Storyteller’s Tale
Charlotte Ross devotes a lifetime to sharing mountain heritage

By Caroline Monday

When Charlotte Ross moved to Boone in 1968, one of her children brought home a geography text book from school. “It referred to this corner of Western North Carolina as the ‘lost province.’ And, that was the attitude of much of the state,” she said.

Charlotte Ross holds one of Willard Watson's wooden marvels. Ross is more interested in folk culture than pop culture. Photo by Marie Freeman

But she had a different attitude about this area and she has devoted much of her life to learning about and recounting its rich culture.

Ross spent the first five and a half years of her life in the mountains of northern Georgia with her mother, grandmother and great grandfather.

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor when she was 6 months old and her father went off to fight in the war. Ross’s mother left their home in Atlanta to live with her family until the war ended and her husband came home. That time spent with “the old folks,” as Ross calls them, set the foundation for Ross’s love of Appalachian history and story telling.

The house was located near where North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia came together. “When I woke up in our old farmhouse in the morning first thing I saw, my window looked east, were the mountains of North Carolina,” she said. “I always knew North Carolina was going to be a beautiful place when I got old enough to explore those mountains.”

Every morning after breakfast we would go downstairs and stand and we would walk around the porches on three sides of the house. He would point to a mountain and he would name that mountain for me in English and in Cherokee and he would tell me stories about that mountain,” she said. “Then, when I was 2, one morning he stopped and wanted me to do it, to name the mountain in English and in Cherokee and to tell stories about it.”

She and her great grandfather formed a close relationship that has influenced Ross in ways that can been seen to this day. “It was good training for a child. He was old and he was blind and I was his Seeing Eye great grandchild, better than a dog – I could talk back,” she said. “We got in a lot of trouble together, Great Granddaddy and I. Sneak away sometimes and they would have to come out looking for us. Got arrested one time.

“He was a wonderful old man and it was hard for him to shut down his world as the cataracts came on. I was his eyes and I was his ears and I said things little girls shouldn’t say and I learned lots and lots of stories. So, I had that interest in them and I didn’t know how many stories I had just automatically collected after he died.”

Of her mother, Ross said, “I don’t know that she ever quite understood why I was so interested in talking to old people about mountain things. She wanted to be modern and upwardly mobile and those things don’t matter to me.”

Without realizing it, Ross said her interest in folklore and in the history of the Southern Appalachians grew to become more academic in nature. She said she didn’t know it, but many of the ways she pursued her interest trained her for her career as a folklorist. “[My great grandfather] didn’t just tell me stories, he talked to he about the mountains and the history of the mountains and he told me that their were more things known that were not true about this backyard of America than about any other part of our country. And he was right.,” she said.

In her early teen years, Ross worked for local newspapers, and eventually large papers such as the Atlanta Journal and the Chattanooga Free Press, as a stringer. “I don’t think any of them realized when they took me on as a stringer — they’d seen my little pieces in the North Georgia News — I don’t think they knew I was 14,” she said.

When she was 16, she was offered a radio show on Saturday mornings all about local news. While she covered current events, she said she was really interested in bringing “old characters” to the show and interviewing them about what they remembered about events in county history. “What I was doing of course were folkloric interviews,” she said. “The show had a little bit of a following.”

Ross went on to earn two degrees in English and moved to Boone in 1968 with her husband and two children. In 1969, she began her work on the Appalachian Regional Collection at the Appalachian State University library. That work led to the creation of the Appalachian studies program. She then initiated the oral history program.

In addition to her academic pursuits, Ross was involved in social activism concerned with the health, labor and environmental issues that affected the area. “There was a constant battle between coal miners and coal companies,” she said.

Along the way, she met many interesting people, some of whom have come to be very well known. She met the famous Patch Adams at a hospital strike fighting for black lung benefits for miners. “I met Patch on the picket lines there many years ago. In fact my husband paid the fine for both of us to keep us out of, I think it was, the Pike County jail,” she said.

“You would meet the most interesting people. People would come and camp and look. William O. Douglas from the Supreme Court came and set up his tent one night and came over and had supper with us — I always took a lot of food,” Ross said.

The protesters could not win every battle, Ross noted. In one such instance, Ross joined the effort to protect the sacred Cherokee site of Choto in Tennessee. The ancient Cherokee capital is now covered with water from flooding caused by dam construction.

For young people interested in activism, she recommends they focus on environmental issues such as development and mountain top removal. She said the reason the activism of the past does not exist today is because “people are afraid to take chances.”

While fighting for current causes, Ross always remembers the importance of local history. “It’s more than just you history, more than just your culture. It’s your identity.”