By Jane Nicholson

Students in the Goodnight Family Sustainable Development Program learn the skills needed to foster rural community development, heritage preservation and environmental awareness.

One skill set that might not have been on their list until recent years is porch sitting.

Tommy Walsh, assistant director for sustainable development outreach in the GFSDP, began work in 1999 to save Elk Knob in Watauga County from second home development, and create the first state park in the county.

Ecologically rich

Elk Knob is an ecologically rich site with diverse flora and fauna, including Gray’s lily, trailing wolfsbane and rattlesnake root, and bobcats, deer and black bears. But for years, the 5,500-foot mountain had been considered a possible location for a ski slope or gated community.

Walsh used the old-fashioned, but tried and true, method of talking one on one with landowners in the community surrounding the mountain about selling or donating property for a state-protected natural area and the benefits that land preservation can have on neighboring communities.

Walsh talked to more than a dozen people about participating in the plan to protect Elk Knob, including one Watauga County resident who owned almost 1,100 acres on the mountain.

The Elk Knob State Natural Area was established in 2003 with just more than 1,000 acres. It has since grown to exceed 1,800 acres, thanks to the continued work of Walsh, area residents, N.C. Park Service and area conservation organizations.

Maintaining communities

“Part of our mission in sustainable development outreach is to promote and foster community autonomy, environmental education and economic development,” said Chuck Smith, director of the Goodnight Family Program in Sustainable Development. “The Elk Knob project has addressed all three.”

Smith said educating farmers and local residents of the benefits of public holdings like Elk Knob helps them maintain their communities rather than being displaced by development.

Walsh said meeting landowners in their homes helped establish credibility and got them to buy in to the project. “You’ve got to establish an identity with the people. They’ve got to feel comfortable with you and you have to earn their trust,” he said.

“To me, the genius and hard work of this was developing a relationship with the owners,” said Jeff Boyer, a professor in the Department of Anthropology. Boyer was the founder and is former director of the sustainable development program, and he continues to play an active role with the program.

“It shows that if you are going to do rural sustainable development work in this area, you’ve got to learn to slow down, to work with the pace of the community members or you’re not going to get anywhere. That has been a slow, hard lesson. But what Tommy has done is show us all that this is how you’ve got to work out there.”

Saving the land for development is just one part of the preservation being facilitated by university students and professors.

Historical preservation

Another key component to the Elk Knob project is helping residents preserve their community’s history.

That’s where the work of Dr. Patricia Beaver and graduate students in the Appalachian studies program plays a role that began with the sustainable development outreach program’s annual Elk Knob Headwaters Community Day.

For the past two years, the students have collected information from residents attending the annual community day event, held in the fall.

They are documenting the area’s rich economic and historic heritage by collecting oral histories from residents of the Meat Camp, Pottertown and Sutherland communities, which are located in the shadow of Elk Knob in Watauga and Ashe counties. They are also duplicating and preserving family photographs, and creating a permanent record— or community scrapbook, as Beaver calls it—that will be maintained in the university’s Appalachian Collection, located in Carol Grotnes Belk Library and Information Commons.

They also are planning to develop these materials into exhibits for the Elk Knob State Natural Area.

“Students ask residents to tell them a story about how they would like the history of their community remembered and represented in the park,” Beaver said. More then 300 residents attended the first event in 2005. About 50 were interviewed for the project. Many brought photographs of family, buildings and significant activities from the past.

Beaver says preserving the community memory of places such as Meat Camp, Pottertown and Sutherland is important.

“There is an unspoken, undocumented past that tends to get erased, and this erasure obscures our understanding of local history and the complexity of the communities around us,” she said. “We have learned there was less isolation in these areas than people think. Everyone had access to a store, post office, church and school. There was more commerce than we tend to think.”

Sutherland had a thriving cattle industry, while Meat Camp was home to Winebarger Grist Mill, which was established in the mid-1850s and remained in operation until 2005. “These were bustling, dynamic communities,” Beaver said.

Beaver is seeking funding from the Blue Ridge Natural Heritage Area to document the mill’s history and create an exhibit for the Elk Knob State Natural Area.

“One of the things our students pointed out was how successful a subsistence-oriented, agriculturally based system could be, and that we might learn about sustainability by a better understanding of the relationship between farm and forest, the crops that were being grown, and the way water was harnessed to create energy,” she said.

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