondness for them. When we moved from Texas to Raleigh last year, we talked about coming up here.”

Brace is also a history buff, collecting family genealogy and learning about Daniel Boone. His great-grandfather was from Tennessee, though his parents were both born in Miami, Fla. During his recent visit, he looked for a coonskin cap, though he couldn’t find an authentic one like the model he owned as a youngster that he now believes is packed away in a box somewhere.

“Camping and hunting feels very natural to me,” he said. “I hope we eventually go up that way, and maybe buy a piece of property.”

Brace is director of business development for a firm that conducts market research for the publishing industry. He expressed interest in Daniel Bare’s recent book, “In The Footsteps of Daniel Boone,” which strips some of the romanticism of the figure that was depicted by actor Fess Parker in a popular 1960s television series. The show’s theme song proclaimed, “Daniel Boone was a man, was a big man, who fought for America to make all Americans free,” conveniently skipping the part where Daniel Boone fought for the British in the French and Indian War.

Brace’s mother Maryann Bedingfield, said the Daniel Boone connection had always been part of family lore but Brace was the one who really became interested in tracking the history and lineage.

“We’ve known it for a long time but didn’t really research it,” she said. “Brace is into history, so he’s started again.”

The family also visited the local golf course and Grandfather Mountain, which has a replica of the carving allegedly made by young Daniel who “cill’d a bar” near the apocryphal tree.

“Everything up here has his stamp on it,” Brace noted.

Though no bears were harmed in the return of the Boone bunch to the Blue Ridge Mountains, it wasn’t without casualty. Five-year-old Isabella lost her first tooth while in town.